A HAFF is not a home
The Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF), Labor’s flagship policy to address the housing crisis, described by Housing Minister Julie Collins as “life-changing legislation that will help generations of Australians”, has not resulted in a single home being built in the nearly two years since it was passed. This was revealed in Senate Estimates Committee hearings in February, when Labor’s Finance Minister Katy Gallagher tried to claim that the HAFF had “completed” 340 new homes (already a derisory number). She was quickly forced to admit that these were existing properties that had been acquired.
From the beginning, the HAFF was a fig leaf to hide Labor’s inaction on the housing crisis. What was touted as a $10 billion boost to housing was actually an investment fund, with the money gambled on the stock market and a maximum of $500 million in returns to be spent on housing each year. Labor claimed the HAFF would build 30,000 “social” and “affordable” houses over five years, but reporting by Crikey showed that it would construct around 14,000 properties at best. With 122,000 people homeless, 172,000 on the social housing waitlists and thousands more people being pushed into housing insecurity each year, the HAFF was only ever going to help a tiny number of people to afford a home.
Two years on and the HAFF hasn’t helped anyone. Anglicare’s 2025 Rental Affordability Snapshot reported that affordability has crashed to record lows. Buying a home is more out of reach than ever: you’d need an income of more than $275,000 a year to get a mortgage for a median-priced house in Sydney, according to a SQM Research report. As this article is being written, Queensland police are clearing a “tent city” of the homeless in Brisbane’s Musgrave Park. Where these people are supposed to go is anyone’s guess.
The Liberals have blamed the HAFF’s failure on government bureaucracy and red tape, but this is cynical rubbish coming from a party whose idea of “red tape” is a planning control requiring windows in an apartment or paying construction workers the minimum wage. The Liberals’ real objection to the HAFF is that they don’t think the government should even pretend to be building affordable housing. They’d prefer to dispense with the fig leaf and openly shovel public money into the pockets of the developers and let the market rip.
The HAFF hasn’t resulted in any properties being built because almost none of the money was ever intended to go directly into the construction of affordable homes. The HAFF is a financial instrument that gives concessional loans and subsidies to private developers who partner with community housing providers. In other words, it’s a handout to big corporations, which can get cheaper debt to build for-profit developments in return for providing a small number of “social” or “affordable” properties. The government has no control over when the homes are built, or whether they are built at all. Instead, it’s up to developers, whose sole concern is maximising their profits. If the market looks good, then maybe they’ll build, but if not, they’ll wait and build nothing, as we’ve seen for the past two years.
The HAFF is a failure. If the government’s priority was building affordable homes rather than underwriting corporate profits, there are straightforward measures it could implement now to tackle the crisis. It could spend $10 billion (or more) directly on housing, rather than gambling it on the stock market and drip-feeding the returns. It could establish a public builder to construct new homes, rather than holding itself hostage to the market and developers’ profits. And it could keep the properties as public housing, not hand them off as “social housing” to external providers.
In the wake of Labor’s election win, Albanese has told the Greens and anyone who cares about housing justice to “get out of our way on housing”. Get out of the way so Labor can do what? Introduce more policies like the HAFF that can’t get a single property built? Give more cash handouts to developers like Build to Rent? Tout more token measures like Help to Buy that drive up house prices? We shouldn’t get out of the way; we should get in the way and fight a Labor government that has made the housing crisis worse.
