Australian rental housing standards: institutional shifts to reprioritize the housing–health nexus

Abstract

A large proportion of Australia’s housing stock offered for private rental or socially let is of poor quality, which has implications for residents’ health and well-being. This problem has arisen from historically weak regulation of housing standards and under-investment in public housing services, both features of Australia’s neoliberal housing regime. In this paper, we reviewed the institutional contexts of two policy settings used to address problems of housing quality: the Homes Act 2018 (UK) and the Healthy Homes Guarantee Act 2017 (Aotearoa–New Zealand). From these two case studies, five institutional shifts required to reprioritize the housing–health nexus in Australia were synthesized: (1) policy objectives should explicitly link housing conditions and health outcomes; (2) community awareness and sector advocacy should be harnessed to overcome complex structures of government; (3) policy approaches should foster collective social responsibility; (4) mandatory requirements should be made transparent and objective; and (5) robust protocols for tracking progress should be developed and applied.