On Friday, I sat in a room in Canberra with developers, super funds, councils, community housing providers and researchers, and asked them the question I have been carrying since the day I was elected: what does affordable housing actually mean? I convened the roundtable because I could not get a straight answer anywhere else and had begun to suspect the answer did not exist.
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Bradfield is the most unaffordable electorate in the country in which to buy a house, and when I arrived in parliament, I assumed that behind the billions governments spend on affordable housing there was a system somewhere, with a shared definition and a register that counted what we had against what we needed.
What I found instead was a hodge-podge, in which the funding, the planning approvals and the investment are all measured against benchmarks that have never been reconciled with each other. Part of me assumed I had missed something, and that the people who do this for a living would put me right.
Nobody did. What struck me on Friday was how quickly the room agreed. Around that table were people who normally only meet each other across a planning panel or a funding negotiation, and who have every reason to see this differently.
They converged within the first hour on a single finding: Australia does not have a system for affordable housing. We have programs, funding streams and planning provisions, and no shared definition holding any of it together.
Tom Alves of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute framed it with a comparison that has stayed with me. By 1956, Australia had one of the highest home-ownership rates in the world and was producing 100 affordable rental dwellings a week. In 2026, we cannot even say what affordable rental housing we have.
His answer was a national evidence base covering stock, demand dynamics and rental impacts. Willoughby Mayor Tanya Taylor – and president of Northern Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils – put the same gap in local government terms, telling us there is no central register to turn to and no way to make evidence-based decisions without it.
The delivery is local, approvals are local and state, the funding is state and federal, and the measurement and accountability is nobody’s.
Worse, where numbers do exist, they pull in different directions.
The Housing Australia Future Fund sets affordable rent at 74.9 per cent or less of market, while the NSW government works to 20-25 per cent below market, or 25 to 30 per cent of gross income, depending on how a property was funded, and Willoughby City Council uses rents no higher than 30 per cent of actual household income.
Those are four different rents for the same home, and all of them can be called affordable housing. The bigger problem, in a market like Sydney’s, is that our affordable homes are rarely affordable.
- See our brief and a link to a paper by Julie Lawson Jago Dodson, Liam Davies, Mike Berry, Laurence Troy, Ryan van den Nouwelant and Greta Werner, who argue that affordable housing rents should not be set to market rates
This is the part I find hardest to accept. Let’s think about a local nurse. A first-year nurse earns around $89,000, so they can pay $513 a week before they’re classified as being in housing stress. The median two-bedroom apartment in Chatswood is $950. Take 20 per cent off, as several definitions do, and it comes to $760; apply the Housing Australia Future Fund’s benchmark, and it comes to $711.
Developers get uplift, but housing is still unaffordable
Both of those “affordable homes” get built, with discounts to developers on uplift for providing “affordable” housing, and yet – our community cannot afford them.
When the market rent is this far out of reach, a discount off the top gives us housing that is affordable in name only.
Dr Marcus Spiller of the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council put the underlying principle plainly, telling the room on Friday that affordable housing is essential infrastructure, and that rambling, sprawling systems are the enemy of an efficient market.
There are 14,400 new homes coming to my area on the north shore, and residents have been asked to accept more density and a changed streetscape on the understanding that affordable housing comes with it.
So, I asked my community about that trade-off.
We handed surveys to commuters at train stations across the electorate and received 400 replies. Renters answered alongside owners, and apartment dwellers alongside people in free-standing houses.
Sixty three per cent would accept greater density in exchange for more affordable homes built locally
Sixty three per cent would accept greater density in exchange for more affordable homes built locally, 87 per cent support governments building homes to rent below market rates, and 83 per cent support helping essential workers rent locally.
This is a community holding up its end. The 14,400 homes are coming, the density is being accepted, and what comes back is affordable housing at $760 a week for a nurse who can only afford $513.
Bradfield is getting a dodgy deal, and residents can see it well enough to be wary of the next one. That is how social licence for development is lost. It goes when a bargain is struck and only one side is held to it.
Bradfield is not unusual. Every state is running this experiment separately, and none of them can fix it alone.
A nationally consistent definition would mean funding, planning and construction finally work towards the same goal, and an evidence base and national register would let us count what we have and measure what we add.
Willoughby City Council uses rents no higher than 30 per cent of actual household income
Those same clear settings are what institutional investors told us they need to move at scale — Alek Misev of Aware Super described how much more the private sector and government could unlock together on approvals and construction:
“As a super fund with many members in essential services such as health and education, we understand the importance of affordable, well-located housing to people’s financial and personal wellbeing.
“We believe there is still much that can be done through collaboration between governments and the private sector to speed up approvals and construction and unlock housing supply. As a major investor in housing, we play our part in adding to housing supply while delivering strong investment returns on our members’ savings.”
The Private Member’s Bill I am introducing to the House next month would put that definition in law, backed by 11,955 petition signatures from people who want the standard set and the results counted.
There was no argument in that room about whether this system is needed. The only question left is whether Parliament catches up with the sector, and that one is ours to answer.
