A report from Everybody’s Home – a national campaign to tackle Australia’s housing affordability crisis – has confirmed Australia’s rental affordability has hit its worst levels in nearly a decade.
Most average Australians are suffering from housing stress just to be able to afford an average rent, and people on low incomes are in severe housing stress, according to Everybody’s Home spokesperson Maiy Azize.
“If people are being wiped out from paying the rent, it means that they've got nothing left to pay their bills, they've got nothing left to buy food, they've got nothing left to deal with emergencies, so it's a huge problem.”
Azize believes the answer to this problem is in social housing, but it is hard to move towards that solution until the government start investing more into it. Despite a long history of social housing it is something the government has walked away from and stopped investing in over the last few decades.
“We've got a government that likes to talk about social housing and it recognises the value of social housing. We've got a Prime Minister who grew up in social housing and talks about that a lot. What's really missing is a plan to scale up what they're proposing to do to match the scale of the crisis that we face.”
According to Azize and Everybody’s Home, there are 640,000 people across the country who need social housing and can’t get it. Everybody’s Home are calling on the government to build 25,000 social homes every year until we end this crisis, but the federal government is currently talking about a plan which would deliver up to 30,000 social and affordable rentals over the next five years.
“It's great that we've got a government that sees the importance of social housing, but what we now need them to do is develop a plan that really meets the scale of the crisis.”
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