Housing in 21st-Century Australia

People, Practices and Policies

Rae Dufty-Jones, Dallas Rogers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317120995
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Over the last two decades new and significant demographic, economic, social and environmental changes and challenges have shaped the production and consumption of housing in Australia and the policy settings that attempt to guide these processes. These changes and challenges, as outlined in this book, are many and varied. While these issues are new they raise timeless questions around affordability, access, density, quantity, type and location of housing needed in Australian towns and cities. The studies presented in this text also provide a unique insight into a range of housing production, consumption and policy issues that, while based in Australia, have implications that go beyond this national context. For instance how do suburban-based societies adjust to the realities of aging populations, anthropogenic climate change and the significant implications such change has for housing? How has policy been translated and assembled in specific national contexts? Similarly, what are the significantly different policy settings the production and consumption of housing in a post-Global Financial Crisis period require? Framed in this way this book accounts for and responds to some of the key housing issues of the 21st century.

Chapter 1
Housing in Australia: A New Century

Rae Dufty-Jones and Dallas Rogers

Introduction

Home is where most of us live more than half our waking hours. It is where we do more than a third of our work, and spend a great deal of our leisure. It’s where we suffer or enjoy a great deal of our whole experience of life … it’s an important place. (Stretton 1974: 21)

In 1974 Hugh Stretton, a Professor of History at the University of Adelaide and deputy chair of the South Australian Housing Trust (a post he held for 17 years), delivered a series of five lectures for the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) on the topic of ‘Housing and Government’ as part of the Boyer Lectures series.¹ Occurring in a period when housing policy in Australia was being radically reshaped, Stretton’s talks were pivotal in their timing and their content. The lectures identified the challenges and changes occurring in Australian housing at the time and framed a public research agenda for Australian housing studies.² Forty years on, Stretton’s 1974 Boyer Lectures provide a unique lens – a time capsule of sorts – on this period in Australian housing history. To gain a sense of present day circumstances and what these mean for the future, an appreciation of where we have been is essential. Stretton’s lectures provide a useful frame for orientating ourselves around some of the core issues when considering contemporary housing issues in Australia. Reflecting on the changes to housing in Australia over this 40 year period this chapter introduces the main themes of this collection: people and practices (framed around the areas of economy, society and environment and how housing intersects with these) and policy. The research assembled in this volume and how it advances our knowledges of housing in Australia in the 21st century is outlined throughout each theme.

People and Practices: The Great Australian Dream Then and Now

… we have on average comparatively big and well-equipped houses; three quarters³ of us own one or are buying one; some of the rest are tenants because they want to be tenants, and most of the people in flats are there because they like flats best. So we have the remarkable distinction of giving as many as 90% of our people the type of housing that each wants as his [sic] genuine first preference. (Stretton 1974: 13)

1974 was a watershed year in terms of the Australian economy, society, environment and housing. It was the year when the first cracks in the Keynesian economic system, which had served Australia so well during the post-World War II (WWII) ‘long boom’, began to show. Economics editor for The Age, Tim Colebatch (2005) described 1974 as the ‘year that the Australian economy went bung … For the economy, 1974 was the end of the good times’. During this year unemployment increased from 2 to 5 per cent. Those employed during this period were mostly employed full-time and were mostly men (only 36.3% of women were in paid employment compared to 79.1% of men (Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) 1972b)). In the early 1970s 23.2 per cent of the labour force were employed in manufacturing, 7.4 per cent were employed in agriculture, forestry and fishing and 6.9 per cent were employed in the finance and business services (ABS 1972b). Inflation rose rapidly in both wages and consumer goods. Rising wage claims were accompanied by increased industrial disputes. The Oil Crisis was beginning to take hold as the OPEC cartel doubled world oil prices. One of Australia’s major trading partners, the United Kingdom, joined the European Economic Community (EEC) the year previously and Prime Minister Gough Whitlam commenced what would become a decades-long period of microeconomic reform through the winding back of trade protection. Severe shortages of steel, bricks, timber and other building materials, combined with rising labour costs, saw the post-war housing boom go bust. The productivity limitations of Fordism were also recognised by Stretton (1974: 33) who noted that: ‘Once the commercial services have full employment and a limited working week their further growth is severely limited, and mostly depends on getting more housewives back to commercial employment.’

As the opening quote to this section identifies Australian society and the way it was housed was understood as being relatively uniform in 1974. Almost 70 per cent of households were either purchasing or already owned their own home. In comparison, only 22.6 per cent of households rented privately, while even less (5.3%) lived in government owned housing (ABS 1972a). These homes were mostly detached, single story dwellings. The 1971 Census of Population and Housing found that 84 per cent of Australian households lived in a private house while 12 per cent lived in a self-contained flat (ABS 1972a).

The nuclear family reigned supreme in 1974. According to Stretton (1974: 40):

the nuclear family turns out to be more popular than ever, especially where it can get comfortable living space. A higher proportion than ever now live in family households. If they leave home young, or get divorced often, it’s usually to form new nuclear households very soon.

Sixty-four per cent of Australians aged over 15 years of age were married, while only 3.5 per cent were either separated or divorced – de facto relationships were not even recognised by the nation’s statisticians in the early 1970s (ABS 1972c).

However the diversity that existed within Australian society in the 1970s was also beginning to dawn on the national consciousness. The Whitlam Government had introduced ‘no fault’ divorce laws. It had also amended the Migration Act and, in the following year, it would introduce the Racial Discrimination Act (1975), thereby ending the ‘White Australia Policy’ that had been in place since 1901. While Stretton still advocated strongly on the universal good derived from the free-standing home on the quarter-acre block he also noted that,

We are short of housing for many particular needs. Our public authorities have concentrated mostly on housing standard families, and lately pensioners. They are only beginning to do much for childless couples. Most of them still do little or nothing for single women under sixty, or single men at any age. There are shortages and acute problems in aboriginal housing, both where the people do want and where they don’t want to be housed in standard white fashion. (Stretton 1974: 17)

Stretton defended the division between work and home (‘It’s not efficient to smelt steel at home, or on the other hand to bring up children in institutions’ (Stretton 1974: 33)). However he did recognise the important economic contribution that work within and around the home space made, as well as the role of the home in the pursuit of social and cultural aspects of Australian lives:

[Home is] where most people now hear most music, read most books, see and hear most drama, read and see and hear most of the world’s news and most of the analysis and commentary on it. (Stretton 1974: 41)

Throughout his lectures Stretton (1974: 49) makes a strong call for the linking of housing to urban and environmental concerns. In 1971, 86.7 per cent of Australian households lived in urban areas (ABS 1972a). According to Stretton suburbanisation was still the best way of delivering a high standard of housing efficiently and equitably. In addition to these distributional benefits, the Fordist technologies that had enabled suburbanisation also provided Australians with the ‘gift of … private space’ (Stretton 1974: 40). He ferociously defended the suburban house against the discourse of densification that was recommended as a panacea to the diseconomies of scale that had emerged as Australia’s housing boom outpaced the delivery of employment and infrastructure in the suburban fringes of the nation’s major cities.

[C]ritics blame that famous Australian quarter-acre for most of the sins of the cities, and they believe that if we built denser housing … our cities would run more cheaply, efficiently and sociably … The trouble is not that our gardens are too big, but that two of our cities [Sydney and Melbourne] are too big. (Stretton 1974: 13)

Stretton warned against the creative destructive mentality of ‘densification’, arguing that the difficulty of retrofitting Australia’s cities would be too costly both in terms of resources and time and would fail to supply the market with the level of housing needed. Furthermore, Stretton (1974: 14) argued that densification would amount to ‘class robbery’ and threatened the egalitarianism inherent in Australian suburban housing (‘The middle classes would have the old big houses with gardens, the workers would have the new small flats without [gardens]’ (Stretton 1974: 14–15)). Last the demolition involved in densification displaced those least able to resist such planning measures while simultaneously wasting current housing resources and exacerbating housing supply issues.

Suburbanisation was also advocated by Stretton in terms of its socialisation opportunities in the context of an emerging environmentalism during this period. For Stretton (1974: 48), ‘our environmental policies will always in the end be determined by our people’s values; and houses with gardens are the nursery of most of the best of our environmental values’. Suburbanisation was not the problem; rather it was how Australians used their homes that posed the environmental threat.

Do generous houses and gardens themselves hurt the environment? They can, if people fill their houses and gardens with machinery and drench them with chemicals, and build them too far from the places where their people work, in over-sized cities that generate too much daily travel. On the other hand generous housing with land around it offers the best scope for good environmental behaviour … It’s in houses with storage space and some land around that it’s easiest to collect local energy, or to use more human energy, and to get along with less powered commercial services. It’s also easier to adapt to many kinds of environmental and industrial breakdown. People in landless flats suffer most when the rubbish truck doesn’t come and the lift and the clothes-dryer stop. (Stretton 1974: 47)

Stretton did recommend some strategies on how to improve Australian suburbanism. In keeping with the planning discourse of the day was the solution of decentralisation (Ruming et al. 2010; Lloyd and Troy 1981). That is, develop satellite cities and make these cities centres of culture and employment. The Australian urban environment would also be improved through the reduction of road transport and less dependence on the car. Planners were urged by Stretton to think of short transportation needs and forms such as pedestrian, bikes and public transport. Sydney was advised to reduce its ‘road space and [make] it over for buses and bikes only, instead of increasing it’ (Stretton 1974: 47).

The makings of the reformist New Urbanist vision for the Australian suburb is also present in Stretton’s critiques. For example in his fourth lecture Stretton (1974: 46) argued that Australian cities and towns should stop building shopping centres to

look like television studies in a blasted moonscape of asphalt, which nobody would want to approach any other way than by car. Centres ought to be dense and intricate and villagey. They ought to have people living in them and close around them, instead of being cut off from their living areas by six-lane highways and all that moonscape.

The environment more generally came roaring onto the housing policy scene at the end of 1974 when on December 25 Cyclone Tracy hit the far north city of Darwin. Sixty-six people were recorded as having lost their life due to the cyclone and the city woke up on Christmas Day with 70 per cent of its homes destroyed or severely damaged.

* * *

In 2014 Australia entered its 22nd year of uninterrupted economic growth. To put this in perspective since the turn of the 21st century, despite a global recession that still has many other developed economies struggling, Australia has not experienced two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. This has been achieved on the back of a confluence of factors ranging from geological good fortune, a stable political and regulatory environment, and a range of microeconomic reforms pursued during the 1980s and 1990s.

In 2011 Australia’s unemployment rate was at 5.6 per cent. On the face of it things seem little changed since the figure of 5 per cent recorded in 1974. However these figures belie a four-decade period of change where the fundamentals of the Australian economy have radically shifted. For example 5 per cent of unemployment in 1974 was seen as a major economic problem that needed immediate government response. Today, economists define 5 per cent of unemployment as ‘full employment’. The change in the Australian economy also exists in other details. For example the last 40 years has witnessed an unprecedented level of women entering the formal Australian labour force: from 36 per cent in 1971 to 53 per cent in 2011. Stretton’s argument that Australia’s productivity gains would be achieved through the ‘housewife’ entering the labour force has seemingly come to pass. However, the restructuring of the Australian economy during the 1980s and 1990s has seen the level of men employed in the formal labour market decline from 79 per cent in 1971 to 63 per cent in 2011. The industry mix of employment in Australia has also shifted. Agriculture, forestry and fishing now only account for 3 per cent of employment (down from 7.4% in 1971) and manufacturing 12 per cent (down from 23.2% in 1971). While finance and business services have increased from 7.9 per cent in 1971 to approximately 15 per cent in 2011 (ABS 2012a).

Australian society has also profoundly changed over the past 40 years. For example the nuclear family is only one of a range of household structures in Australian society. In 2011 48.7 per cent of Australians⁴ were married (compared to 64% in 1971). De facto relationships (now recognised by statisticians) were identified by 9.5 per cent of the population. While the proportion of the Australian population who had never been married increased from 15 per cent in 1971 to 34 per cent in 2011. An increase was also observed in the proportion of those individuals who were either separated or divorced: from 3.5 per cent in 1971 to 11.4 per cent in 2011 (ABS 2012a).

The Australian population has also become older. Those aged 65 years old and more made up 16 per cent of the population in 2011, almost double that in 1971 (8.3%). The aging of the population is further exacerbated by the fact that younger generations are having fewer children (the average Australian family had only 1.9 children in 2011). However, through an immigration program that is equal to that which followed WWII, Australians are a more ethnically diverse population with the proportion of the population born in Australia now at 69 per cent (compared to 79.8% in 1971). Not only is Australia’s population made up of a higher proportion of immigrants but the countries from which immigrants originate from have also changed. While those from England still account for the largest proportion (4.2%) this is down from the dominance that the United Kingdom and Eire had in 1971 (8.5%). An increasing proportion of immigrants now arrive from New Zealand (2.2%), China (1.5%) and India (1.4%), replacing the role of Southern Europe⁵ as a source of immigrants (ABS 2012a).

As a consequence of all these changes Australian households are simply more complex. For example single-parent households now make up 15.9 per cent of all Australian households and single person households now make up 24 per cent of all Australian households (compared to 14% in 1971 (ABS 1972a)). However while some things have radically changed others have remained relatively stable. For instance in 1971 86.7 per cent of the national population were living in urban centres (66% in major urban centres and 20.7% in other urban centres).⁶ In 2011 this proportion had only increased to 88.9 per cent (69.4% in major urban centres and 19.6% in other urban centres). Similarly, despite a boom in apartment building in many Australian cities since the turn of the century (see Chapter 8) there are now more households living in private homes (89% compared to 84% in 1971) and the proportion of households living in a flat, unit or apartment has declined (from 12% in 1971 to 10% in 2011). Last, despite the hyperbole that swirls around the topic of housing in Australia, there has been remarkably little change in the rate of homeownership (down from 69% in 1971 to 67% in 2011) and the proportion of the Australian population who rent (up from 27.9% to 29.6%) (ABS 2012b).

There are many measures of this economic and socio-demographic change but few are as pervasive as the measure of housing. Whether it is in the boardrooms of Australia’s ‘Big Four’ banks o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Housing in Australia: A New Century
• PART 1 People and Practices
• PART 2 Policies
• Index