What an outcome on holiday letting – it’s a bit like offering $1,000 for a horse and getting it for $500.
Yeeha! Happy as I am about the headline outcome, Recommendation 4 by the IPC commissioners suggests opening up more land – the Ballina-isation of Byron.
This sends shivers down my spine, especially when I heard a developer promising to clear forest for suburbs because, ‘people here have a right to housing too’.
And the chorus is joined by well-meaning selfless and sensible housing advocates who jump on the linguistic bandwagon of a ‘right to housing’.
But housing, like health and many other needs, is not a right in any real sense. We might want it to be, but in Australia, as a question of law, it just isn’t. Housing in Australia is either a commodity or a benefit. Or more accurately, a commodity and a benefit, given the tax treatment of capital gains and negative gearing. That’s why we always talk of a housing market – just another widget to be part of the ebb and flow of supply and demand.
There are all sorts of rights – aspirational rights, internationally recognised rights, and human rights to name a few. But they are all worth nothing more than a limp lettuce leaf, unless they are legally enforceable. Housing is a classic example of a non-right in any legally big-stick way.
There are a number of international treaties that Australia has signed which enshrine a right to a roof over our head. For example, Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, specifically hallows a right to ‘adequate housing’.
Well may you ask – if it is internationally recognised as a right, and Australia is a signatory, then why is there actually no actionable remedy for housing? Because, in the end, an international agreement, even one to which we are a signatory, is aspirational only unless it is embedded in specific Australian law. And not one parliament in Australia has done that with housing – even those states with a bill of rights.
It does not have to be this way. Many countries, to some extent or other, have legislated a right to housing.
The idea of making a government legally accountable for its citizens’ right to housing is not radical and it has led to the development of some of the most effective anti-homelessness systems in the world – like those in Finland, France and Scotland. Even in the UK, there are statutory responsibilities on local councils for housing.
So, there it is, an aspirational right, blowing in the wind past the lighthouse, just wanting to be butterfly-net caught and made an enforceable right. But don’t hold your breath.
And this means that many people in Australia and on the Far North Coast don’t have access to affordable, secure housing, and are often evicted into homelessness because our lopsided laws don’t protect them.
Accepting that housing is subject to the rules of supply and demand, and is no more a right than freedom from hunger, I have been diligently following the debate on housing in the mainstream press and academic landscape. The obsession is exclusively with supply.
The song is so well sung now, I know every chord by heart – open up more land (repeated ad nauseam), change the tax/planning laws, squish people in tighter and higher, government assistance for first home buyers and more affordable, social and supported housing. This is mimicked in our local area, with housing over car parks, new estates, higher density, mooted empty-house tax and maybe holiday letting crackdowns. The latter two are great initiatives.
But there is an elephant in the room. It is supply and demand. How about a bit of focus on demand for a change? Nationally, the situation is absurd. Australia will experience the biggest two-year population surge in its history, with an extra 700,000 migrants across this financial year and next.
When you factor in natural growth, this is a 900,000 plus jump in the number of newbies needing housing. I see little debate about this, because so often population limitation is associated with the hard racist right. But if we cannot house our current population, what will it be like in two years’ time? Logically, if we had zero population growth, then the housing crises surely would level off.
I hear the argument for immigration equating to economic growth (read massive Ponzi scheme), but does it really make sense to have more people fighting over limited housing stock?
I guess demand is reduced as prices go up and no one can afford to rent, but that’s a brutal recipe for inequality and sorrow. (Of course, I’ve still got a copy of Small is Beautiful on my bookshelf).
What does this mean for Byron? I fear we are going to continue to get swamped, no matter what we do. I’ve written before that you cannot build your way out of that gentrification, and can now add that Byron cannot develop its way out of national population growth.
Just trying to is likely to kill the goose that lays the golden egg – our space, our beauty, our greenery. More social housing for the homeless, less Airbnb – sure. But that’s it. Perhaps, in the end, we just need to get better at resisting.
♦ David Heilpern is a former magistrate and Dean of Law at SCU
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
