Australian home ownership: past reflections, future directions

Broadly, the argument of our research is that the institutional environment framing the Australian housing system in the period between 1945 and the 1970s created a window of opportunity for rapid growth of ownership to record levels. [...] International observers at the time said of the Australian housing system, ‘Australians are among the best housed people in the world and they are perhaps the most equally housed’ (Donnison 1967: 21) and the era provided the basis for the notion of ‘the Australian dream’. [...] The first of these change periods, precipitating many subsequent ones, was largely an economic change in the performance of the economy, as the governance and economic model that prevailed in the 1940s to the mid-1960s began to show its limitations in an increasingly competitive international environment, and both unemployment and inflation increased substantially in the 1970s. [...] 2.7 Housing supply While much of the focus of the housing affordability debate centres on the cost of renting or purchasing properties, in a market-driven housing system such as the Australian one—and many of the comparator countries in Section 4—these costs are determined by the interaction of demand and supply factors, both of which are shaped by the institutional environment. [...] 2.10 Land and the remaking of the city The second half of the 1980s and the early 1990s should be seen as a transformative period in Australian cities.