By Dr Martha Knox Haly
If you lose your house to climate change, there is a 90% chance you will still be living in a tent 5 years later. We all know Australia is in trouble with its housing market. What people may be less aware of, is how much worse it is in Australia’s regional areas affected by natural disasters. According to University of Queensland, 23,000 Australians over the age of 15 have been displaced each year since 2009, by floods, bushfires and other natural disasters. Displacement almost tripled during the 2019-2020 fires, with 65,000 new displacements between July 2019 and February 2020. Destruction of 3,100 homes resulted in long-term displacement of approximately 8,100 people. Indigenous Australians have been disproportionately affected by natural disaster displacement because of 18 per cent of Indigenous Australians, as compared with 1.4% of the non-indigenous populations live in very remote, poorly serviced areas.
AHURI is a national, independent research network addressing housing challenges in Australia. In their March 2025 report ‘described post disaster rebuilding as ‘complex, costly and prolonged’. Just how complex this is, is illustrated by the Bega Valley experience. Mick Brosnan (SBS) (housing and social justice representative for the Sapphire Coast, SJASC), explained that by December 2024, 50 houses out 464 destroyed in the Bega Valley by the 2019 fires, have been rebuilt. In Kangaroo Valley, fire directly impacted approximately 100 properties, or approximately 10% of homes in Kangaroo Valley). Kangaroo Valley reportedly fared a little better on its rebuild rate, only because it is just over two hours drive from Sydney. Skilled trades didn’t have to find temporary accommodation themselves during the course of rebuilding. There is no official data on the rebuild rate, other than that 23 development applications had been approved with Shoalhaven Council by September 2021. By April 2022, just 15% of homes destroyed by the 2019-2020 fires in Victoria had been rebuilt. More than 4000 homes were destroyed in the 2022 floods in Lismore. As of March 2025, more than 600 homes have been bought back, but only 4 homes have been relocated. Families live in pods, tents, cars, caravans, single rooms in a hostel or simply squat.
As a result of climate change, Australians will face concurrent, cascading and convergent disaster events impacting housing availability. In 2022, after the worst recorded floods ever on the East Australian coast, several types of temporary housing were made available by the reconstruction authority. Housing providers recognised that emergency and temporary housing was limited due to a pre-existing surge in mental health issues, domestic violence and housing demand resulting from the pandemic response.
AHURI’s 2025 review highlighted prompt provision of temporary housing after natural disasters, and survivors were grateful for the temporary housing. Still plastic pods were bitterly cold in winter or lacked kitchens. Chronic underinvestment in regional housing meant that temporary solutions became permanent. Over the ensuing years, pod villages experienced surging domestic violence, drugs and substance abuse, as a traumatised homeless population self-medicated. There will be those individuals who judge the displaced as lacking initiative, but consider this might be you and I one day. The National Climate Risk Assessment Report bleakly predicts that 1.5 million Australians will be displaced by rising sea levels by 2050. This is potentially a ten-fold or more increase on current levels of homelessness.
The costs of housing reconstruction have historically been covered by the insurance sector, and disaster responses were handled at state and territory level, with variations across states in the provision of housing. Post-disaster insurance payouts have greatly increased in recent years. Australian general insurers processed 300,000 claims valued at $5.47 billion arising from bushfires, floods and hailstorms in the 2019-20 summer. 302,000 claims worth $7.28 billion were processed as a result of floods in 2022, with a ‘quiet year’ of $1.6 billion in 2023. Low-income, older, retired, or those renting with lower insurance literacy and savings are particularly bearing the brunt of under-insurance and insurer retreat from regional Australia. There is currently no government-backed insurance scheme for natural hazards in Australia. It is noteworthy that 77% of homes had been rebuilt in the two years following the 2009 fires in Victoria, compared with just 15% being rebuilt after the 2019 fires. Natural disaster recovery systems are now less able to fix the damage quickly because the scale of the damage is growing.
In the aftermath of natural disasters, there are quite correctly calls for ‘building back better’. The problem is that ‘building back better’ is expensive. Insurance payouts where they were approved did not cover the full costs of rebuilds after the 2019 fires. Delays occurred at local council level as councils received legal advice to decline development applications that did not meet disaster resilience standards. The costs of insurance payouts and rocketing premiums which will eventually overshoot what all but the very richest can afford. Consider that climate change will impact the entire globe – there will be no where that is risk free. Given these considerations it is unclear whether an insurance industry can exist at all in coming decades.
This leaves the ball for rebuilding squarely in the government’s court. Unfortunately right now NSW Department of Housing only manages construction projects, facilitating the sale of public land to developers, often without mandating a quota for public housing. It does not employ a construction workforce, only maintenance teams. The proportion of households living in social housing in Australia decreased from 4.7% in 2013 to 4.1% in 2024. Homes NSW (which is part of the Department of Communities and Justice) is responsible for repair and construction of affordable social housing, but it does not directly employ construction workers either. Social housing projects have been completed in Rosemeadow, Liverpool, Blackett, West Ryde and Wollongong. The remaining 37 projects are either in construction or planning phase with private or not for profit partners. None of these projects are in Lismore, Cobar, the Gospers Mountain area, Mogo, Quaama or Cobargo, which is where the population was displaced. Homes NSW does interface with disaster recovery through the Housing Recovery Service Program, which provides housing repair grants, temporary caravan accommodation, financial aid and recovery support services, but does not rebuild houses.
The Bega Valley Development Project is being built by Southern Cross Housing (a not for profit) and will provide 97 affordable housing units. Construction will not start till 2026. That is six years after the fire. There is no public housing in Kangaroo Valley. In Mallacoota, the local health district has refurbished 8 holiday cottages to provide housing for 8 displaced patients with chronic health issues, whilst Homes Victoria are managing the build of ten social and affordable dwellings. The compassion and initiative of not for profits and the local health services is commendable. I can’t help thinking that these organisations are being asked to shoulder more of a burden that they should, and that these fragmented efforts do not represent a comprehensive solution.
Countries such as Singapore and France have a very visible public housing sector, as does the city of Vienna. Singapore has achieved a home ownership rate of 90% over the previous sixty years. The Government is currently the developer for 71% of housing, in prior decades it was the developer for 98%of all housing stock. The housing model creates multiracial communities, with parks, playgrounds, health facilities, shopping and schools. The policy of public housing was very deliberately created to avoid property speculation and lack of affordability. Prices on 70% of HDB (Housing Development Board) flats are set at a rate which is affordable for medium income households servicing a mortgage servicing ratio of 25%. The Government very deliberately pursues a policy of keeping house prices stable, with an estimated 16 rounds of price deflation measures between 2009-2023. These measures included increased transaction taxes for investors and foreign buyers, ensuring the right volume of housing supply for emerging households, and tightening lending conditions to avoid speculative loans.
In France 20% of housing stock in each city is allocated for social housing or HLM (habitations à loyer modéré). Approximately 10 million people live in social housing. France’s Construction and Housing Code mandates that social housing must improve the lives of occupants. It has to generate social mixing and improve the living conditions of those who are disadvantaged and on low incomes. A household’s rent is determined by its proximity to an income ceiling that is set by the government. There are still problems with demand exceeding housing supply in France. The French government combats property speculation through the ‘Taxe sur les logements vacants’, a main residence capital gains tax – requiring a property to be occupied for at least five years before capital gains tax exemption is granted. Local authorities have the power to restrict purchase of second housing investments in new builds, prevent property purchases and increase transaction taxes to fund social objectives.
In Vienna the city owns 220,000 social apartments and 200,000 cooperative dwellings built with municipal subsidies, meaning that the majority of housing stock is public(approximately 58%). 78% of Viennese are renters, and 60%of the city population lives in social housing. Rent is strictly capped each year per meter, with indefinite leases which can be passed down through generations. Recently landlords have been allowed to offer three year leases, but only in return for a 20% reduction in rent. Vienna ensures a mixture of social groups by capping applications for a single person at approximately 56,000 Euros annual income. The municipality does not check annual income once a flat is tenanted. The experience of Singapore and Vienna demonstrate that social housing stock needs to represent 60% of more of all housing stock to keep rents and house prices stable, this is a large jump from the calls for Australian social housing to grow to 10% of housing stock.
Once upon a time, State Housing Boards and Commissions did actually build houses. Dr Marcus Spiller described the post war years in Australia as being ‘sharply focused on creating a large social housing sector’. Social housing was not simply the landlord of last resort, it was seen as a crucial part of modernising the Australian economy, being built near ports, energy infrastructure and manufacturing. Dr Spiller explained that the State Housing Boards would build between 10,000 to 20,000 houses a year. Private builders were involved in some instances, but they supplemented the construction workforce of the State Housing Boards.
Large scale public housing construction projects provided a continuous opportunity for apprentices in carpentry, bricklaying, roofing, tiling, plumbing and electrical work. These projects grew several generations of tradespeople and ensured that Australia had an adequate supply of skilled workers. These projects grew the housing stock which also became the basis for a huge jump in Australian home ownership from 35% to 72% in the post war years when governments created the opportunity to buy these properties.
Cameron Murray attributes the shift from governments supporting social housing to private ownership to a devastating piece of political wedging. Labor Housing Minister John Dedman stated ‘the Commonwealth is concerned with providing adequate and good housing for the workers, it is not concerned with making workers into little capitalists.’ Then Dedman was politically wedged by Larry Anthony from the Country Party, who stated that the policy of the present government was to discourage home ownership. To this day the Menzies Institute still refers to John Dedman’s speech as an ‘explicit rejection of the forgotten people’. The problem is that regional disaster zones does not offer opportunities for the private sector. Natural disaster survivors are barely keeping the clothes on their backs, they are certainly not awash with cash to buy houses. Their lived experience demonstrates that without publicly constructed housing, they have become the ‘forgotten’ people in perpetuity.
The introduction of neoliberal microeconomic reform and national competition policy delegitimised the role of the public sector in housing construction, and social housing investment. The Government switched from building public housing stock to commonwealth rental subsidies. The shift was a boon to the private housing construction, which got rid of its main competitor (the government) from the market. It was also the start of Australia’s skills shortages.
The privatisation of the Australian public sector has been repeatedly implicated in the shortfalls of skilled trades workers, because public sector manufacturing used to generate the majority of apprenticeships. Apprenticeships are a long term undertaking, and the Australian construction industry is dominated by small businesses often juggling uncertain cash flows. The Productivity Commission found that 98.5% of the firms working on the 410,602 firms are businesses with less than 20 employees and the proliferation of small private firms has been found to reduce productivity and drive up home construction costs. Again I struggle to see how a typical small plumbing or electrical business is going to address the demand arising from 1.5 million geographically dispersed displaced people. It seems that there is a need for Homes NSW and its inter-state equivalents to start employing, growing and developing their own construction workforce and apprenticeships for deployment in regional areas. This provides local employment opportunities, overcoming the costly business of bringing tradespeople from Sydney to rural areas.
Homes NSW is already looking into prefabricated homes as a quick durable construction solution. Prefabricated homes are made up of factory built components, which are then shipped to site. Plumbing, electrical, insulation, and ventilation aspects can be quality controlled and tested onsite. Prefabrication is also associated with less waste, and designs can accommodate the extremes of climate change related disasters. Non-combustible materials such as colourbond, ember guards, fire resistant insulation, steel beams and fibre cement panels can increase resilience in bushfire prone areas. Continuous tie-down systems, reinforced bracing, impact resistant windows can ensure a house is still standing after cyclones and high wind storms. Local TAFEs can be expanded to incorporate onsite housing fabrication factories which incorporate these construction resilience strategies, which can be a laboratory for innovation and supervised practice for Homes NSW apprentices.
At the moment, Federal and State governments favour a model of generalist business executives, who float from one department to the next. Under conditions of adapting to climate change, executive teams of public sector construction workforces needs to include leaders with technical backgrounds who can actually deliver construction. This will be important for managing a technical workforce of engineers, designers, architects and trades. A shared technical language between executives and front line staff facilitates staff learning, innovation, industrial harmony and performance.
The issue of managed retreat is going to become more important in the future. Australia can take a leaf out the Netherland’s book, where relocation is taken out of the realm of partisan political decision making and made the responsibility of scientists employed by the public sector. In NSW, The NSW Reconstruction Authority has the main responsibility for relocation, in Victoria the responsible agency is Emergency Recovery Victoria, in Queensland it is the Queensland Reconstruction Authority and in Western Australia the responsible agency is the Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES), with federal coordination being conducted by the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA). The workforce and leadership composition of these agencies will need to be augmented with increasing numbers engineers, scientists, geologists and hydrologists to determine appropriate relocation sites.
The technology and institutional structure is already here, and once upon a time, state and federal governments did employ their own construction workforces. It has been done in the past, and needs to be done again. The main barrier is our Governments’ attitude, they just have to start taking responsibility and stop outsourcing their job to the private sector.
Also by Martha:
Taxing mining – will Australians stop shooting themselves in the foot?
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