Australia’s housing crisis has become so entrenched that it is easy to treat it as an unavoidable fact of modern life. Young people cannot afford to buy. Renters face escalating costs and insecure tenure. Public housing is chronically undersupplied. Homelessness continues at unprecedented levels, affecting people who would never have imagined it’s something they would have to face. For many Australians, the old promise that hard work would eventually lead to a secure home has become increasingly difficult to believe.

It is this broken promise that sits at the heart of Matt Lloyd-Cape’s Our Place.

This is a big, not particularly easy book. However, there are very cogent answers in it. And answers that the PSA has published in Housing Affordability Survey and Policy Recommendations 2026, which is the union’s response to how the housing crisis is affecting NSW public servants.

Mr Lloyd-Cape’s starting point is refreshingly optimistic. Australia has experienced serious housing crises before, and governments have successfully intervened to address them. The current crisis is therefore not inevitable. It is the product of political choices, economic settings and policy failures, and what has been created by policies can also be changed by policies.

Housing debates are often reduced to arguments about planning approvals, population growth or whether enough houses are being built. Mr Lloyd-Cape takes a much broader view. Housing is not simply a commodity or an investment vehicle. It is a fundamental component of a decent life.

Housing costs are, in effect, a form of pressure on wages. A worker whose rent or mortgage consumes a greater proportion of their income has less economic security, regardless of what their payslip says. A generation of workers can receive nominal wage increases while seeing much of that increase swallowed by housing costs.
For public sector workers, the implications are obvious. Governments require employees to live within reasonable proximity to the communities they serve. When housing becomes unaffordable, recruitment and retention become more difficult and governments increasingly struggle to maintain essential services.

For decades, governments of both major political persuasions have benefited from a system in which rising property values are treated as evidence of economic success. Home ownership has been encouraged and protected, while housing has simultaneously become one of Australia’s most attractive investment assets.

The result is a system in which existing property owners have a powerful interest in maintaining high prices, while those who do not own property face an increasingly difficult entry point.

Our Place argues that this cannot be fixed through minor adjustments at the margins. Lloyd-Cape calls for a much more ambitious national housing strategy, including stronger protections for renters, expansion of public housing and expanded changes to the tax and investment settings that currently reward speculation.

For much of the neoliberal era, public housing has too often been treated as a residual service for people who have failed to secure housing through the private market. Lloyd-Cape’s approach points towards something different: housing policy as an essential part of national economic and social infrastructure.

Australia routinely accepts that governments should invest in roads, railways, schools, hospitals and utilities because these things underpin economic activity and social wellbeing. Housing should be understood in the same way.