Abstract
This chapter charts the evolving policy and political context for urban planning and housing provision in Australia. The focus is on a shifting dialectic between government attempts to regulate urban development whilst supporting the private housing market. Four key policy episodes are highlighted in the first section of the chapter. These are early settlement and land and housing speculation; the post-Federation era of government intervention in housing provision; the twin movements of environmentalism and neoliberalism from the 1980s onwards; and, the re-emergence of national level concern over housing affordability from around the turn of the new millennium. The second section of the chapter outlines contemporary approaches to housing and urban policy, in part, through various inclusionary planning experiments. Potential lessons from the Australian experience in the light of the overarching housing challenges identified in Chap. 2 are highlighted in conclusion. This historically informed analysis suggests that contemporary approaches to urban planning and the housing market in Australia do reflect a certain path dependency in responding to the wider challenges to housing (rising inequality, demographic and environmental change and the structure of urban life) as discussed throughout this book.
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Notes
- 1.
Under international European law, colonial possession of country was lawful only if the land was uninhabited, won through war or battle and/or if a treaty was agreed between the colonisers and Indigenous people. That none of these three conditions held in relation to British colonisation of Australia reflected the dehumanising way in which Europeans viewed the Aboriginal people as native occupants rather than owners (see Russell 2005; Wensing and Porter 2015).
- 2.
Modelled on the US Low Income Housing Tax Credit scheme, Australia’s NRAS offered $100,000 in Commonwealth and State tax credits over 10 years, provided that units were rented to an eligible household at 20 % below market rents for the decade, after which period the affordable obligation ceased.
- 3.
The leasehold system in the ACT dates from its establishment as the national capital and was intended to reduce the potential for land speculation in the capital’s development.
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Gurran, N., Bramley, G. (2017). Housing, Property Politics and Planning in Australia. In: Urban Planning and the Housing Market. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46403-3_9
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