09/05/2026
The comparison to Singapore where 80% of housing is government housing. In Australia we only have 4% social housing.
WHAT IF PUBLIC HOUSING DIDN’T SUCK?
AND WHAT AUSTRALIA COULD LEARN FROM SINGAPORE BEFORE WE ALL MOVE INTO OUR CARS
By The Barefoot Nurse
Grab a drink — beer, whisky, wine, tea, or tap water out of a chipped mug — because apparently we need to say something radical in 2026.
People need homes.
Not investment vehicles. Not speculative assets. Not “opportunities for portfolio growth.” Homes. Places where people sleep, raise kids, recover from illness, store medication, cook food, and feel safe.
Somewhere along the line, Australia forgot that housing is shelter first and investment second. Then we built an economy around pretending that was normal.
IN BRIEF
Australia’s housing crisis is not a mystery. It is the result of treating homes as wealth engines rather than essential infrastructure.
Singapore’s public housing system is not perfect, but it proves public housing does not have to mean poverty housing, stigma, or political neglect.
Around 4.1% of Australian households were in social housing in 2024. Singapore, by contrast, houses close to 80% of its resident population in HDB flats.
Cameron Murray’s HouseMate proposal offers one possible Australian version: government-built homes sold to eligible first-home buyers at cost, with rules to stop quick flipping and speculation.
For nurses, housing is not abstract policy. Housing insecurity turns up in emergency departments, mental health services, child health, chronic disease management, family violence recovery, and workforce burnout.
SINGAPORE DID SOMETHING AUSTRALIA FORGOT HOW TO IMAGINE
In Australia, “public housing” often carries the smell of political failure. People picture underfunded estates, long waitlists, broken maintenance systems, stigma, and governments treating tenants like a budget problem with a pulse.
Singapore took a different road.
Through the Housing and Development Board, Singapore built public housing as national infrastructure. Not charity. Not leftover housing for the desperate. Infrastructure.
Today, HDB flats house close to 80% of Singapore’s resident population. More than 9 in 10 HDB households own their flats, although “own” needs an asterisk because these are usually long-term leases rather than freehold land.
Still, the result is extraordinary by Australian standards: public housing that is large-scale, mainstream, mixed-income, connected to transport, and treated as part of national planning.
Not perfect.
Normal.
That is the bit Australia should be embarrassed by.
COMPARE THAT TO AUSTRALIA
Australia talks about housing like it is a weather event.
Prices rose. Rents exploded. Young people got locked out. Nurses drove further. Teachers left communities. Families started sleeping in cars. Governments frowned at podiums and announced another roundtable.
As if all of this just happened.
In 2024, social housing made up about 4.1% of Australian households, down from 4.8% in 2011. That is not a serious national housing safety net. That is a fraying rope bridge over a crocodile pond.
Home ownership has also shifted sharply against younger Australians. Among 30–34-year-olds, home ownership fell from 64% in 1971 to 50% in 2021. For 25–29-year-olds, it fell from 50% to 36%.
That is not avocado toast.
That is structural failure.
THE MARKET DID NOT FORGET TO FIX THIS
One of the great fairy tales of Australian housing policy is that if we just let the market build enough homes, affordability will eventually trickle down like holy water from a negatively geared investment unit.
Supply matters. Of course it does. If there are not enough homes, prices rise. If there are not enough rentals, tenants get smashed. No serious housing argument can ignore supply.
The problem is that private supply alone does not guarantee affordable homes where people need them.
Developers are not charities. They build what is financially viable, where returns work, under rules we create. That is not a moral failing. It is the system doing exactly what it was designed to do.
The private market builds for profit. Public policy is supposed to step in where profit does not meet public need.
We understand that with schools, hospitals, roads, water, libraries, and public transport. Housing somehow got shoved into a different basket, labelled “private wealth”, and passed around Parliament like a live gr***de.
ENTER HOUSEMATE
Economist Dr Cameron Murray has proposed one Australian model called HouseMate.
The idea is direct: government uses or acquires land, builds homes, and sells them to eligible first-home buyers at cost rather than speculative market price. Buyers must live in the home for a set period, and resale restrictions prevent quick flipping.
Murray estimates the budget cost would peak around $1.7 billion after seven years, then shrink to about $640 million after 20 years as repayments flow back into the system.
In Australian housing policy terms, that is not mad. That is almost suspiciously sensible.
HouseMate is not the only answer. It does, however, ask the right question: what if government directly built affordable ownership pathways instead of endlessly bribing the private market and hoping affordability fell out the bottom?
“BUT THAT WILL LOWER HOUSE PRICES”
Yes.
That is the point.
Australia has convinced itself that housing affordability should improve without house prices becoming less cooked. That is like saying we want to reduce obesity while making deep-fried Mars bars compulsory at breakfast.
For someone who owns one home and needs somewhere to live, rising house prices are not pure wealth. If your home doubles in value, the next place you buy probably doubled too. You only truly cash out if you downsize, move somewhere cheaper, borrow against it, or die and leave the problem to your kids.
The people who benefit most from endless price growth are those who already own multiple properties, those who lend against rising property values, and those whose political careers depend on not upsetting either group.
That is why housing reform keeps getting strangled in the cot.
Everyone says they want affordability. Fewer people want what affordability requires: prices and rents growing more slowly than incomes for a long time, and in some overheated markets, prices falling.
That is not a bug.
That is the medicine.
WE ALREADY INTERVENE — JUST NOT FAIRLY
Australia loves pretending it believes in the free market. It does not.
We intervene in housing constantly. We shape demand through tax settings. We shape supply through planning. We support buyers through grants. We support landlords through tax concessions. We protect existing wealth through political caution.
The question is not whether government should intervene.
The question is who government is intervening for.
If politicians are too scared to reform investor tax settings, then they need to build public and affordable housing directly.
That is the bit Australia keeps dodging.
WHAT NURSES SEE
Housing is healthcare.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
Mouldy homes worsen asthma and respiratory illness. Overcrowding spreads infection and stress. Rent pressure drives anxiety, depression, family conflict, poor nutrition, and medication non-adherence. Insecure housing makes it harder to attend appointments, manage chronic disease, recover from surgery, keep children in school, escape violence, or maintain employment.
Nurses see the discharge plan that collapses because the patient has nowhere safe to go.
Nurses see the young mum trying to keep insulin cold in a house with an unreliable fridge.
Nurses see the older man skipping meals to pay rent.
Nurses see the teenager in crisis because “home” is a couch, a car, or a rotating list of unsafe options.
Housing policy walks into healthcare wearing different shoes. Sometimes it arrives as asthma. Sometimes as domestic violence. Sometimes as depression. Sometimes as a pressure injury because someone was discharged into a room that should have been condemned during the Howard years.
SINGAPORE IS NOT A MAGIC KINGDOM
This is where we need to be grown-ups.
Singapore’s model is not perfect. It comes with strict eligibility rules, leasehold complications, resale pressures, and a level of state control that would make many Australians twitch.
That matters.
Australia should not worship Singapore. We should learn from it.
The lesson is not “copy everything Singapore does.” The lesson is that public housing can be large-scale, normal, mixed-income, desirable, and central to national planning.
An Australian version would need democratic safeguards, strong tenant rights, First Nations housing leadership, disability access, climate resilience, regional models, and proper links to transport, schools, healthcare, aged care, and employment.
That sounds hard.
Good.
Nation-building usually is.
WHY WE KEEP FAILING
Australia does not lack reports. We do not lack policy ideas. We do not lack economists, planners, housing advocates, nurses, researchers, or exhausted renters explaining the bleeding obvious.
We lack political courage.
Most of this stuff is already sitting in reports on shelves, buried under dust, lobby pressure, and the quiet terror of upsetting homeowners in marginal seats.
We know density has to increase in established suburbs. We know public and social housing stock has to grow. We know housing and transport planning need to be joined at the hip. We know tax settings shape behaviour. We know essential workers are being priced out of the places that need them.
We know.
The problem is that meaningful reform creates losers, or at least people who feel like losers. Some landowners will not get the windfall they expected. Some investors may lose tax advantages. Some suburbs will have to accept apartments. Some councils will have to stop acting like three-storey buildings are an invading army.
That is why politicians keep choosing announcements over architecture.
WHAT WOULD A SERIOUS AUSTRALIAN MODEL LOOK LIKE?
A serious Australian housing model would stop treating public housing as emergency welfare and start treating it as essential infrastructure.
It would build public, social, affordable rental, and affordable ownership housing at scale. It would use government land properly. It would acquire land where needed. It would create mixed-income communities rather than dumping disadvantage into one postcode and then blaming the postcode for being disadvantaged.
It would keep some homes permanently outside the speculative market.
It would give first-home buyers a pathway that does not require family wealth, crypto luck, or marrying someone whose parents bought in Brunswick in 1987.
It would build near transport, schools, hospitals, supermarkets, parks, childcare, aged care, and jobs.
It would understand that secure housing is not just a welfare cost. It is health policy, workforce policy, child development policy, family violence policy, productivity policy, and national stability policy.
THE FINAL WORD
Australia does not need to become Singapore.
Australia needs to stop pretending the current system is natural, inevitable, or morally superior.
There is nothing natural about essential workers being unable to afford to live near essential services.
There is nothing inevitable about young people giving up on home ownership.
There is nothing morally superior about protecting property wealth while families sleep in cars.
Singapore shows that public housing does not have to suck. HouseMate shows that Australia has workable ideas on the table.
We are not waiting for genius.
We are waiting for courage.
Secure housing is not radical. What is radical is expecting the same market forces that helped create this mess to suddenly develop a conscience, put on a hi-vis vest, and build us a fair country out of the goodness of their negatively geared hearts.
Let’s stop treating shelter like a casino chip.
Let’s build homes.
Let’s build communities.
Let’s build a country where nurses, teachers, ambos, cleaners, aged care workers, and young families are not one rent rise away from living in the bloody car.
Have you worked in Singapore or lived in HDB housing? Have you worked with patients whose health was wrecked by insecure housing? Send your thoughts to [email protected] or tag The Barefoot Nurse on Instagram or Facebook.
We’re here to learn, argue, think, and occasionally yell into the policy void together.
Disclaimer: This article is not medical, legal, financial, or housing advice. It is food for thought, not a substitute for professional advice, workplace policy, government responsibility, or therapy after watching another renovation show where someone paints a wall beige and calls it coastal luxe.
