How capitalism, not migrants, created Australia's housing crisis

“Our infrastructure is under pressure, essential services from schools and hospitals are stretched thin. Australians are locked out of the housing market. Many are house poor, spending most of their income on rent or mortgages”, explained Liberal senator Andrew Hastie in an incendiary Instagram post. “This is a housing demand crisis driven by unsustainable immigration. It’s that simple. We must act.”

The feeling that migrants are the cause of the housing crisis is widespread. Right-wing politicians like Hastie frequently blame “unsustainable immigration” for the lack of affordable housing. In August 2025 tens of thousands took part in the nationwide “March for Australia” rallies which called for an end to “mass migration” as a solution to the housing crisis. Pauline Hanson’s racist One Nation party has been surging in the polls by making this issue its key talking point. This anti-migrant sentiment goes well beyond open racists and wannabe Trumpists. The Labor government has been pushing for caps on international students, with Treasurer Jim Chalmers claiming that “Enrolments have grown … this puts pressure on prices and rents … it makes finding a house harder for everyone”.

Instead of challenging the racism of the Liberals and One Nation, the Albanese government has capitulated to it. Hence Albanese urged the Labor caucus to accept the idea that the March for Australia rallies were filled with “good people”, unfortunately led astray by the neo-Nazis. They hoped that this would starve the issue of political oxygen. Instead, it has merely mainstreamed anti-migrant sentiment.

With most of the major political parties and the mainstream media heaping the blame for the housing crisis on migrants, it is disappointing, but not surprising, that poll after poll shows the majority of Australians want serious cuts to migration.

The real roots of the housing crisis

Blaming migration levels diverts attention from the real reasons that we are in a housing crisis. Housing in Australia is premised on the idea that houses are merely a commodity. They are something that is bought and sold, or rented, on the capitalist market. Whether you can buy a house outright, borrow to buy one over time, or rent is determined by your income. A minimal number of crumbling Housing Commission places exist only for the poorest of the poor.

Housing in Australia is deeply structured by the hierarchy of class. Data provided by the Australian Tax Office in 2023 revealed that 1 percent of taxpayers own nearly 25 percent of all investment properties in the country. While the media likes to focus on so-called “mum and dad investors”, in reality only 15 percent of taxpayers in Australia are property investors. Only 21 percent of households in Australia own a property that isn’t their home. Seventy-one percent of those who own more than one property only have one more. So it is a minority who own a property which isn’t their own house, and then a minority of a minority that owns more than one extra property. The estimated data shows that around 50 percent of all rented housing is owned by this minority.^[1]

Thirty-one percent of the population rent. A further 35 percent have their own home under a mortgage, with only 31 percent owning their home outright. The vast majority of the population don’t own any investment properties, and either rent or take on debt to “own” their home.^[2]

Access to affordable housing is always a tense issue under capitalism. Even in the best of times, there are sections of the working class that struggle to have a secure and affordable roof over their heads. Periodically, the costs associated with housing grow dramatically, resulting in a “housing crisis”. There can be a variety of reasons for this. Incomes can sharply fall or stagnate, making it harder to buy, borrow or rent. The prices of houses or rents can rise dramatically due to changes in the housing market. What all of these factors come down to is that houses are a commodity in our capitalist society. They are built in order to make money for someone. They are not a utility whose access is organised in a rational, planned and equitable way. The fluctuations in people’s access to housing are but an expression of the chaotic turmoil and hierarchical structures of the capitalist markets themselves.

From the postwar housing boom to the housing crisis

Left-wing commentators often argue that the origins of our current housing crisis go back to the neoliberal turn and the subsequent decoupling of income from house prices that started in the 1980s. This was an important turning point. However, if we are to grasp why this shift took place, we have to take a longer view of the housing question in Australia.

Despite the fact that Australia is a very large country with a comparatively very small population, the lack of affordable housing has been a consistent problem, and the current housing crisis is hardly Australia’s first.

Until the end of the Second World War, the federal and state governments took very little responsibility for housing. They argued that it would be wrong for the state to interfere in a private industry. Both conservative and Labor governments thought that the main thing was to entice more capitalists to invest in the risky business of constructing houses. The result was the sprawling urban slums, decrepit amenities and crumbling housing stock that was epitomised most dramatically in Sydney.

By the 1940s, this had reached a crisis point. The shocks of the economic depressions of the 1890s and 1930s meant that capitalists were very reluctant to invest in construction. Consequently, housing stock rapidly deteriorated through the first decades of the twentieth century. By the end of the Second World War, it was estimated that Australia would need an extra 300,000–400,000 homes to house the population of a country with only 1.6 million dwellings. In NSW, it was estimated that a quarter of the population didn’t have access to an adequate home in 1946.^[3]

The usual story is that at this point, the heroic Labor government of Ben Chifley stepped in with a bold experimental plan to solve the housing crisis through state intervention.

The “radicalism” of the postwar Labor government’s reconstruction plan has generally been exaggerated. “[F]ar from over-regulating the private sector the ALP was less interventionist than either the contemporary Labour government in Britain or the subsequent Menzies ministries in Australia”, concluded economists Bob Catley and Bruce McFarlane, who pointed out that “no capital gains tax was introduced and that the percentage of GNP ‘controlled by the state’ only rose from 13 percent in 1941 to 14.9 percent in 1949”, with a tax system significantly less progressive than Britain or Scandinavia.^[4]

On the issue of housing, the postwar Labor government was even more moderate than in other policy areas. When Chifley tried to attain extra government powers via referendum in 1944, federal government control over housing was explicitly not included as an option. The Chifley government, and Chifley himself in particular, was terrified that too bold an intervention into the housing market would unite middle-class and working-class home owners against the Labor Party.

They were, however, under considerable pressure to do something about housing. The housing shortage was becoming a social crisis as the military was demobilised and marriage and birth rates spiked. A wave of protests, often led by returned servicemen, saw families squatting in empty or half-built homes. Underpinning this was a huge upsurge in strikes as workers pushed to end the austerity of the war years, which Labor was determined to keep going as long as possible.

The solution the Labor government hit upon, in collaboration with liberal-minded state planners and economists, was a combination of expanding public housing while leaving the rest of the housing market as unregulated as possible.

The idea was that public housing stock would be built by private construction companies who would be enticed by funding transferred from the federal government to the state governments’ newly founded Housing Commissions. Workers would benefit from more stable housing, however as economists Ken Buckley and Ted Wheelwright point out, “private building contractors also gained”.^[5] As well, access to public housing would be restricted to those on very low incomes, so it would be put aside only for the very poorest of the poor. If not enough of the poor could be found, then the Housing Commissions were encouraged to sell off “excess” housing stock. Under Liberal Prime Minister Menzies, there was more emphasis placed on the virtues of home ownership (although he actually built more public housing faster than Chifley), and he made it easier for public housing to be sold.^[6] However, the basic structure of housing was established by the postwar Labor government.

It was precisely the inadequate nature of this public housing in Australia, which was considerably worse than in Britain and western Europe, that underpinned the high rates of home ownership. In the UK almost a third of the population (29 percent) lived in public housing by the 1960s, in Germany 19.4 percent, in France around 17 percent. In Australia in 1961 it was a measly 4.2 percent. The only advanced economy that was lower at the time was the USA at 2–3 percent.^[7] The reality is that public housing in the UK and Western Europe today (even after decades of neoliberal restructuring and sell-offs) is still better than public housing ever was in Australia.

Most workers in Australia then simply had no other choice than to enter into the private housing market. Pullan argues that “the desire for ownership was not driven by a general suburban ‘ideal’ but was the population’s response to an under-supplied, therefore expensive and volatile, rental market, during a time of secure, well-paid employment”.^[8] Under these pressures, home ownership went from 53 percent in 1947 (comparable to other advanced capitalist countries) to 70 percent by 1961 (one of the highest in the world).^[9]

The expansion of both public housing and home ownership took much longer to roll out than is commonly thought. The private construction bosses dragged their feet, despite the large amounts of cash being shoved into their pockets. “The declared housing targets were never approached”, writes labour historian Tom Sheridan, “and controls over prices and materials were relaxed in a manner which worked against the interests of both lower-income earners and public sector institutions”.^[10] A 1950 report found that housing construction in NSW was still 52 percent behind government targets and that the backlog of those requesting public housing had increased by 14 percent.^[11] As time went on, the proportion of houses built that were public housing also declined.

It had been hoped that government-sponsored housing would account for about half of all houses built, but the proportion was much smaller. In 1945–46, 4,028 houses were built under the Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement, 26 percent of the total, but by 1949–50 the proportion had fallen to 13 percent.^[12]

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Australian press was still filled with articles and reports about the housing crisis in Sydney and Melbourne. There was a considerable section of the population living in “temporary dwellings”, particularly in the outer suburbs of Sydney. Blocks of land were purchased with no actual house, and workers lived in makeshift dwellings on the land while they built their future home over a number of years. The 1961 census found that 45,000 people still lived in “huts and sheds”.^[13] There were thousands of families living in such dwellings in the early sixties. Much of our somewhat romanticised image of the postwar housing situation is really based on life during the mid-sixties to the late 1970s.

There were sections of the socialist left and the unions that were critical of the limited nature of the postwar housing plans. At the left-dominated 1945 congress of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), criticism was raised over the government’s housing policies. The Building Workers’ Industrial Union (BWIU) put forward a very detailed motion calling for union representatives on the Housing Commission boards and attacking the construction bosses. In 1947, the slowness of building public housing by private construction bosses led the BWIU to demand the socialisation of the building industry. They argued that the construction and then sale of all housing should be placed under government control with union supervision. This criticism though was muted by the union leaders’ sympathy for the federal Labor government and ultimate acceptance of the limits of its postwar economic plans. By 1949, all talk about socialising the building industry had evaporated, and left-wing criticism narrowed to defending the gains of the postwar Labor government against cuts by Menzies.^[14]

The key issue here is that housing remained a private capitalist commodity in the postwar years. As long as incomes were rising and workers were able to afford to become homeowners, the tensions over housing, while never entirely going away, could be managed.

The turn towards neoliberalism progressively eroded the ability of the system to paper over these tensions. Government policies increasingly encouraged property investment (negative gearing, capital gains tax discounts), income inequality and indebtedness increased, and public housing and social services declined. The lack of any public control over the housing market meant that home ownership was transformed into a serious source of growing inequality, enriching some at the expense of many, renters and mortgagees alike. The end result was the decoupling of housing costs from income that is so widely discussed.

The results have been clear. In 1994–5, the proportion of households that owned their home outright was 41.8 percent; by 2025, this had dropped to 31 percent. Meanwhile, the proportion of households who were paying off a mortgage climbed from 29.6 percent to 35 percent, and renters went from 18.4 percent to 30.6 percent of households. Meanwhile, the number of households in public housing contracted from 5.5 percent to 2.9 percent.^[15]

In other words, there has been a substantial decline in the number of people who own their home outright, with a significant increase in the numbers of people who are trapped in a mortgage or unable to get into home ownership. And this is just for the population overall, without breaking it down into age categories. As the Australian Institute of Health and Wellbeing (AIHW) explains, Australian home ownership rates are misleadingly inflated by the ageing population and the shift towards higher numbers of indebted home “owners”. Once this is taken into account, the future trajectory of home ownership is clear.

Home ownership among 30–34-year-olds fell from 64% in 1971 to 50% in 2021, and for 25–29-year-olds it dropped from 50% to 36%. Among those nearing retirement, home ownership also declined; for 50–54-year-olds, the rate decreased from 80% in 1996 to 72% in 2021.^[16]

What is the actual impact of migration then?

Anti-immigrant crusaders can point to simple numerical facts that appear to support their arguments. After all, if there were fewer migrants there would be more houses for people to buy and rent. The problem with this argument is that it totally ignores the real relationships between wealth, ownership, inequality and housing.

To start with, it is based on the lie that housing prices, rents and interest rates are rising because migration is outstripping housing construction. However, over the last ten years, the population of Australia increased by 16 percent, while the number of houses and apartments increased by 19 percent.^[17]

In 2024, Melbourne had the largest increase in net overseas migration (121,240 people), with Sydney coming in second at 120,886. Melbourne also had the largest natural increase in population as well. Despite this, housing prices in Melbourne peaked in 2021 and rose by half as much as Sydney during 2024. Brisbane (16.9 percent), Adelaide (16 percent) and Perth (23.8 percent) had the largest increases in house prices in 2024. Yet in all these states net overseas migration declined substantially that year, and of course was significantly lower than migration to Melbourne or Sydney in both raw numbers and as a percentage of the population.^[18]

Drilling down into small geographical units reveals even greater variance. In NSW, a series of regional towns have had very large increases in housing prices despite stagnant population numbers or even a steady decline. Broken Hill’s population declined by 0.46 percent in 2024, but housing prices in the city increased by a staggering 30 percent, the highest increase in the state. Clearly, there are other factors at work.^[19]

The connection between migration and interest rate rises is even more ludicrous. The decision by the Reserve Bank to raise interest rates in February, and warn that more rises are likely, despite migration to Australia dropping by 40 percent in the last 12 months and expected to fall further, should be proof enough.

The impact of migration on housing also can’t be disentangled from the impact of migration on the economy and living standards, more generally. One of the reasons why immigration levels have been relatively high in Australia is that there has been a consistent shortage of labour, both among skilled workers and middle-class professionals, which migration has filled. This, of course, has been carried out in a thoroughly pro-capitalist manner, rather than on the basis of human rights or the free movement of people. Clearly, though, migrants have contributed to expanding the Australian economy. Simply slashing numbers will cripple the Australian capitalist economy, and it is very unlikely that capitalists are going to turn around and give “native” workers higher wages, better jobs and housing if the economy is going backwards.^[20]

One of the difficulties in disproving the anti-immigration argument is that migration to Australia has been at a relatively high level for so long that it is hard to show hypothetically what would happen if it were cut. But there are some contemporary and historical examples we can look at.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the borders were shut and migration to Australia collapsed to almost nothing. During this period, housing prices went through the most rapid increases in Australian history, thanks to the cuts by the Reserve Bank to interest rates. There are many governments around the world, both far-right and centrist, that are currently introducing savage cuts to migration. There are so far no signs that this is easing the housing crisis, let alone leading to rising living standards. Net overseas migration to Australia peaked in 2023. Since then it has fallen from 556,000 in 2023–24 to 306,000 in 2024–25 and is expected to drop further to 260,000 in 2026. Yet the housing crisis has continued.^[21]

We can also look at history. It was during the postwar period that Australia saw both a massive increase in access to housing and much larger levels of migration than today. On the flip side, in the wake of the Great Depression migration to Australia fell to almost zero until after the Second World War. As we have seen, this was the period when Australia entered into its greatest housing crisis ever.

The reality is that access to housing is much more impacted by wage levels, property prices and government intervention (or the lack thereof) into the housing market, than by immigration. The current housing crisis is a product of the contradictions of the neoliberal boom in Australia, which was fuelled by huge increases in wealth at the top of society while workers got by through increasing levels of debt. It is this which needs to be confronted.

A socialist solution to the housing crisis

The campaign by right-wing politicians, media outlets and think tanks to blame migrants for the housing crisis is a very deliberate one. They are seeking to reassemble a popular base for conservative politics that has fragmented in recent years and regain the political initiative from the Albanese Labor government. In the process, they hope to forge a coalition of radicalised racist ideologues, traditional conservative voters and discontented outer suburbanites.

The turn towards anti-migrant politics and the growth of the far right internationally is clearly a strong influence, with Pauline Hanson’s One Nation taking the lead in trying to build a Trumpian politics Down Under. Labor has time and again either adapted to or outright capitulated to this campaign. To the extent they do stand up to it, they do so by pontificating on the pro-capitalist benefits of immigration rather than via a principled anti-racist and pro-working-class argument.

The socialist left can’t defeat this campaign by accommodating to anti-migrant arguments. That will only disarm the left and strengthen the hold of racism and conservatism. In order to defeat popular anti-migrant attitudes, we need a bold, radical and insurgent socialist plan for housing that meets the seriousness of the crisis.

An important starting point has been provided by the Socialist Party. We do need to massively expand public housing and reject the bullshit of so-called “social housing”; rent caps would also provide some immediate relief to renters. However, as the history in this article shows, having more public housing isn’t enough if it leaves the rest of the housing market untouched. There needs to be serious state intervention into the housing market more generally, well beyond temporary rent caps.

Much left-wing criticism of the housing crisis focuses on landlords and real estate agents. These are indeed the immediate figures that renters come up against. However, simplifying the situation as a struggle between renters and landlords misses the bigger picture. Behind the unequal structures of the housing market lie the banks, wealthy investors, development companies, the minority of landlords with large numbers of properties, all backed by government bureaucracies and powerful political parties, i.e. the Australian capitalist class and their supporters. It is these forces, and the capitalist system that they are enmeshed in, that need to be challenged if we are going to win some serious protections for ordinary people, whether they are renters, mortgage holders or home owners, from the vicious vicissitudes of the capitalist market.

In the past, access to housing has often increased because working-class living standards more generally have risen. This has usually taken place because the workers’ movement and the socialist left have led and organised struggles that have pushed back against the bosses and won gains. As well, it is not enough to have access to any old home; we have to fight for decent housing that is worth living in. This goes back to the very construction of housing and its maintenance. Also it is little use getting access to housing if that means being crushed by rising debts, turning a home into a trap. So the struggle over housing will not be narrowly about this issue alone, but will be a part of a broader fight back against all the ways twenty-first century Australian capitalism screws over workers.

Throughout Australian history, there have been tantalising glimpses into what a struggle around housing could look like: the experimental Green Bans and housing actions by the radical Builders Labours’ Federation, and the floated plans of the BWIU for a nationalised construction industry, for instance. Ultimately, the real battle over housing isn’t about migration or capital investment, it isn’t about renters vs home “owners”, it isn’t even about Boomers vs Millennials and Gen Z. It is a battle for workers to democratically control the construction and ownership of housing. The solution to the housing crisis has to be found by looking at housing within the broader context of Australian capitalist society.

In order to really solve the housing crisis then, we need to transition to a socialist society. The wealth concentrated in the banks and the top property owners needs to be placed under the democratic control of the working class, and the structures of property ownership that straitjacket housing need to be abolished entirely.

This is an ambitious approach to solving the housing crisis, to say the least, but there are forces in Australian society that could fight for it if they were organised to do so. The majority of the population either rent or have a mortgage, and even most of those who own their own home are hardly in the top elite of society. There is a real basis on which a fighting plan that unites working-class renters, mortgage holders and home owners together against the corporate elite could be built.

The neoliberal boom in Australia, which began in the 1990s, for decades encouraged a retreat from class identification and a focus on consumerism and individualism. This has been eroded as the unequal consequences of this boom have become starkly obvious. Discussions about income inequality, class and corporate wealth have made a comeback. But the retreat from class politics during the neoliberal era has left its mark. The fragmenting of traditional political loyalties leads to volatility over popular understanding of the causes and meaning of today’s inequalities. This opens up the space for the racist far right, whose arguments can draw upon long established conservative attitudes, but also potentially opens up space for the socialist left.

A new working class has been created, concentrated in the outer suburbs of the capital cities, working in hospitals, supermarkets, schools, transport, childcare and other industries. Recent migrants make up a large section of this working class, more so in Australia than even in other advanced capitalist countries. This is another reason that anti-migrant politics needs to be rejected, otherwise there is little hope of building a strong, united movement of the working class that draws in white Australian workers, citizens from migrant backgrounds and recent migrants.

It is important, then, to reject the arguments of moderate progressives who argue the left needs to accept cuts to immigration in order to win working-class support. It is also vital to reject the arguments of sections of the left who want to counterpose the interests of Indigenous people to migrants on the basis that migrants are “settlers” or “colonisers”. No left-wing working-class movement can be built on the basis of either of these approaches.^[22]

And while anti-migrant attitudes are unfortunately widespread, they are not totally dominant, nor are they unchallengeable. There is a body of people who see that migration is not the cause, or at least not the primary cause, of the housing crisis. A report by the Macquarie University Housing and Urban Research Centre in 2025 found that 18–34-year-olds thought that high interest rates and low wage growth contributed more to the housing crisis than immigration levels. Among this age group, rent caps, rent assistance and more public housing were all listed as more likely to help the housing crisis than cuts to immigration.^[23] We should also remember that when Peter Dutton tried to win outer suburban working-class voters in the last federal election on a Trump-style basis, he was rejected.

“On the housing question, most socialists agree on the end goal: decommodified, publicly-owned, democratically-controlled housing for all – that is, dignity, safety, comfort”, explain two socialist writers in a critical review of New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s housing policies. “However, there is significant disagreement on the means and actualization of those ends. What tactics, strategies, and organizations – what politics, in both theory and practice – are necessary to build the requisite power to reach our end goals?”^[24] Taking on the housing crisis in Australia is also a political-strategic question. What kind of left-wing organisations do we need to mobilise the forces in society that can challenge the banks, governments and elites that are profiting from the housing crisis?

Our ability to tackle the question of housing and push back anti-migrant politics is dependent then on our capacity to start to build a mass radical socialist movement that can organise a fightback against the powers that be in this country.

Jordan Humphreys is an editor of Marxist Left Review and has written extensively on Indigenous oppression and working-class history. His book Indigenous Liberation and Socialism is available from Red Flag Books.

References

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) 1994, “Australian Social Trends, 1994”. https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/2f762f95845417aeca25706c00834efa/f8f2b5b6a0447a77ca2570ec00787a54/

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) 2021, “Housing Census: information on housing type and cost”. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/housing/housing-census/2021

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) 2022, “Housing Occupancy and Costs: 2019–2020 financial year”. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/housing/housing-occupancy-and-costs/latest-release

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) 2025, “Overseas Migration, 2024–25”. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/overseas-migration/latest-release

Australian Institute of Health and Wellbeing (AIHW) 2025, “Home ownership and housing tenure”. https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/australias-welfare/home-ownership-and-housing-tenure

Buckley, Ken and Ted Wheelwright 1998, False Paradise: Australian capitalism revisited: 1915–1955, Oxford University Press.

Department for Communities and Local Government (UK) 2017, 50 years of the English Housing Survey. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a81fa8ced915d74e623521f/EHS_50th_Anniversary_Report.pdf

Forward, Carmen 2026, “NSW residential property: Regional towns where house prices rose most,” Sydney Morning Herald, 29 January. https://www.smh.com.au/property/news/nsw-regional-towns-where-house-prices-soared-20-per-cent-in-a-year-20260119-p5nv8d.html

Grudnoff, Matt 2025, “Is population growth driving the housing crisis? Here’s the reality”, Australia Institute, 29 August. https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/is-population-growth-driving-the-housing-crisis-heres-the-reality/

Humphreys, Jordan 2019, “The political economy of immigration to Australia”, Marxist Left Review, 17, Summer. https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/the-political-economy-of-immigration-to-australia/

Humphreys, Jordan 2022, “Review: Indigenous people vs. ‘settler’ migrants?”, Marxist Left Review, 24, Winter. https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/review-indigenous-people-vs-settler-migrants/

Kuru, Scott 2024, “Australia’s capital; city home prices on the rise of six quarters”, Australian Property Update, 26 July. https://australianpropertyupdate.com.au/apu/australian-home-prices-continue-to-defy-tough-economic-times

Macintyre, Stuart 2020, Concise History of Australia (fifth edition), Cambridge University Press.

Martin, Oskar and Jordan Humphreys 2024, “Are migrants colonisers?”, Red Flag, 9 October. https://redflag.org.au/article/are-migrants-colonisers/

McDonald, Peter and Alan Gamlen 2025, “Migration is falling fast – but election politics is spinning a different story”, ANU policy briefing. https://policybrief.anu.edu.au/migration-is-falling-election-explainer/

Powell, Graeme and Macintyre, Stuart 2015, Land of opportunity: Australia’s post-war reconstruction: research guide, National Archives of Australia.

Pullan, Nicola 2019, Just a roof over their heads: temporary dwellings on Sydney’s urban fringe 1945–1960, PhD Thesis, UNSW. https://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/entities/publication/a94c4327-c64b-4380-98f8-a5b7b5cdf7ce

Rachwani, Mostafa and Antoun Issa 2023, “A quarter of Australia’s property investments held by 1% of taxpayers, data reveals”, The Guardian, 4 June. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jun/04/a-quarter-of-australias-property-investments-held-by-1-of-taxpayers-data-reveals

Rosenfield, Gen and Holden Taylor 2026, “Municipal Socialism’s “YIMBY” Problem: the housing crisis and Zohran – which way forward?”, Spectre Journal, 10 February https://spectrejournal.com/municipal-socialisms-yimby-problem/

Scanlon, Kathleen and Christine Whitehead 2011, “French Social Housing in an International Context”, OECD Economics Department Working Papers No. 862. https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2011/05/french-social-housing-in-an-international-context_g17a1fa9/5kgcd9s0q8f8-en.pdf

Sheridan, Tom 1989, Division of Labour: Industrial relations in the Chifley Years 1945–1949, Oxford University Press.

Troy, Patrick 2011, “The rise and fall of public housing in Australia”, Talk from Proceedings State of Australian Cities, ANU. https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/items/32928026-4295-4c57-9caf-2995e4da36cc

Wilson, Shaun, Ben Spies-Butcher, Adam Stebbing, Kristian Ruming and Alistair Sisson 2025, Housing and the 2025 Australian Federal Election: Between Crisis and Inertia, Macquarie University Housing and Urban Research Centre: Sydney, October. https://www.mq.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/1357321/Housing-and-Election-Report.pdf

1. Rachwani and Issa 2023.
2. ABS 2022.
3. Pullan 2019, p.22.
4. Quoted in Sheridan 1989, pp.36–7.
5. Buckley and Wheelwright 1998, p.170.
6. Troy 2011, p.3.
7. For Australia see ABS 1994 (public housing in Australia was actually at its highest in the 1990s, although still well below comparable economies). For UK and European public housing levels see Department for Communities and Local Government (UK) 2017, Scanlon and Whitehead 2011.
8. Pullan 2019, p.84.
9. Macintyre 2020, p.227.
10. Sheridan 1989, p.176.
11. The Daily Mirror, 11 May 1950, p.16.
12. Powell and Macintyre 2015, p.162.
13. Pullan 2019, p.79.
14. Sheridan 1989, pp.61–2.
15. AIHW 2025 and ABS 2021.
16. AIHW 2025.
17. Grudnoff 2025.
18. ABS 2025 and Kuru 2024.
19. Forward 2026.
20. For more on the relationship between capitalism and migration in Australia see Humphreys 2019.
21. McDonald and Gamlen 2025.
22. Martin and Humphreys 2024, Humphreys 2022.
23. Wilson et al, 2025.
24. Rosenfield and Taylor 2026.