Opportunities and Constraints in State Housing Policy: The Example of Tasmania's ‘Affordable Housing Strategy’

Abstract

The lack of Commonwealth government funds for public housing has encouraged state governments across Australia to develop ‘Affordable Housing Strategies’ to address the problems that result from the shortage of housing available for low-income households. However, to date there has been limited discussion of the implications of these affordable housing strategies and their significance as a form of policy intervention. This article highlights the Tasmanian Government's ‘Affordable Housing Strategy’ as a case study to illustrate the obstacles that confront state housing policy makers. These include difficulties in securing partnerships with the private sector, an inability to influence macro-economic policy settings, fluctuations in the property market cycle and a reliance on small and uncertain budgetary allocations. However, there is limited scope to address some of the problems that have undermined previous state and Territory housing policy initiatives by reaching agreements with local government to ease planning controls for social housing, boosting the capacity of the community housing sector and using additional budgets judiciously.

Keywords:

• Housing
• policy
• affordable
• strategy
• Tasmania

Notes

1. For the purposes of this article ‘housing affordability’ is used to denote the problems that confront households with insufficient resources to secure housing commensurate with their needs (for an extended discussion of the use of the term affordability in policy settings see Gabriel et al., 2005).

2. In this article, ‘social housing’ is a broad term used to denote community housing as well as public housing stock while ‘public housing’ is used specifically to describe housing for rent managed directly by the state government.

3. The total debt stood at $264 million in 2003.

4. On the grounds of confidentiality, no rationale was provided for the reasons for the withdrawal of Macquarie Bank (see Premier Lennon's speech September 2005 http://www.premier.tas.gov.au/speeches/sos2005.html). The significance of the failure of the partnership is discussed at the end of the article.

5. In making this point, it should be recognised that some States might benefit from a reduction in the principal of horizontal fiscal redistribution policies in Commonwealth/state financial relations.

6. This perception was sourced from a conversation with a senior staff member from Housing Tasmania.