‘National scandal’: Only 1 in 100 rents are affordable for essential workers

Barely one in 100 rentals in Australia are affordable for the average nurse, construction worker, early childhood educator or hospitality worker.

Anglicare Australia has crunched the numbers and found that essential workers who can get rent have virtually no money to live their lives.

The research surveyed more than 45,000 rental listings across the country in March. For an ambulance worker, 2.2 percent of rents are affordable. It’s all downhill from there for aged care workers, nurses, early childhood educators, construction workers, and finally 0.8 percent of rents are affordable for hospitality workers.

“It should be a national scandal that so few of our essential workers can afford to keep a roof over their heads,” Anglicare Australia chief executive Kasy Chambers said.

Wages have grown by 4 percent in the past 12 months to mid-2014, while rents have risen by 7 percent.

Anglicare’s analysis measures affordability against the adult award wage for each industry.

It’s no mystery why essential industries are understaffed, Ms Chambers said.

“Virtually no part of Australia is affordable for the aged care workers, early childhood educators, cleaners, nurses and many other essential workers we rely on.”

“It’s no wonder that many critical industries are facing labor shortages.”

While rents have increased by 7.3% in the past year, housing as a whole has increased by 5.2%. House prices have fallen in half in Sydney’s suburbs and the average house price in Melbourne is falling.

But Anglicare’s research shows that moving to the regions, once a reliable option for someone to buy a house or rent cheaply while working and saving money, is barely more affordable than the cities.

Compared to the average salary of a cleaner, there were two affordable rents in Cairns in March; March is outside the traditional tourist period in the north Queensland hotspot.

At the same time, the Illawarra, south of Sydney, had three rents a cleaner could afford, Mandurah, in Perth’s far south, had one and the Mornington Peninsula, outside Melbourne, had three.

There were zero listed rentals that a cleaner could afford on the Central Coast and Shoalhaven in NSW, the Gold Coast, the Whitsundays, Toowoomba and Moreton Bay in Qld, south-east Tasmania or the northern half of the interior of WA.

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Anglicare points out that workers in the care industries have likely invested in their education, accepted that they are working essential roles for minimum wage and are now being forced to forego food to afford a place to live.

Social and affordable housing is the solution, Ms Chambers said.

“Building blanket housing and hoping that affordability will go down just doesn’t work.”

“We are also calling for tax reform to put people who need housing, not investors, at the center of our system.

“A push is building to change this system once and for all. These results are dire, but they are also an opportunity for change.”

With Queensland’s election less than two weeks away, the Premier and Treasurer were in the Sunshine State on Tuesday to announce funding to build 1100 mainstream, social, affordable and rental homes in Brisbane and the south.

Federal Housing Minister Clare O’Neil was handed the portfolio in a reshuffle in July.

The Harvard public policy master’s degree holder has been at the forefront of the government’s latest push for reform, re-introducing its Help to Buy bill for a second time last week, after the Greens thwarted the scheme in the Senate.

However, the government’s housing guarantee scheme has had a positive effect.

The Expanded Workforce Housing Guarantee scheme helped 43,800 people – including more than 11,000 key workers – buy a home in the most recent financial year, up 34 per cent.

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