Somewhere along the way, we stopped thinking about housing as a home and started thinking about it only as a wealth creation mechanism.

That shift, quiet and cumulative and largely uncontested across decades of politics, has built an inequality into the foundations of this country that we can no longer ignore.

Australians are ambitious people. We work hard, we plan ahead and we want to build something for ourselves and our families. But none of that means much without somewhere safe to come home to at night. A secure home is the foundation on which everything else is built.

The debate we are having is not really about tax settings, planning frameworks or investment structures. It is about what kind of community we want to be.

It has been quite a fortnight to be in housing policy.

Last week, hundreds of Australia’s most committed affordable housing practitioners gathered in Melbourne for the Affordable Housing Development and Investment Summit: Developers, community housing providers, superannuation funds, policy makers, academics, all grinding away at the practical question of how we build more affordable rental homes for the people who need them most.

I also appeared before the Senate select committee on intergenerational housing inequity, which continues to hear evidence from experts, advocates and Australians experiencing the effects of the housing crisis firsthand. A separate Senate inquiry heard evidence on the Albanese government’s proposed changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax, and the legislation passed the Senate this week.

That these things happened in the same fortnight is not a coincidence. It reflects a housing system that has reached a genuine point of reckoning, and a political moment where, for the first time in a long time, there is real appetite to do something about it. The debate we are having is not really about tax settings, planning frameworks or investment structures. It is about what kind of community we want to be.

The government’s decision to reform capital gains tax concessions and negative gearing is courageous and........

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