Hal Pawson

Significantly, at rates which are much greater than we've seen in the last, well, any time since 2008, actually.

On average across the country, we've been seeing, looking at rent increases of around about 8%.

annually, well, that's far above the norm for, you know, the historical, the last 10 years or so.

Two or 3% would be normal.

Well, you're absolutely right.

I mean, the COVID experience of the last two years has had a much bigger and quite different impact on the housing system than we, I think anybody or very, very few people expected.

The two years since COVID broke in Australia, I mean, that has really seen a kind of convulsion in the housing market that very few people expected.

And that's really true in both the house sales market and the rental market.

The rental market, I think, is the part of it.

The private rental market is the part of it that's most directly relevant to the stress on the social housing system, because rising rents that we've seen at rates that haven't been recorded in Australia for well over a decade have already pushed a lot of people, low income renters, towards housing.

well, more insecurity and the risk that they really can't keep up those payments.

And they might face having to hand in their keys or landlords actually removing tenants who are falling into unacceptable arrears.

And I think, Amy, you've got a question.

Yeah, that's a very good question.

There certainly are other countries which do social housing and which do housing in general better than Australia, in my opinion.

For many commentators, analysts in the field in Australia, many of them look towards particularly the German-speaking countries, Switzerland, Germany, Austria.

They all have more stable housing systems, less volatile housing systems than we do.

Austria in particular, a very large and also very well-managed social housing sector has

more than a quarter of the whole housing stock.

It's huge by Australian standards, five times or more bigger than Australia's equivalent.