Housing stress in Australia is reaching new heights this year amid the loss of affordable homes for low and middle income earners.
The National Rental Affordability Scheme aimed at providing government subsidised, below-market rent prices was scrapped during Scott Morrison's leadership with the program coming to a close in 2026.
This means 36,000 affordable properties will be removed by 2026, with 6,600 of those properties phased out in this year alone.
The national spokesperson for the Everybody's Home campaign, Maiy Azize, described the important assistance this scheme has offered to renters.
"The idea was to subsidise some affordable rental accommodation for people on low to middle income earners so police, nurses, ambulance workers, people like that who are being priced out of the rental market and it gave incentives to developers, community housing organisations, private landlords, to rent out homes at below the market rate."
The Albanese government, which campaigned to make social housing a priority, has currently pledged to build 20,000 social homes over the next five years.
But Ms Azize says that this is nowhere near enough to address the issue at hand.
"What we need is for them to really scale up their ambitions. So this government is promising to build 20,000 social homes in the next 5 years. That is a real drop in the ocean compared to what the need is - the need is 500,000 homes across the country. So we really need them to scale up their ambition to match the scale of this crisis. And you look at the National Rental Affordability scheme winding down and you see that we're not even going to be building enough homes to make up for the ones that we're losing as this scheme closes so we're just going to be playing catch up forever at this rate."
