Critics complaining that the Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF) has had a rocky start have lost sight of the big picture.

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The HAFF represents a sophisticated and sustained response to a housing crisis that has been decades in the making.

Rather than undermining this housing breakthrough, we should all be invested in making it bigger, stronger and more effective.

Australia currently has about 640,000 households who can't survive in the private rental market, according to the UNSW analysis of the census. By 2041, that figure will hit 940,000.

Rental stress is crushing working families - nearly 28 per cent of renters now spend more than 30 per cent of their income on rent, up from 25.5 per cent just a year earlier. In Greater Sydney, housing costs have jumped from 17.5 per cent of household income in 2009-10 to 22.2 per cent today.

This is what you get when government walks away. Federal funding for public housing basically stopped after 1996, with only brief intervention during the 2009-2011 stimulus.

State and territory governments, nominally responsible for public housing, just stopped replacing ageing stock or building at scale. This is a huge break with history.

Between 1945 and 1970, for example, social housing represented 16 per cent of all housing construction in Australia.

The Housing Australia Future Fund is an ambitious........

© Canberra Times