In short:

Provide access to secure housing options for all Australians, including greater housing affordability for home buyers and renters

• More social housing
• Less investor tax breaks
• Slower migration

Background

Housing is a fundamental need and human right. Perversely, successive Australian federal governments have encouraged the 'financialisaton' of housing, with homes now treated as an investment asset rather than a shelter in which to live and/or raise a family.

Unlike the Liberals, Nationals, Labor, Greens, One Nation and Teals, SAP tackles both the major supply and demand-side issues to sustainably solve the housing crisis, stop over-development, and protect our local environments and communities.

We need affordable housing, the sustainable way.

"Australian rents have risen 2.5 times faster than wages over the past five years, pushing rental affordability to record lows, according to new analysis by property research firm Cotality. National rents climbed 43.9 per cent in the five years to September 2025, compared with wage growth of 17.5 per cent over the same period." ABC

Full background below.

Related policy

• Economy
• Foreign Ownership
• Planning & Development
• Population & Immigration (Australia)
• Taxation

Policy Objective

Provide access to secure housing options for all Australians, including greater housing affordability for home buyers and renters, while striving for relatively stable house prices. Housing affordability should achieve the following urgent targets:

• Social (public or community) housing – A collective 10 per cent social housing target across all new residential developments
• Housing affordability – Affordable housing rent schemes to be measured as a maximum of 30 per cent of average household income for a region, not simply (say) 20 per cent below the region’s market rate
• Home ownership – Return overall home ownership to at least 70 per cent of all Australians(1)

Policy Actions (Federal)

To support this objective, Sustainable Australia Party will:

• Remove the 50 per cent capital gains tax discount on taxable Australian property (non-principal place of residence), with existing arrangements to be grandfathered(2)
• Abolish negative gearing on taxable Australian property, with existing arrangements to be grandfathered(2)

“The [Reserve] Bank has always held the view that the combination of negative gearing and concessional capital gains tax combines to encourage essentially speculative investment in property...You don’t increase affordability by giving people more money to spend on housing." MacroBusiness

"Australia’s banks have also expanded into massive building societies that prioritise residential housing loans above productive enterprises. In 1990, businesses comprised around two-thirds of all bank loans, with mortgages accounting for only about one-quarter. Thirty-five years later, the ratio has flipped, with more than two-thirds of bank loans for housing and barely one-third for business." MacroBusiness

"It makes other investors look at our industry. We've gone through a point where no-one really wanted to invest into livestock heavily [in part due to Australia's misallocation of investment capital into housing speculation and away from productive industries like manufacturing, agriculture, IT, etc, which also leads to increasing foreign ownership of Australia's key resources], and this changes the game." ABC News

"Five of the 10 most valuable companies on the Australian Securities Exchange are banks: ANZ, CBA, National Australia Bank, Westpac, and Macquarie Group. It’s a stark contrast to the American sharemarket, where innovative technology companies take out the top seven positions: Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google owner Alphabet, Facebook owner Meta and Broadcom. Productivity growth is booming in the tech-savvy US and stagnant in Australia... In 1991, Australia’s home ownership rate was approximately 5% higher than it is today, homes cost about three times the average income (compared to eight times today), and household debt was 70% of income instead of the current 180%. Australia’s banks also lent two-thirds to businesses and only one-quarter to mortgages. Australia’s economy would be more balanced and productive if it channelled capital into businesses rather than into inflating home values. In this regard, Australia’s $11.6 trillion housing stock is a gross misallocation of capital." MacroBusiness

• Exempt Australians renting out up to one room in their home (primary place of residence) from being subject to capital gains tax liability, in order to increase supply of available rooms to rent
• Slow population growth then stabilise Australia’s population size as soon as practicable, including by lowering Australia's permanent immigration program from the current record of over 200,000 per annum back to a cap of 70,000 per annum, being Australia's average annual permanent intake level during the twentieth century (also see Population & Immigration (Australia) policy)
• Ban further foreign (majority) ownership and limit future foreign investment to a maximum of 25 per cent of any Australian residential housing or commercial property, or land for residential housing or commercial development
• Increase Foreign Investment Review Board scrutiny of and penalties for breaches of foreign purchase rules
• Manage bank lending practices to better control the supply of housing credit, including appropriate loan serviceability (interest rate) buffers, and the banning of interest-only housing loans and those above a loan to value ratio (LVR) of 90 per cent

"A prudent authorised deposit-taking institution (ADI) [arising from lending secured by mortgages] would monitor exposures by LVR bands over time... APRA has not formally defined ‘high LVR lending’, but experience shows that LVRs above 90 per cent clearly expose an ADI to a higher risk of loss." APRA Prudential Practice Guide

• Phase out provisions allowing Self-Managed Superannuation Funds to borrow for investment in real estate
• Develop better quality aged, community and home care facilities and standards (also see Ageing policy)

Policy Actions (State)

To support this objective, Sustainable Australia Party will:

• Ensure a minimum 10% affordable housing(3) is integrated into all new significant residential developments through a process of inclusionary zoning

SAP means genuinely affordable (a maximum of 30 per cent of a region’s average gross household income, not simply 20 per cent below the region’s market rate) according to the housing stress test(3), which many so-called "affordable housing" schemes in practice are not: "Across the country, affordable housing programs [run by state governments] are meant to offer rent below market rate for low-to-moderate income households that make too much for social housing but not enough for the private market... The rental asking price of many of the affordable homes currently advertised would also require tenants to part with more than 30% of their income." The Guardian

• Significantly increase investment in social housing (public or community), through both public(4) and community(5) housing, with a collective 10 per cent social housing target across all new residential developments. This should include more rent-to-buy options(6)

"Just 3 per cent of the total dwellings available for rent in Australia are social housing. By contrast, they make up 16 per cent in the UK, and 7 per cent across the entire OECD." The New Daily

• Support government acquisition and/or long-term leasing of foreign-owned vacant housing, including high-rise apartments, to increase affordable, social, and community housing supply
• Reduce land banking by requiring timely development of vacant (unimproved) land, to increase housing supply and affordability
• Reform tenancy laws to offer greater renters’ rights including:
  • Longer standard rental tenure
  • Longer notice for eviction
  • Greater ability to keep pets
  • Greater ability to make minor renovations including picture hangers
  • Removal of ‘no-fault’ termination from residential leases so that tenants have more security and stability. This will mean there will only be four situations in which a tenant can be removed from their home:
    1. Sale of the property
    2. Major renovations
    3. Failure to meet tenancy conditions including rent payments
    4. Owner wants to move into their property
• Support a ‘Right to Rent’ plan allowing homeowners whose homes have been foreclosed due to major market corrections to stay in their homes at a fair market rent for up to five years
• Give owners corporations and local governments more right to impose restrictions on short-stay (generally less than 30 days) rental accommodation
• Where the federal government does not immediately ban further foreign ownership, increase state taxes on future foreign purchases of residential and commercial land/property as follows:
  • 10% stamp duty surcharge (above standard rate)
  • 10% annual land tax
  • 10% annual vacancy tax (on property’s full capital improved value)
• Offer residential property buyers the option of paying current stamp duties or an annual land tax(7)
• Expand existing anti-money laundering legislation (Anti-Money Laundering and Counter Terrorism Financing Act 2006) to accountants, lawyers and real estate agents to help prevent foreign and local crime-related money from entering the real estate market

"Australia’s hot property market is an attractive haven for criminals, with estimates that billions of dollars of dirty money is being laundered through residential property." MacroBusiness

"AUSTRAC has warned that laundering the proceeds of crime through property purchases can drive up prices and keep legitimate buyers out of the market…" MacroBusiness

• Only after the above Federal and State policies are implemented:
  • Abolish first home buyer grants
  • Allow Australians to access a portion of their superannuation to put a deposit on their first home
• Where environmentally appropriate, create a 'Natural and sustainable housing' permit framework to allow for eco-villages, tiny (small) houses, off-grid houses, including houses built from natural methods (also see Planning & Development policy)

Background

Housing is a fundamental need and human right. Perversely, successive Australian federal governments have encouraged the 'financialisaton' of housing, with homes now treated as an investment asset rather than a shelter in which to live and/or raise a family.

“Australia stands out for its real estate that makes up almost 53% of the country’s personal wealth, ahead of the United Kingdom and far ahead of the other markets. In the United States, the proportion is 30%... The proportion of wealth held in cash and deposits is the lowest in Australia at just above 10%, only half as much as in Switzerland, Singapore and the UK." UBS

Unlike the Liberals, Nationals, Labor, Greens, One Nation and Teals, SAP tackles both the major supply and demand-side issues to sustainably solve the housing crisis, stop over-development, and protect our local environments and communities.

While urgently providing more public and other social housing for our most needy, we need more focus on the root cause of Australia's housing affordability crisis, being government-engineered hyper-demand (capital gains tax and negative gearing tax concessions for property speculation, foreign ownership, rapid population growth, lax bank lending regulations, etc), rather than chase our tails with ever-increasing and environmentally destructive hyper-supply.

Dearer residential property and land does not create national wealth. It simply creates a society of haves and have-nots, increases the cost of living and doing business, and retards the capacity of individuals, families and banks to invest in wealth-generating small businesses and other economic enterprises. This collectively starves the broader Australian economy of capital.

"Land is a key input cost for most businesses. So when costs are inflated, it reduces the competitiveness of industry, making it harder for Australia to compete abroad. The associated higher housing costs also places upward pressure on wages. For decades, resource allocation has been channelled away from the tradable sector and infrastructure investment towards the financial sector, as home buyers have taken on ever-bigger mortgages as they chased house prices higher...Australia’s housing obsession has also starved productive sectors of the economy of credit. At the heart of the problem are Australia’s unique mix of tax concessions." MacroBusiness

Importantly, we have a one-off opportunity to greatly lower population growth / demand, and still ensure a sustainable housing industry with healthy construction opportunities over several decades. But we must act now if we are to transition the construction industry to a sustainable footing.

Under our policies, Australia would still grow from its present ~27 million to stabilise under 30 million by 2050. We have inbuilt growth in the system due to natural increases (excess of births over deaths) being currently at around 150,000 per year. This will add up to 3 million over the next few decades before stabilising by 2050. At an average of 2.6 people per household in Australia, that growth still requires well over 1 million houses to be built – or around 10 Canberras! Also, due to extreme housing unaffordability, many adults are sharing or living with parents and others, but could create a new household to be constructed if affordability improved via more stable house prices.

Further, an ageing population is also an economic opportunity for housing construction, estimated to require an increase in one-person households in NSW alone of around 70 per cent, or 260,000, by 2040. That would extrapolate to another 1 million homes nationally.

Finally, if housing (land) affordability improves, people will have more money to spend on improvements (architecture, painting, landscape gardening, etc). This will all keep the housing construction industry busy, while shielding them from the ever-increasing business costs (including road congestion) that come with rapid population growth.

With Australia’s population still growing and ageing, under our policies we will still need much more housing. This is a once-off opportunity for a sustainable transition and to protect the industry and broader economy from a very big construction crash down the track.

We need affordable housing, the sustainable way.

Sound familiar?:

Footnotes:

1. Home ownership fell from a peak of 73% in 1966 to 70% in 2006, to 67% at the time of the 2021 Census.
2. This would only relate to capital gains and negative gearing after the policy comes into legislation. Capital gains and negative gearing made before the legislation could still be discounted.
3. Affordable housing is defined as housing that is provided at a rental price point that is affordable to low and moderate income tenants (based on median household income statistics), at or below 30% of gross household income (the "housing stress" test).
4. Government owned and operated affordable housing with rent capped at 25-30 per cent of household income.
5. Not-for-profit owned and operated affordable housing with rent capped at 25-30 per cent of household income.
6. Also see Everybody's Home.
7. State stamp duties are typically around 5%, whereas an annual land tax would likely be around .5%. A choice would benefit some buyers and the economy in several ways: With a lower total purchase price, the land tax option would improve housing affordability (market entry) for first home buyers, improve labour mobility by encouraging workers to relocate closer to employment, and encourage some people (e.g. empty nesters and short-to-medium-term movers) to more cost-effectively move to housing that better suits their needs.