Introduction by Croakey: An interactive dashboard to track progress on the National Preventive Health Strategy 2021-2030 and National Obesity Strategy 2022-2032 has been published by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare today.
But is it a missed opportunity to track progress on critical underlying determinants of health – such as poverty and housing insecurity?
The four main aims being tracked are:
- All Australians have the best start in life
- All Australians live in good health and wellbeing for as long as possible
- Health equity is achieved for priority populations
- Investment in prevention is increased.
The National Preventive Health Strategy identified seven focus areas to help achieve these aims, which are being tracked: reducing tobacco use and nicotine addiction; improving access to, and the consumption of, a healthy diet; increasing physical activity; increasing cancer screening and prevention; improving immunisation coverage; reducing alcohol and other drug harm; and promoting and protecting mental health.
‘While the National Preventive Health Strategy acknowledges other social, environmental, structural, economic, commercial, cultural and digital determinants influence health outcomes, many of these “sit outside of the direct control of the health system (ie. climate change, racism, social media etc) and consequently the scope of the Strategy”.
The AIHW separately publishes information about the wider determinants of health, including the health of people experiencing homelessness.
Meanwhile, a new report shows the number of people experiencing homelessness has risen to pre-pandemic levels. Also, most homelessness services (76%) report finding it ‘much harder’ to find suitable housing for clients compared with one year earlier.
The report recommends urgent action to reduce poverty and expand access to affordable, suitable, accommodation.
Below, in an article first published at The Conversation, Professor Hal Pawson writes that while some jurisdictions have begun addressing the issue through social housing, “other than in Queensland, there has been a lack of any stated rationale, strategic framing or evidence-based scaling of social housing programs”.
Hal Pawson writes:
Rising homelessness across Australia is overwhelming the capacity of services to offer emergency help.
New evidence in the Australian Homelessness Monitor 2024, released [on 9 December], confirms homelessness has soared well above pre-pandemic levels in most parts of the country.
Complementing the report’s findings from a survey of local governments, a majority of homelessness services agencies also report “significantly increased” numbers of people seeking assistance over the past 12 months alone.
Much of this escalation likely reflects the sheer lack of rental homes available and the extraordinary rent inflation experienced across Australia since 2020. National median advertised rents have jumped 51 percent since March 2020. Even when adjusted for inflation, the increase is 29 percent.
A welcome increase in government investment in social housing offers the prospect of some limited relief in the next few years.
However, as none of the recent spending commitments extends far into the future, and because they generally lack any evidence-based logic, there is a high risk this recovery will prove short-lived.
Agencies are feeling the strain
Recent market conditions have created a perfect storm for homelessness services agencies. In parallel with the rising need for crisis assistance, there is less scope to help clients into secure housing.
Some 76 percent of services were finding it “much harder” to find suitable housing for clients in mid-2024 than a year earlier.
Agency monthly caseloads are up 12 percent since 2019–20. There’s also a big increase in the average time clients receive support: up by 44 percent in the five years to 2022–23. This has forced agencies to reduce intakes of new clients seeking help.
The sector has a backlog, causing agencies to struggle to meet demand. They have been triaging applications for help. This means giving priority to people who are already homeless rather than at risk of homelessness.
While justifiable in the circumstances, this damages agencies’ ability to prevent – as opposed to relieve – homelessness.
The rental market pressures fuelling this crisis have continued to intensify, well over two years after Australia’s post-COVID reopening.
These problems would have been even worse without “extraordinary” boosts to Commonwealth Rent Assistance sanctioned by Treasurer Jim Chalmers in 2023 and 2024. In combination with routine indexation, these have raised maximum payments by 45 percent since early 2022.
Rising homelessness has longer-term causes
The housing market impacts of COVID-19 disruption have aggravated homelessness in the early 2020s.
But it’s only the latest phase in a much longer-term trend. This is because the housing market drivers of the problem are not (only) cyclical but structural; that is, built into how the system operates.
Housing demand and market supply have been out of sync for decades. As a result, house prices have continued to increase faster than incomes. This puts home ownership increasingly out of reach for moderate income earners.
With the path from private renting to first home ownership increasingly obstructed, even for moderate to high income earners, overall demand for tenancies has grown. This inflates sector-wide rent prices, further reducing availability of rentals affordable for people on lower incomes.
These housing market dynamics have been an underlying driver of rising rental housing stress and homelessness since the 1990s.
All the while, these tendencies have been underpinned by key tax and other policy settings that inflate housing demand and restrict supply.
The Federal Government’s promised National Housing and Homelessness Plan must acknowledge, analyse and reconsider these policy settings.
Governments have begun to respond
As the 2022 and 2020 editions of the Homelessness Monitor identified, signs of stepped-up engagement with homelessness as a policy priority began to emerge among governments as early as 2016 in states such as New South Wales and Victoria.
Then, in 2020, several states launched large-scale, widely-welcomed pandemic emergency accommodation programs for people sleeping rough and others who were homeless.
More recently, in a notable policy reversal highlighted by our new research, both federal and state governments have pledged appreciable investment in long-term social housing.
Initially led by Victoria and Queensland, followed by the Commonwealth and NSW, this new investment should deliver around 60,000 new social homes by 2030, by far the sector’s largest influx of new stock this century.
At least for a few years in the late 2020s, the promised programs might halt – at least temporarily – the trend of social housing dwindling from over six percent of all homes in the 1990s to barely four percent today.
Yet any gains will remain modest relative to the scale of unmet need. Referencing this, housing and homelessness advocates have called for social rental homes to form 10 percent of all housing.
Even so, we should see, at least for a few years, a marked uptick in scope to help people who are homeless into secure and affordable homes. This will be the result of a surge of newly-built social units supplementing existing homes being re-let. And for more of those helped in this way, these will be homes designed and built to modern standards.
Australia can do much better
Problematically, though, these developments have come about through incremental and disconnected policymaking. Other than in Queensland, there has been a lack of any stated rationale, strategic framing or evidence-based scaling of social housing programs.
In most cases, there has been no explicit recognition or acknowledgement of the need to keep investing much more in social housing than in the recent past. This investment must be enough, at the very least, to prevent a resumption of sector decline. Ideally, it should cover an expansion of social housing in line with known long-term needs.
It would surely be logical to include a statement of aspiration along these lines in the Government’s promised National Housing and Homelessness Plan.
We cannot measurably reduce and then prevent homelessness without reducing poverty and expanding access to secure and affordable homes.
Just as the current situation has come about thanks to mistaken policy choices of the past, these are challenges that could be squarely addressed by course corrections today.
• This article was first published by The Conversation under the headline, ‘Homelessness much worse than before COVID leaves agencies battling a perfect storm’.
About the author and disclosure
Hal Pawson is a Professor of Housing Research and Policy, and Associate Director, City Futures Research Centre, UNSW Sydney. Pawson receives research funding from the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation (City of Melbourne), the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, the Australian Research Council and Crisis UK. He is a part-time unpaid advisor to Senator David Pocock and a non-exec director of Community Housing Canberra.
See Croakey’s archive of articles on the social determinants of health
