Public Lecture by Mark Stephens, Australian Centre for Housing Research Speaker Series, on 26 February 2026.
This lecture is about social housing, and the role that it might play in tackling Australia’s housing crisis.
Social housing may seem a surprising topic, because although Australia has a well-informed public discourse about housing, social housing rarely features in it. This is undoubtedly attributable to the small scale of social housing in Australia and its focus on housing some of the poorest and most marginalised families in the country.
It wasn’t always like this. In one of the interviews that form the basis of this lecture I was reminded of
“The good old story [in South Australia]… Wait for your kids to turn 18. Walk them down to the Housing Trust office. Fill out the form… and just wait.”
Those days are long gone and will not return. But I think the public perception of social
housing paints an overly bleak picture of hyper-residualisation.
