Hal Pawson, Vivienne Milligan and Judith Yates: Housing policy in Australia: a case for system reform
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Hal Pawson, Vivienne Milligan and Judith Yates: Housing policy in Australia: a case for system reform Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 368 pp. ISBN 978-981-15-0780-9 Julie Lawson1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
This important book synthesizes a substantial body of work on housing trends and policy developments in twenty-first century Australia and outlines key directions for reform. It is a concise resource for politicians, policy makers and advocates interested in addressing affordability and access concerns, and an essential guide for students of Australian urban and housing policy studies. ‘Housing Policy in Australia’ also provides a launch pad for further exploration and explanatory research. Readers can use this book to go beyond official policy reports, ask more fundamental questions and postulate causal theories explaining Australia’s dynamic housing system, its consequences and future prospects. Australia has a strong tradition in urban studies, economic geography, sociology and cultural studies, which is lively, ready and able to inform Australia’s contemporary policy challenges. In recent decades, Australian housing policy research has flourished. With strategic investment by Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI), cross disciplinary research teams have co-operated across multiple universities, undertaking multimethod analyses of housing and to a lesser degree, urban conditions. Together with policy stakeholders, researchers have generated a wealth of evidence based policy proposals. Disappointingly, this research effort has not led to substantial policy reform or major innovation. Indeed, since the 1990s, the Australian housing system has not performed well in delivering accessible, affordable and sustainable living conditions. As home ownership rates have declined, more households have been pushed into private rental housing or long commutes, exacerbating socio-tenurial inequality, housing stress and car dependence. This new book on Australian housing policy concisely brings a selection of Australia’s research effort and experience to a wider audience, but it does more than this too. It outlines an agenda for reform. As seasoned AHURI researchers, Pawson, Milligan and Yates (2020) focus on the role of policy within the broader ‘housing systems’ lens, drawing on ideas from Basset and Short’s classic text (1980), focusing on ‘institutions’ (Pierre 2011) as localised by Burke (2012) and suggesting that structural causes are at work. The authors’ theoretical discussion of Australia’s structural causes could have drawn more heavily on international comparative debates on varieties of residential capitalism, financialization and welfare * Julie Lawson [email protected] 1
Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
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regimes. Yet these theoretical debates are not the authors’ main source of inspiration. When speaking to policy makers governing Australia’s housing system they restate the empirical evidence. The book’s ten ch
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