Reforming Australia’s housing sector for equity, access and innovation
Australia’s housing system has become increasingly homogenised around the standard mortgage model. The overwhelming majority of households that achieve secure tenure do so through 25–30 year mortgage contracts, underwritten by stable, full-time employment and intergenerational transfers of wealth. Policy reinforces this pathway as the primary, and often the only, legitimate route to housing security.
This narrow foundation creates three systemic problems. First, it excludes a growing share of households whose economic circumstances do not align with the “ideal borrower” profile: single parents, older women, renters with strong payment histories, gig-economy workers, Indigenous and culturally diverse households, and recent migrants without conventional credit footprints. Second, it channels institutional capital into speculative, high-yield property markets, concentrating finance in projects designed for wealth extraction rather than affordability retention or community benefit. Third, it crowds out tenure diversity, treating co-operatives, community land trusts, shared equity, and other atypical models as marginal, transitional, or administratively anomalous.
The result is a monocultural housing finance regime that equates security with private mortgage ownership and regards all other tenure forms as secondary. International experience demonstrates that this is not inevitable. In countries such as Canada, Austria, Singapore, and parts of the United States, governments have deliberately diversified housing finance ecosystems, creating statutory recognition, public finance intermediaries, and capital markets designed to support co-operative and community-led housing. Australia has yet to make this shift, leaving its housing market unusually narrow in both tenure and finance models. It is against this backdrop that the following analysis sets out the systemic barriers that inhibit the growth of atypical housing and finance models in Australia, grouped into four domains: Legal and Regulatory, Finance and Capital Markets, Institutional and Governance, and Market Dynamics and Normative Biases.
To understand the reforms needed, we examined the challenges associated with the uptake and utilisation of alternative finance and housing models, models that would aide and advance housing access for vulnerable groups. The barriers can be grouped into four domains:
- Legal and Regulatory
- Finance and Capital Markets
- Institutional and Governance
- Market Dynamics and Normative Biases