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Australia must treat housing as a human right: Former State Supreme Court judge

Access to decent housing should be the "Great Australian Right," says a former Victorian Supreme Court justice.

"A large and politically influential cohort of voting Australians has a huge stake in home ownership and small-scale investment in rental housing as supported by present legal and taxation arrangements. "Home ownership, meanwhile, is unaffordable to households even with two earners on the average wage, rents are skyrocketing, vacancy rates are plummeting, tenancy laws are second-best, social housing is a residual part of the system under chronic strain, and over 120,000 people live in homelessness among the national plenty." "If the plan remains purely policy-based and does not have legislative backing, as seems to be the present intention, I fear that it will not succeed in overcoming Australia's housing disaster nor prevent it from re-ocurring," he writes.

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