Last week saw a major submission to the ongoing Commonwealth Senate inquiry on affordable housing by the Built Environment’s City Futures Research Centre.

Key themes included tax reform principles for improved housing affordability, measures to channel institutional investment into rental housing and policy integration of infrastructure, planning and housing measures.

This comes hard on the heels of the City Futures submission to the NSW Parliamentary Select Committee on Social, Public and Affordable Housing, where Hal Pawson, Vivienne Milligan and Judy Yates (newly-appointed City Futures Senior Visiting Fellow) presented key recommendations and responded to Committee questions at the closed session on March 12.

Drawing on the Centre’s extensive body of policy-focused research, both of these inquiry inputs included wide-ranging proposals to remedy the inadequate supply of housing accessible to lower income Australians.

Professor Hal Pawson, a contributor to the submissions says the key message, especially for the Senate inquiry, was that Commonwealth Ministers can’t wash their hands of responsibility for tackling the growing shortage of affordable housing.

"Any suggestion that this is just a problem to be sorted out by the states and territories would be grossly misleading. By phrasing our proposals in plain language and stressing their evidence-based status, we hope they’ll influence the Committee’s recommendations to government".

Read the full Senate inquiry submission