Earlier this year, a newborn infant died at an informal encampment of unhoused people in the town of Wagga Wagga, Australia. The encampment is a collection of tents and self-constructed shelters on the town’s riverbank, without adequate security of tenure, services, or sanitation. It serves as home to people with few other options in a country where housing prices are hyper-inflated, tenant protections are weak, social housing wait lists are years long, and Indigenous Australians are often subjected to inhumane housing conditions. How can it be that in a country as rich, as politically stable, and as well-endowed with infrastructure as Australia that this situation could happen, and even be taken in stride by most Australians as just another news item? 

As I argue in my recent book, Housing and Human Rights, housing policies that do not centre housing as a human right generally entrench inequality, and when they fail to tackle structural factors, they individualise housing issues inhibiting our ability to see and to resist human rights violations.

Let me illustrate one facet of this process using Australia’s housing crisis as an example. The baby’s death in the Wagga Wagga encampment was reported in the national media, and characterised as a tragedy and a ‘tipping point’ in Australia’s deep housing crisis. But there was no palpable sense of wide or enduring outrage. The baby, and the community’s hardship and grief, were soon forgotten by most. Why? As my book discusses, many governments – the Australian government included – have worked hard to create the landscape of housing law and policy which produced this situation, and ‘sell’ this vision of housing to their citizens.

Homeownership is ‘the Australian Dream’. Successive governments of all political persuasions have supported ownership with significant tax breaks and preferential policies, promoting it on the basis of personal, and indeed intergenerational, financial security and belonging. In doing so, they have created a system of ‘asset-based welfare,’ where the family home (and increasingly an additional home purchased as in investment) is expected to step in and fulfil the role of the state. With asset-based welfare, the state no longer needs to provide social security, rights to adequate pay and working conditions, rights to aged care, or even education: the financial security of one’s home can, it is assumed, be leveraged to deliver these social goods.

But asset-based welfare not only acquits governments of their social rights obligations, it works against the realisation of human rights in general. It makes housing unaffordable as it becomes financialized, encourages unsustainable mortgage debt burdens increasing housing insecurity, and privileges exchange value over use value, violating the heart of the right to housing: as a place to live in dignity, security and peace. At the same time, investment in housing concentrates housing in the hands of the few, leading to more unequal societies, which are the ‘antithesis of human rights’. And, I argue, by privatizing our social goods and rights and expecting them to be fulfilled through individual home ownership, it makes us look away from the social deprivations of others, and accept the violation of their human rights without outrage.

As my book argues, the answer to the global housing crisis cannot lie in commodified and financialized homeownership, in treating housing as a wealth-generating machine, or in ever further ways to financialise people’s living spaces. Instead, it lies in remembering that housing is a human right and that housing justice lies at the heart of a fair society, one in which we are all included.  And it lies in framing our laws, policies, and activism around that heart.