Rental affordability is at an all-time low, as rents across the country have risen 44 percent over the past five years. In Sydney, the median rental price has now hit an eye-watering $760 a week, in Brisbane it’s $660 and in Perth it’s $710.
According to the Priced Out report, published by Everybody’s Home, to afford to rent in Sydney, you need a household income of more than $130,000.
New data from the research firm Cotality show that, over the past five years, rents across Australia increased 2.5 times faster than wages. In Western Australia, rents went up a staggering 66 percent, while wages rose by only 19 percent. For the first time since records began, most renters are now in rent stress, paying on average 34 percent of their income towards rent.
The escalating cost of housing outstripping stagnant wages is pushing more and more people into poverty. A recent report by the Australian Council of Social Service found that, in 2022-23, 3.7 million Australians lived in poverty. In 2026, we can expect those figures to be substantially higher, as people have experienced three years of real wage cuts and rapidly rising rents. This is shocking. In one of the world’s richest countries, whose billionaires increased their wealth by $600,000 every day over the past year, at least one in seven people live below the poverty line.
Housing in Australia is emblematic of the deepening inequality of capitalism. The ultra-rich swim in unearned billions while working-class families decide whether to skip meals or an appointment at the doctor so they can pay for a roof over their heads.
Labor governments at both the federal and state levels are doing nothing to turn this around. In fact, they are giving more money to investors in tax breaks alone than the entire amount they spend on housing affordability. Reporting by the Guardian Australia found that in 2025, the federal government gave investors a $12.3 billion tax handout while spending only $9.3 billion on social housing, homelessness and rent assistance combined.
In the face of this desperate crisis, the entire political establishment, from Labor to Liberals to Pauline Hanson and the far right, wants to convince us that Australian capitalism is not to blame. It’s immigrants who are the problem; they are competing for a limited supply of properties and pushing up prices.
But immigrants are not responsible for pushing up rents. As Red Flag has reported previously, the number of houses relative to the population was roughly the same in 2014 as it is today, but rents are increasing four times faster. When borders were closed in 2020-21 and there was no significant immigration, rents increased by 14 percent. When international students returned, the effect was at most a 0.5 percent increase in prices. And even this marginal increase could and should have been offset by universities using the billions of dollars of profit they make from international students to provide them with affordable accommodation.
Immigrants are also not benefiting from increased rents. A Propertytology report, based on Bureau of Statistics data, found that between 2013 and 2023, migrants purchased just 7 percent of all properties, including owner-occupied homes.
The people who are to blame for rising rents are not migrants; they are Australia’s capitalists, the property developers and big investors who are making billions from the crisis. They prey on people’s need for a home to squeeze every last dollar from them. They have left hundreds of thousands of houses empty across the country while people sleep on the streets and languish on public housing waiting lists. According to Prosper Australia, a think tank, in Melbourne alone there are 100,000 empty properties that could be used immediately to house people, but instead sit empty while their owners wait to cash in on higher land prices, benefiting from government tax breaks all the while.
At the root of this is the capitalist economy, which treats everything required to satisfy human needs as a commodity. Properties are not built and distributed based on the right of every person to have a home; they are built, bought and sold for profit, accessible only to those who can manage to pay the price.
Demands to scrap tax breaks to investors, build public housing and cap and freeze rents are an important starting point, but these measures won’t solve the fundamental problem. While housing remains a commodity and its construction and distribution are controlled by billionaire developers, banks, wealthy investors or a state that acts in their interests, profit will ultimately determine who has access to housing.
To end the housing crisis, we need socialism, and to get there, we need a mass socialist movement: a movement that fights against capitalist control over housing, a movement that fights the racist scapegoating of migrants and takes aim at our common enemy, a movement that combines the fight for immediate demands with a broader struggle against the system as a whole, for a world run by workers where housing is the common right of all.
