And doesn’t a whole generation or more of young people trying to buy housing know it! So much for the idea that you can be anyone and get anywhere in this country with a good education and job. Don’t the millions of Australians living in high-cost rentals, poorly protected by second-rate residential tenancy laws, know it. A growing number of them will spend all their lives in rental housing. The legal regime needs drastic renovation, and the ridiculous social stigma against renting as a form of housing tenure should end. Don’t those on waiting lists for desperately needed social housing know it. The wait can be decades-long. Don’t women fleeing violence in their own homes – sleeping in cars, often with children – know it. There’s not enough emergency housing for them. Don’t those living with mental ill health know it – for how can you be right in your head without a roof over it? Don’t more than 120,000 homeless people know it – including those regularly and sometimes repeatedly released into homelessness by prisons, mental health institutions, and government child protection agencies (among others). Don’t First People know it – for the continuing injustices of colonisation mean they are affected by the housing disaster far more than any other group, and in their own Country over which they have never ceded sovereignty.

The foundation of a housing system that puts profit before people is the idea that land is to be valued as a commodity for investment rather than as a place for a home. This idea is part of the Australian nation’s creation story. It was brought here by settler colonialists, who ensured that it stayed as the primary mode for implementing the colonial project.

One of them was Joseph Tice Gellibrand who came to take land from traditional owners in the earliest days of Victorian colonisation not far from my home in Balnarring on the Mornington Peninsula. The historical records show that in 1836 he landed a ship at nearby Sandy Point, in the traditional lands of the Bunurong/Boon Wurrung people, with hundreds of sheep and walked north-westerly towards Port Phillip Bay. It was the height of summer in January and the party were hot and thirsty. They nearly died but found water near a settlement of about a hundred ‘native huts’ within the wide elbow of a creek in Tuerong just north of Balnarring. Early European maps depict open plains nearby, doubtless produced by firestick farming, so that hunting could take place. The existence of so many huts explodes the common myth that First Peoples did not have physical settlements. But that is not my point. I want to contrast Gellibrand’s idea of land with that of the traditional owners.

First Peoples such as the Bunurong/Boon Wurrung count among the oldest continuous human cultures on earth. Their land was (is, and always will be) the spiritual foundation of their collective existence. It was their home in the fullest sense of that word. Under their culture, land was respected and nurtured as a vital life force. First Peoples today call this ‘caring for Country’. A hundred huts suggest that two hundred-plus people lived there. Important ceremonial and burial places were likely nearby. This human settlement was underpinned by a system of traditional land law that regulated how the huts were arranged in the space and how the community interacted with the surrounding area. The land was owned by and for the whole community. It was sustainably utilised for hunting, gathering, medicines, mining, making tools and cultural artefacts, trading, and in many other productive ways. The community had an economy and understood notions of wealth and value. But this was not the primary purpose of land, which was seen holistically. It was part of a system in balance. Homelessness did not exist.

We can infer from his conduct that Gellibrand had a completely different idea about land. For him, it was property from which wealth could be derived. Ignoring the prior rights of the traditional owners, he saw land primarily as a physical resource to be used or taken for his enrichment. It was an instrument for maximising private gain. He thought nothing of coming onto the land of the Bunurong/Boon Wurrung and running sheep there without permission for as long as he wished. To him, this land was a physical object he could exclusively own once the often-violent dispossession was legally mandated in the colonisers’ law. Then it could be kept or sold for private gain as he saw fit, without regard to the prior rights of the traditional owners, which he did not recognise. Land might become his home, but that was not its primary purpose. He could stay, move on, or take (or buy) other land if he wished, which in fact he did. Like other settlers, his central idea was that land was a commodity to be used for wealth creation.

This dichotomy between how settlers and traditional owners saw land is between land valued primarily as a commodity for producing private wealth and land valued in a holistic way, including as a home-place. The exploitation of land valued primarily as a commodity and instrument of private gain is a colonial idea. Promoting and acting on the idea was the main purpose of colonisation. The same idea both underpins and explains the Australian housing disaster in the modern age. It has become embedded in the national imagination and is supported by a national taxation regime that delivers extraordinary benefits to the privileged minority who can afford to buy residential housing primarily for investment purposes.

A tax expenditure is an amount of taxation forgone by the government because it has conferred a concession on a given activity that would otherwise be taxable. Residential property investment is supported by (among others) two such concessions: negative gearing and a fifty per cent capital gains discount. The official estimate of the yearly value of the negative gearing taxation expenditure is $69 billion in 2024-25; for the capital gains tax discount taxation expenditure it is $54 billion – a total of $123 billion. In 2034-35, it is expected to be $228 billion. Over time, you could solve the Australian housing disaster with this money.

You don’t have to travel far to see the impact of these concessions on the Australian housing system. Just go to a Saturday auction and see a cashed-up (or loaned-up) investor easily outbid a young couple on two good wages for a home fit for a small family. Just talk to the countless parents whose adult children have had to move back in with them. Just look at families having to go fifty kilometres or more away from family, social supports, and work to buy or rent a home often only if the family can endure housing-cost stress, sometimes extreme. This has been happening apace since about 2000, with disastrous consequences for the Australian housing system and the realisation of the human right to housing, which should be its primary purpose.

There is still time to act, however. Successive Australian governments have framed housing the population purely as a matter of socio-economic policy, except that it is now the other way around. The commodity value of housing as an investment has been allowed to dominate the social value of housing as a home. This is a skewed way of looking at a fundamental human need that is embodied in a fundamental human right. Yet it has come to define the entire housing system. This is the root cause of our torment.

This skewed way of looking at housing has to change. We need to make the realisation of housing as a human right – indeed the ‘Great Australian Right’ – the purpose of the system. Achieving this purpose must be government’s primary responsibility. There will still be wide scope for socio-economic policy to be democratically debated, developed, and implemented, but consistently with the human right to a decent home.

For this to occur, there must be a national housing and homelessness plan that is rights-based, comprehensive, strategic, and legislated.

To be rights-based, it must have the primary purpose of realising the right to a decent home for all and apply human rights-based principles in doing so. Among other things, this means balanced support for all potential forms of tenure. In relation to First Peoples, it means the plan must be linked to, and consistent with, the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

To be comprehensive, it must cover all parts of the system, because they are interdependent. Among other things, this means that state and territory residential tenancies legislation must be reformed in line with human rights, especially the right to a decent home. In particular, it means the scourge of eviction without just cause must be ended in all jurisdictions.

To be strategic, it must specify ways and means for ensuring, over time, the right to a decent home for all and ending homelessness, not just lifting the funding effort from a pitifully low base, important though this is.

Finally, the plan must be supported by legislation that is strong enough to achieve its historic purpose in an enduring way, drawing on overseas experience. Because a national human rights act (supported by equivalent state and territory acts) would support human rights in the housing system and across the whole of government, this should also be legislated and include the right to a decent home and other economic, social, and cultural rights.