Light on the Hill. Labor and the cost of caution
· Michael West
What happened to Labor and Australia, the ‘Land of the Fair Go’? In the 4th of his Light on the Hill series examining the party’s retreat from reform, Andrew Brown looks at housing inequality.
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The consequences of political retreat are not abstract.
They are lived.
They arrive as rent notices and eviction letters. They sit in empty fridges and crowded shelters. They echo through emergency departments and police call outs. They narrow lives, not by accident or misfortune, but by design.
Housing is where this becomes undeniable.
Rents have surged more than 30% in many parts of Australia since 2020. Real wages have barely moved. Home ownership has not just slipped out of reach for younger Australians; it has been pushed there. Among people in their early thirties, ownership rates have fallen from around 60% in the 1980s to closer to 50% today.
Kabuki politics. Style over substance, controlling the narrative
What was once delayed now feels implausible.
Public housing tells the rest of the story.
Fewer than 4% of Australian homes are public or community housing, down from more than 7% in the early 1990s. In the United Kingdom, it is closer to 25%.
Australia did not fall behind by accident. It chose to.
Waitlists now exceed 170,000 households nationwide. In some states, families are told to expect waits of ten to twenty years.
A childhood can pass in that time.
The Prime Minister often speaks about his own upbringing in public housing. It is central to his political story. A reminder of what the system once made possible.
That system no longer exists at anything like the same scale.
Ladder not pulled up, dismantled
What was once a foundation has been allowed to wither into a narrow safety net that catches fewer people, later, if at all. The ladder has not just been pulled up. It has been dismantled.
Shelter, the most basic condition of stability, has been turned into a financial instrument. A vehicle for accumulation, shaped by negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts that neither side of politics has been willing to materially unwind.
And Labor governs this system.
Not despite that history.
In abandonment of it.
This is not a market failure. It is a political choice.
Labor speaks the language of affordability while declining to use the one tool that would materially change outcomes. Build at scale. Build with intent. Build until the market bends.
Instead, the Housing Australia Future Fund, negotiated and passed with cross-bench support, is designed to deliver 30,000 homes over five years. Around 6,000 a year, in a country that builds more than 150,000 homes annually and faces a shortfall in the hundreds of thousands.
The gap is not closing.
The private market remains the default provider, even as it continues to fail on both affordability and security.
Homelessness no accident
When a government will not build homes, homelessness is not an accident.
It is policy.
The energy transition follows the same pattern.
Australia has every structural advantage required to lead. Sun and wind at scale. Land. Critical minerals. Technical capability.
What is missing is urgency.
The government has legislated a 43% emissions reduction target by 2030 and speaks often of progress. Yet approvals for new coal and gas projects continue under existing frameworks, including decisions taken by Environment Ministers who argue the law requires it.
The contradiction is not resolved.
It is administered.
Labor does not deny the transition.
It defers it.
A farm and a quarry
While other countries commit vast public capital to domestic manufacturing and clean energy supply chains, Australia continues its familiar role. Export raw materials. Import finished value. Promise the upgrade later.
Delay is not neutral. It shifts risk forward, onto those least able to absorb it.
A slow transition is not a careful one.
It is a decision to make tomorrow pay for today.
Domestic violence strips away any remaining ambiguity.
On average, one woman is killed every week in Australia by a current or former partner. In some years, the number rises higher.
Crisis services are stretched. Refuges are full. Prevention remains underfunded. Housing insecurity traps victims with abusers. Legal systems exhaust those trying to leave.
The National Plan exists. Funding has been committed. Announcements are made.
The violence continues.
Programs are fragmented across federal and state systems. Funding is often time limited. Demand consistently exceeds supply. The system signals concern while rationing safety.
Violence persists not because it cannot be stopped, but because stopping it requires coordination, money, and political will.
All three exist.
They are not being used at the scale required.
Child poverty sits beneath all of this, steady and largely accepted.
More than one in six Australian children, over 750,000, live in poverty. Many grow up in insecure housing. Many rely on schools for their most reliable meal. Many begin life already behind.
Not through failure, through design.
This is not marginal; it is structural.
No child should live in poverty. That is not radical.
It is the minimum standard of a society that claims fairness.
Yet payments like JobSeeker and related supports remain below widely accepted poverty benchmarks, even after incremental increases. The decision not to raise them further is not technical.
It is political.
Poverty is managed.
It is not ended.
A government that manages child poverty has already accepted it.
First Nations Australians live with the sharpest edge of this failure.
Closing the Gap targets are reported annually. Most are not on track. Some are going backwards. Indigenous incarceration continues to rise. Aboriginal children are more than ten times as likely to be in out-of-home care as non-Indigenous children.
Deaths in custody continue, decades after recommendations that remain only partially implemented.
Reports are delivered.
Outcomes do not shift.
This is not a lack of information.
It is a lack of action.
Land of the Fair Go gone
And beneath it all, something deeper has shifted.
Egalitarianism once sat at the centre of Australian political life. The idea that dignity should not be determined by wealth or birth was widely held.
Now it is invoked more often than it is practised.
Tax settings continue to favour asset holders.
The capital gains tax discount remains intact. Negative gearing remains intact. Corporate tax avoidance continues to erode the revenue base, while enforcement and compliance fall more heavily on those least able to avoid it.
These are not oversights.
They are maintained settings.
Labor does not dismantle this.
It stabilises it.
When equality becomes difficult to state plainly, inequality becomes easier to accept.
None of this is inevitable.
None of it is accidental.
These are the outcomes of choices made, policies maintained, and decisions defended.
A government that moves slowly in the face of known harm is not being careful.
It is allocating the burden.
And deciding who will carry it.