Treading Water on Housing: Talk to Shelter House Forum

4 February 2025

A big thanks to the Shelter team.  The work you and your members do to address the biggest issue West Australians face right now is amazing.

We are in a housing crisis. Be the all-to-regular calls to my office or conversations when out doorknocking, story after human story illustrates what ABS data also shows; WA is the “epicentre of the national housing crisis”

• Families facing extreme housing stress as rents gone up more than 50% since the last election
• People couch surfing and waiting years to access public housing.
• Tenants in housing so hot it is unliveable
• Renters fearing, due to rapidly increasing house prices, they’ll be forever renters in the forever housing shortage.

These are problems two decades in the making

But problems which have largely got worse over the last 8 years.

We need the WA Government to move beyond trying to paper over the cracks in business as usual with large wads of cash – to actually fixing the problem.

We need to treat this as a crisis and invest in solutions that really work.

We can’t simply build our way out of this very human crisis in the short or medium term.

But we can implement solutions that will improve the lives of people today by:

• Using BOTH carrots and sticks to get 1000s more houses out of the short-term accommodation market,
• Capping rents and abolishing no grounds evictions, in line with all other states
• Introducing minimum standards for all rentals
• Rapidly conversions of empty buildings for homeless accommodation
• Embracing bold evidence-based targets including 5000 social homes a year

Many of these are solutions that BOTH the Greens and Shelter have argued for for years.

Solutions based on the fundamental premise that housing is a human right.

The data shows WA has been treading water on housing for a decade.

Now is the time to shift gears and collaborate to deliver more ambitious evidence-based solutions to the housing crisis that the community and sector are desperately calling for. Thank you for you work.