Kevin Bell AO KC – who served as a judge of the Supreme Court of Victoria for 15 years – has always, he said, been focused on using the law to achieve human rights, equality, and social justice.

In an episode of The Lawyers Weekly Show (going live on Friday, 2 August), Bell – who currently serves as patron of Tenants Victoria and an adjunct professor at Monash University – recounted growing up in an era in which government support for housing was “seen to be fundamental to economic and social reconstruction in the post-war period”.

He is very conscious, he outlined, “of how that prepared me for a fulfilling life, economically, socially, personally, in terms of my family and in all dimensions of my life”.

He recently penned a book, Housing: The Great Australian Right (the latest volume in Monash University Publishing’s series, In the National Interest), in part because he feels that young people nationwide do not have access to housing as a right, in the same way that he did growing up.

“My own upbringing proved to me how it meant everything to me as an individual, as an adult growing up, I was prepared for life by housing,” he said.

Bell promoted the “housing first” philosophy, which he said enables people to flourish and achieve their full potential and is “connected with being able to have health, being able to have work, being able to have social connection with your community, be able to develop in the family setting and yourself individually”.

Now, however, “we have a housing disaster on our hands”, he said.

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“Australia has lost its way in a major way,” he added.

“I see a yawning gap, and I feel a sense of responsibility to try and close that gap – indeed, eliminate it.”

A 4-pronged disaster

The housing system in Australia, Bell listed, comprises four prongs.

The first is home ownership, he said, affordability for which “has never been worse than it is right now”, and things don’t improve much on the second prong, rental housing, as “there are parts of Australia where there is literally no affordable rental housing for people on an ordinary income”.

“That’s a parlous state of affairs,” Bell said, noting it has occurred because of how our housing system is structured via the interaction between investment laws and policy and residential tenancy.

The third prong, public housing, used to be seen as the responsibility of government as part of a pattern of measures to ensure that everybody would have access to housing, Bell went on. Unfortunately, he said, “public housing expenditure in this country has declined to pitifully low levels”.

Finally, homelessness, Bell said, “in this land of plenty is at very high rates” – something he believes should shock the conscience of the community.

“I’m fearful it will become even greater,” he said.

“There’s no question that homelessness exists because of structural failure in the housing system. Homelessness exists on our watch, and we can do something about it. And yet we do not.”

Australia’s housing woes, Bell went on, are worse than those of our global counterparts.

Even with “financialisation” – the ways in which housing is commodified and treated as an economic or investment opportunity – being widespread across the world, Australia’s unaffordability problems are among the highest internationally, he said, noting that European countries have stronger government investment, more regulation, and less “landlordism” compared to Down Under.

Realigning Australia’s values

The first step in addressing the housing disaster, Bell detailed, “is for us to realign our values”.

“Our values at the moment, with respect to housing, are to place profit first, not people. The disastrous situation that we confront has its root cause in that problem,” he said.

“We have begun to treat housing as a matter of economics, as a matter of investment, as a matter of profit, as a way of defining the stake that we have in the world rather than as a form of shelter, as a place in which we create our home, as the centre of our social or our working or our spiritual or our other lives.”

This slide started in the mid-1970s, Bell continued, and the supposed “Great Australian Dream” has become a nightmare for many.

“It’s not a dream anymore. People haven’t got access to it, so there’s no point in calling it a dream,” he said.

Instead of placing such a high premium on the “economic dimension” of the home, he said that human rights is the way to understand housing.

“Human rights sees housing as something that is a fundamental human need so strong that it counts as a right, which is the government’s responsibility, responsibility to fulfil human rights sees housing as having several dimensions,” Bell said.

“It has to be adequate, it has to be good quality, it has to be accessible, it has to be safe, it needs to be available. It needs to be addressed in terms of the needs of the most vulnerable first.”

Who are we as a nation?

Part of this realignment, Bell submitted, means adopting a strong moral perspective on housing, which values housing as a right, so that “literally all generations of people” can have that which is fundamental to their lives.

“I re-emphasise that this is a question of fundamental values. We are looking at ourselves as a nation here. We are asking something about ourselves [that] will affect future generations. This question is, is that important? I’m arguing that if you accept that housing is a right which we all have, then that needs to be brought into Australian law, both state and federal,” he said.

“There needs to be something transformational.”

“Just treating this as a question of market regulation and government investment and spending a bit of money here and a bit of money there is just the same old way of looking at this. We have to look at this fundamentally differently, and accepting that housing is a right and acting on it in law and policy is that way.”

Another hurdle in this endeavour, Bell noted, is that Australia does not have a strong human rights culture, nor does it have a national Human Rights Act (although, as reported by Lawyers Weekly earlier this week, the new Human Rights Commission president is making the enactment of such legislation a top priority).

While some states have their own human rights legislation, none include a right to housing – “that’s a problem”, he said.

“The housing disaster is partly a product of that lack of a strong human rights culture in this country,” Bell added.

Adopting a human rights approach to the problem, he surmised, represents the aforementioned “transformational opportunity”.

A new national plan

When asked how best the nation can proceed to overcome the current state of affairs, Bell mused that the federal government, “to its credit”, is moving to collaborate with state and territory governments on a plan moving forward.

However, while he applauds the government for that, he remains worried about the “expressed intention” for a policy-based instrument rather than a legislative one.

“It should be a legislative instrument because we need to embed it in law in order that the impact of the plan is enduring,” Bell said.

Moreover, such new legislation must be rights-based, he added, giving effect to a right to housing.

“At the present time, I do not see a debate based on meeting the entire need, the whole community, for housing. The debate at the moment is about spending more money than was previously spent. To say right now we’re going to spend $10 billion, or $20 billion, or $30 billion, sounds like a wonderful thing to do. The trouble is that expenditure, even of that great dimension, is not enough to make housing affordable for the entire Australian population,” Bell said.

“We’ve probably got a $200 billion problem on our hands, and in order to address that, we’re going to need to have to plan over two generations something completely different to what we’ve been doing needs to happen, not just spending money, but spending money towards meeting the entire need of everybody in Australia for housing over the longer term. And only a planned approach can achieve that end.”

Looking ahead

When asked about the future and what it could look like, Bell mused that the housing disaster has been going on for two generations and will escalate to the level of a catastrophe if it continues for another two.

“For 100 years, Australia [will have been] in a situation where we have not created the circumstances in which having a decent home is possible for ordinary people,” he said.

“That’s not the kind of Australia that I want to be associated with.”

But while the word “crisis”, Bell stressed, “doesn’t cut it”, he is positive about what Australia’s future may hold.

“I am optimistic because I think that it is necessary,” he said.

“I don’t think we can escape the catastrophe without [optimism], and I think that realisation may be gradually acquired, but I think it will be acquired.”

The Lawyers Weekly Show’s episode with the Honourable Kevin Bell AO KC will air tomorrow (Friday, 2 August).