26 September 2023

No Place Like Home: Repairing Australia’s Housing Crisis

Start the conversation

Reviewed by Rama Gaind.

By Peter Mares, Text Publishing, $32.99.

The statistics are of disturbing, yet we all dream of owning our own home. For most Australians, it is an essential part of our way of life.

More than 100,000 people are homeless. That’s distressing.

According to Mares, an independent writer and researcher, 70% of us are concerned we’ll never own property. More than a million lower-income households in Australia pay above the affordability benchmark for their housing costs.

No Place Like Home is a handy book on how we make sure every Australian can afford a decent place to call home. It’s written in simple language that expands on the complex policies and issues. Inclusive and multi-layered, it avoids the exaggeration and pomposity that frequently accompany these descriptors.

Unhurried and considerate in its pace, it elaborates on the myriad interpretations of homelessness.

“Homelessness covers a range of experiences: sleeping rough, couch surfing, staying in a motel, living in a rooming house or in severely overcrowded accommodation. I doubt the man in the Hawthorn scarf [explained at the start] enjoyed secure housing, and our interactions became for me a more personal version of the direct evidence of homelessness that I would see everywhere on my morning walks with [dog] Snowy. Outside the station itself, just as reliably present as the man in the Hawthorn scarf, was a dishevelled woman huddled against a column. She always looked down, never made eye contact and sometimes seemed to be asleep.”

“At the most basic level, shelter is a fundamental human need that protects our material bodies from the elements, so we are not left like the ‘poor naked wretches’ contemplated by King Lear, with ‘houseless heads and unfed sides’ to bide the pelting of pitiless storms.”

There is a profound physical, cultural, social and psychological connection between the safe interior of home and the uncertain exterior of the world beyond. If we lack the former, then it is much harder to successfully navigate the latter.

As Mares points out: by combining interviews, personal stories, media reports, academic research and publicly available data, “I try to make sense of the issue at play – one citizen’s attempt to find answers to an urgent question that affects us all, and to encourage change, because there’s no place like home”.

Start the conversation

Be among the first to get all the Public Sector and Defence news and views that matter.

Subscribe now and receive the latest news, delivered free to your inbox.

By submitting your email address you are agreeing to Region Group's terms and conditions and privacy policy.