Australian independents' proposal for a citizens' assembly on housing affordability: the chance the public deserves to consider bolder solutions to the crisis?
Experts can't keep asking politicians to step up and make tough decisions without a vehicle for meaningfully engaging the public
Australia is deep in a housing crisis. The crisis is also political. Citizens and experts alike feel that the government isn’t doing enough to address it. But public discourse about the solutions is mired in misconceptions and stuck on a narrow set of options.
Against this backdrop, the crossbench is calling for a citizens’ assembly on housing affordability.
A citizens’ assembly on housing affordability could open up public discourse about potentially game-changing housing policy reform options that just aren’t getting a lot of political air time or that are steeped in misconceptions because they’re tough to sell or explain in short soundbites. First, giving participant citizens the chance to engage deeply with other potential options on their merits could generate shifts in their opinions. There’s also good reason to believe that in turn, the general public would be receptive to an assembly’s findings.
Experts can’t keep just asking politicians to “step up” and sell “tough policies” that won’t generate returns in polls, where those polls give citizens no opportunity to engage with those policies in any depth; the incentives simply aren’t there if there’s no way of bringing the general public along the journey.
We need to start looking beyond innovative housing solutions to the housing crisis and toward innovative democratic solutions to the political crisis that is at its core.
Australia is deep in a housing crisis
It’s difficult to overstate the national spotlight on Australia’s real and mounting housing crisis.
The statistics are stark. Australian rental affordability has dropped to its worst levels in nearly a decade, with the average household spending a third of its income on rent. The number of properties listed for under $400 per week has halved in the last year. On average, Sydneysiders pay more than half their income towards their mortgage and would take about 12 years to save up enough for a 20% deposit, while the number of new homes forecast to be built plunges yet further.
The public focus is acute. It’s dominating mainstream news. More than 70% of young people believe they’ll never be able to buy a home. Recent polling demonstrated overwhelming receptivity to a range of solutions that aren’t current government policy.
The crisis is also political
The politics are reaching a boiling point. The progressive Albanese government’s proposed Housing Future Fund legislation, which promises 30,000 new homes over 5 years, has been blocked in the Senate by the Greens, who are agitating for a rental freeze, deferring debate for another four months. This grants the Albanese government “the first half of a trigger for an early, double dissolution election.” As one leading pollster recently observed, “of all the problems the Albanese government faces as it enters its second year, housing looms as the most wicked.”
The crossbench is calling for a Citizens’ Assembly on Housing Affordability
It’s against this backdrop that a growing crossbench has called for a Citizens’ Assembly on Housing Affordability.
Australia’s “supersized” crossbench (members of neither major party) currently includes 17 of 151 seats in the House of Representatives and 19 of 76 seats in the Senate, giving them the balance of power in the Senate (and significant influence in the House, given their occupation in many cases of historically conservative seats, for example). Not all of the crossbench has signed onto the proposal.
A citizens’ assembly on housing affordability would involve a representative sample of about 100 Australians meeting on weekends, over a number of months, to study housing affordability closely. They would be given objective briefings and presented with arguments from advocates on all sides, deliberate with each other on the issue and report their recommendations.
Could an assembly on housing affordability actually achieve anything?
Allegra Spender MP’s Twitter announcement garnered a not insignificant amount of attention on the platform (nearly 200k views). One of the more popular comments read: “Say you’re going to do absolutely nothing about this issue without saying you’re going to do absolutely nothing about this issue”. Another reads, “How about the people we pay between $200k and $550k a year do their jobs”. Still others relatedly emphasize the idea that the solutions are already known or obvious, echoing sentiments expressed by several commentators.
These raise extremely fair doubts, which ultimately seem to get in some form at this question: “what, if anything, could a citizens’ assembly achieve?”
But far from being a naïve idea, it’s arguably far more politically attuned than much of the expert commentary that’s calling for the government to “just get on with it,” and implement “tough-sell” policies that won’t generate returns in the polls as they stand.
As long as the government is led by polling of public opinion as polling is currently conducted (with no opportunity for to go deep on issues or deliberate), it has no incentive to do anything that diverges from this. Public opinion about the (complex) solutions to the crisis needs to change if we can rationally expect the government to change its position. Without a transparent conversation that allows people to spend more than 30 seconds considering any given reform on this complex issue, it’s going to be extremely tough to generate these kinds of shifts.
An assembly could create a politically viable pathway toward bolder reform.
This argument for an assembly in this case relies on two things being true:
1. The citizens participating in the assembly may actually shift their views on potential solutions to the housing crisis, given the chance to go deep on issues and delve into a range of evidence. Put another way, they might come up with something different from traditional political wisdom and/or polling dictates about how the public will react. Where an assembly is only advisory, why bother running it if it’s just going to spit out what you could have learned from an opinion poll?
2. The broader public is receptive to its findings. At the end of the day, the government isn’t answerable to the participating citizens but to the broader public. This condition certainly isn’t a fait accompli. But if enough supporters are willing to throw their weight behind the process, it’s not inconceivable in this political climate where the current solutions are so obviously inadequate that people will get behind it.
1. A citizens’ assembly is likely to create openness to bold solutions that aren’t currently on the political table
Let me first be absolutely clear that the “answer” in a deliberation is whatever answer people arrive it. The soundness of the answer under the right political and procedural conditions flows from the integrity of the deliberative process. But it can be said ex ante that the answer is usually, after deliberation, “more evidence-based and reflective of the merits of the major policy arguments” and we can gesture at least at a wide range of policies that might be considered more evidence-based on a given issue.
Deliberative processes engender this shift by giving citizens a chance to go deep on issues, hear a range of balanced arguments and deliberate with each other somewhat separately from the ordinary pressures of a 24/7 news cycle, the politics of soundbites and three-year parliamentary terms. Time and again, the opinions of participants in deliberative processes change, often by tens of percentage points.
But it’s true that even if government policy is at odds with the evidence, the weight of public opinion is certainly not always at odds with it. Sometimes deliberation will just reinforce public opinion. For a long time, for example, the public were calling for greater action on climate change, informed by the largely unanimous calls of experts, while the Morrison government wasn’t doing much. And if this were true in the case of housing, while an assembly that has binding power would advance the situation, an advisory assembly might not do much, instead just reinforcing what the government and the broader public already knew.
Is an assembly on housing likely to generate shifts in public opinion? I’d say there’s a very good chance.
The government is advancing some strong evidence-based policies:
The government is seeking to legislate a Housing Australia Future Fund, a $10bn investment fund with dividends (at least $500m a year, as a “floor, not a ceiling”) used to build social and affordable housing. It believes the fund would create 30,000 homes in the first five years.
Under pressure from the Greens, it pledged on Saturday that it would establish a two-year $2bn housing accelerator fund to build new social housing stock.
Labor also promised but hasn’t yet legislated a shared equity scheme in the lead-up to the last election.
Last month’s federal budget included more than $5.5bn for Commonwealth Rent Assistance (an income supplement for people renting in the private rental market or community housing) and $1.7bn for the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement (which delivers money to states and territories to improve Australians’ access to secure and affordable housing across the housing spectrum).
But dramatically greater action needs to be taken and there are a lot more solutions out there that aren’t getting political traction
I set out below a few of the major policy proposals that have been put forward by experts and some observations about current public attitudes towards these proposals, with a view to demonstrating how they might diverge. The idea is that this leaves room for time and fact-based deliberation to shift opinions (I might add, from all positions on the political spectrum).
I don’t claim that the evidence or policies below are necessarily the best, but these examples are illustrative.
Dramatically increase (e.g., double) the size of the Future Fund
Evidence: Grattan Institute has argued that the government should double the size of the fund (acknowledging that it has increased) and guarantee that the funding will flow irrespective of returns. Many commentators have seriously questioned the government’s maths on 30k homes a year, and argued that the amount of the fund is grossly inadequate
Polling/public awareness: 41% of respondents said the fund was “about right”, 9% “too much” and a further 20% were “unsure”. Only 30% said the amount was “too little,” ultimately a clear minority of respondents
Ramp up federal incentives (e.g., direct cash payments, supported by a system of performance benchmarks) for local councils to approve higher-density housing (including apartments and medium density)
Evidence: Local land-use restrictions are a central driver of stagnating supply. The NSW Productivity Commission recently identified planning restrictions as the “main reason” for the “stubborn” persistence of apartment prices above costs of supply in Sydney for decades. Some economists have gone as far as to suggest that “the blame lies firmly with local councils and state governments.” The Center for Independent Studies supported its 2021 recommendations in relation to federal incentives with reference to major comparable programs and proposals in the UK (a New Homes Bonus paid to local authorities in England) and the US (the Unlocking Possibilities Program proposal in the US)
Polling/public awareness: In a recent ANU poll (cited in a 2018 Grattan Report), less than 50% of respondents supported relaxing planning restrictions (while more than 80% strong supported or supported first home owner grants, for comparison)
Specifically, apply these incentives to areas of highest demand, including closer to the CBD and around transport hubs
Evidence: The NSW Productivity Commission and Grattan, for example, have highlighted the insufficiency of supply in our cities’ “inner and middle rings” and close to transport hubs
Polling: There seems to be a public perception that increased density in these areas of high demand need not be part of the solution. NSW Productivity Commissioner Peter Achterstraat has observed that “everyone we talk to in focus groups and things like that, say, ‘Look, we want our children to be able to…have a quarter-acre block, walk to the station and pay no more than a million dollars. We live in Lilyfield’” (to which he responds, “That’s not gonna happen”)
Subsidize rental cooperatives
Evidence: Nordic countries have implemented strong cooperative programs, such that Sweden’s housing cooperatives comprise 22% of the total housing stock, 15% in Norway (and a whopping 40% in the capital, Oslo)
Polling/public awareness: I haven’t been able to find specific evidence of public opinion in relation to cooperatives, but as this journalist opens her story on cooperatives, it’s fair to say that “cooperative housing is relatively unknown in Australia”
Subsidize other innovative models of business and development, design and construction
Evidence: Professor Mathew Aitchison argues that “the industry lacks capacity to build as many dwellings at the market needs or the extra 30,000 social and affordable homes the government says the fund will deliver in the first five years.” He cites development models such as rent-to-buy and housing-as-a service models of building and ownership and prefabricated, modular or industrialised house-building systems
Polling/public awareness: Again, it’s difficult to find specific polling, but Professor Aitchison highlights the extremely singular or “flat” nature of the public discourse, centred as it is on supply
It’s also worth emphasizing that a majority of Australians currently support policies that are highly contested among experts with respect to their impact on affordability, including rent freezes, a migration cap and allowing access to super to buy a home. Similarly, the evidence suggests that removing negative gearing and removing/reducing the capital gains tax discount would reduce housing prices between 1 and 4 percent, and Chris Richardson observes that this reduction is “massively shy of where public opinion thinks it is.”
So would this just be an attempt to ask citizens to rubber-stamp a particular set of expert views? Why not create an expert taskforce?
First, as noted above, in a citizens’ assembly or jury, citizens decide. Put most strongly, you might say that they engender shifts in opinion towards policy that is informed by evidence.
But expertise only gets us so far. The question becomes, “evidence of what outcomes, and why should we prefer these outcomes?” Some policies might slightly decrease affordability in the market at large but increase affordability for particularly vulnerable members of the community. Big spending on housing ultimately reduces budget available for other critical national needs. Some policies will shift greater burden onto state and local governments, while others will favour national government. For any given policy, there will be winners and losers. These questions are fundamentally normative; there is no right or wrong technical answer. They’re precisely the kinds of questions that should be decided democratically.
A report authored by the Center of Independent Studies in 2021, reflects well the highly political and value-laden nature of these issues; even CIS, as a reputable policy think tank that emphasizes the value of technical expertise, asserts that “the problems of state and local government policy reflect underlying social values that need discussion. We need to care more about renters and young home buyers and defer less to wealthy homeowners’ fear of change. That may require a national conversation led by the federal government.”
2. The broader public could be receptive to the recommendations of an assembly
Two in three Australians (68%) disagree that the government is doing enough to tackle the housing crisis. Commentators across the political spectrum are speaking about crisis and urgency.
Our current predicament is the result of decades of neglect, and it is becoming clear to the public that at least from a purely calculated perspective, politicians are not incentivised to make decisions with a view to long-term, multi-decade consequences. As one economist has noted, pretty much every major housing affordability policy going back to the 1960s has been about pumping up demand.
We’re experiencing a unique moment of questioning the status quo in Australian politics and there is a clear public appetite for greater integrity in politics.
Under conditions of major public disenchantment and political gridlock in Belgium, the civil society-initiated G1000 assembly attracted strong public support. In Ireland, a similarly “bottom-up”, civil society-initiated citizens’ assembly process ultimately set Ireland on a path toward institutionalisation of deliberation in certain cases.
It is always worth caveating that the academic evidence on how deliberative processes are received and trusted by the general public is very scant and mixed. In Australia, the evidence we have is promising. Even without “advocacy” of the process, around 60% of an Australian sample presented with a short description of mini-publics said they would probably or definitely support the idea. Thirty percent were on the fence, saying they needed a little more information/evidence that it works.
But ultimately, measuring attitudes to institutional change isn’t the same as measuring technical policy outcomes. Attitudes toward institutional change depend dramatically on the movements calling for the change. If nothing is invested by supporters of deliberation in explaining it and underscoring its benefits, of course it isn’t likely to enjoy the success it could. Just like any other proposed institutional change (not least female suffrage, to cite one major example), advocates will encounter resistance.
It's not a panacea but we don’t have much to lose and we have an enormous amount to gain
Unless the government binds itself to the assembly’s recommendations, the recommendations would remain advisory. If the government doesn’t fund it, civil society could step up. To objections on cost (often in the order of ~$1M for large assemblies), it’s also worth recalling the hundreds of millions we spend on Royal Commissions into major issues, and the hundreds of millions that homelessness, the tip of the housing insecurity iceberg, costs Australia every year (not to mention the profound human cost).
The assembly would give the constituency to whom the parliament is ultimately accountable a chance to engage with bolder reforms that might otherwise remain off the political table.
We desperately need bolder action.
What do we have to lose?