The federal government’s first major tax reform in nearly 30 years was a significant achievement that suggests we may have turned a corner on the housing crisis. It is a good time to revisit Australia’s housing history within the broader history of social policy.

This is a story of public investment for economic growth as well as for the needs of citizens. The railways, telegraphs, hospitals, schools and welfare that gave Australia a reputation for a “pragmatic” rather than “doctrinaire” approach to national development are well known. But governments also invested in housing despite some powerful resistance by interest groups.

This public investment in housing shows how democratic processes worked in this difficult policy area. Most was initiated by Labor governments, some by conservatives, but it all recognised the social and economic value of decent housing, and the difficulties of low-paid workers accessing it via the market. When the eminent architect John Sulman declared in 1914 that “the unsolved problem” in Australia was providing housing at a price that “the living wage workers can pay”, he articulated a “big truth” that remains largely unchanged.

Some public investments were easier to pull off than........

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