The Right to Housing in Australia

With so many Australian cities facing problems of housing affordability, how can we guarantee that all Australians have access to safe, secure housing?

As property prices rise, dragging rents with them, we are rapidly losing the qualities that long made Australian cities some of the most liveable in the world. 

Leaders and policy makers routinely propose solutions to Australia’s housing crisis, though few have led to significant change. Australian housing debates seems to be caught in stalemate at present. 

The Right to Housing in Australia will draw together some of Australia’s leading authorities on housing policy to discuss options for the future of housing in Australian cities. 

Moderated by Professor Libby Porter (Director of RMIT University's Centre of Urban Research), the event will include:

  • The Hon. Kevin Bell AO KC, Former Supreme Court Judge & Monash Adjunct
  • Emma Dawson, Executive Director, Per Capita
  • Jorden van den Lamb, ShitRentals.com
  • Emma Power, Western Sydney University
  • Cameron Duff, RMIT University

Speakers

Professor Libby Porter

Professor Libby Porter is a scholar of cities particularly the violent processes of urban place-making. Motivated by social and ecological injustice, her work is about how urbanisation creates forms of dispossession and displacement and what we might do about it. Her research aims to sharpen our understanding about the relationship between land and housing justice, the displacing effects of urban renewal, critical questions of urban governance and the politics of property. In her work, and life, Libby attempts to reckon with the politics and practices of learning, as a non-Indigenous person, to live lawfully on Country.

Her books include Unlearning the Colonial Cultures of Planning (2010 Ashgate), Planning for Coexistence? (with Janice Barry Routledge 2016) and most recently Planning in Indigenous Australia: From imperial foundations to postcolonial futures with Sue Jackson and Louise Johnson (Routledge 2018). Libby has worked in urban policy and planning practice and taught in planning and geography schools in the UK and Australia. She co-founded Planners Network UK, a progressive voice for radical planning in the UK and is a member of the International Network of Urban Research and Action.

Libby has worked in urban policy practice and taught in planning and geography schools at the Universities of Birmingham, Sheffield, Glasgow, Monash and RMIT. Libby co-founded Planners Network UK, a progressive voice for radical planning in the UK and is an active member of the International Network of Urban Research and Action. She is Assistant Editor (Interface) of the international journal Planning Theory and Practice, and a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. 

The Hon. Kevin Bell AO KC

The Hon. Kevin Bell AO KC is a baby boomer who grew up in social housing in the Melbourne suburb of Moorabbin – fittingly, in the language of the Bunurong/ Boonwurrung, ‘Moorabbin’ means ‘resting place’ or ‘mother’s milk’. He graduated in Arts and Law from Monash University and worked at the Tenants Union of Victoria before practising as a barrister for twenty years, including in Victorian housing and residential tenancies law. As a judge of the Supreme Court of Victoria for fifteen years, he wrote many influential judgments on human rights, including the right to housing and home. As a professor in the Faculty of Law at Monash University and director of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law, he similarly focused on housing, homelessness and human rights. He also served as a commissioner of the Yoorrook Justice Commission and has a masters in international human rights law from Oxford University. He is presently an adjunct professor at Monash and the patron of Tenants Victoria and the Justice Reform Initiative.
His book Housing: The Great Australia Right was published by Monash University Publishing in August 2024 as part of the In the National Interest series.

Emma Dawson

Emma Dawson is Executive Director of public policy think tank Per Capita. She has worked as a researcher at Monash University and the University of Melbourne; in policy and public affairs for SBS and Telstra; and as a senior policy adviser in the Rudd and Gillard Governments.

Emma has published reports and articles on a wide range of public policy issues, with specific expertise in gender equality, workplace relations and the care economy. She is a regular contributor to The Age and SMH and Guardian Australia and is a frequent guest on various ABC radio programs nationally. She appears regularly as an expert witness before parliamentary inquiries and often speaks at public events and conferences in Australia and internationally. Emma is the co-editor, with Professor Janet McCalman, of the collection of essays What happens next? Reconstructing Australia after COVID-19, published by Melbourne University Press in September 2020, and author of several papers and book chapters on social policy in Australia. With Tanja Kovac, she was lead researcher and author of Measure for Measure: Gender Equality in Australia. She is a Fellow of the Women’s Leadership Institute of Australia and an Adjunct Professor at the UTS Business School.

Jordan van den Lamb

Jordan van den Lamb, an office-worker in Melbourne, is known for his reviews and visits of the worst rentals Australia has to offer by his audience on TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube. Alongside his reviews, Jordan also uses his platform to passionately contribute to Australian political discourse, educating his audience on anything and everything that society failed to educate young Australians. 

Associate Professor Emma Power

Emma is a housing researcher and urban geographer who has been researching housing insecurity and advocating for a fairer and more caring housing system for over a decade. Her ‘Cities of Care’ research program envisions a world of more just and caring cities, with current work focused on older people’s housing security, how very low income households are surviving in the context of an escalating cost of living crisis, and how social housing residents are adapting to heat and advocating for better living conditions in Western Sydney’s hottest suburbs. Emma understands housing as a critical care infrastructure and her work is concerned with unpacking what this means and how care can be translated into policy and practice. She is Associate Professor and Director of Academic Programs in Geography and Urban Planning, amongst other disciplines, in the School of Social Sciences at Western Sydney University. 

Professor Cameron Duff

Cameron Duff is Professor of Social Impact at the Centre for Organisations and Social Change in the College of Business and Law at RMIT University in Melbourne. Duff’s recent program of research explores the role of social innovation in responding to complex health and social problems in cities. Working in transdisciplinary teams, Duff is interested in the role of social innovation in transforming the design and delivery of health and social care in vulnerable communities. He has explored these themes in studies of precarious urban lives in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom with a focus on problems of housing insecurity, addiction and mental illness.

This event is presented by RMIT's Urban Futures Enabling Impact Platform, as part of the Academy of the Social Sciences of Australia's Social Sciences Week.  

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Acknowledgement of Country

RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Sentient' by Hollie Johnson, Gunaikurnai and Monero Ngarigo.

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aboriginal flag
torres strait flag

Acknowledgement of Country

RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business.

More information