Robert Menzies fostered Australia’s love of home ownership, but the romance is souring

“Australia is the small house,” the architect Robin Boyd reflected in his book Australia’s Home in 1952. “Ownership of one in a fenced allotment is as inevitable and unquestionable a goal of the average Australian as marriage”.

Yet when Robert Menzies retired as prime minister in 1966, the rapid rise of home ownership was barely mentioned in the press as part of his legacy. This is despite the fact that during his lengthy prime ministership (December 1949 – January 1966), home ownership expanded from about half of all homes to more than seven in ten. The rest were a mix of private and government rentals.

The policy changes introduced under Menzies transformed Australia’s social and cultural attitudes towards housing. They left behind a legacy that’s still legible now, for better and for worse.

Politics and policy share a love-hate relationship, but we can’t have one without the other. In this six-part series, we’re chronicling how policies have shaped Australia’s prime ministers, for better or worse, and what it means for how politicians tackle today’s big challenges. ‘Homes material, homes human and homes spiritual’ The question of how to accommodate Australians had featured with increasing prominence in policy debate between the wars. Homelessness had been a feature of the Depression. Social reformers had campaigned for slum abolition and better workers’ housing. State governments began establishing agencies devoted to building public housing in the 1930s. Home-building was limited during the Depression era and non-existent during the war. By 1945, the desire of many couples to commence normal married life after years of delay and the initiation of a large immigration program inevitably produced a housing shortage. Labor’s Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement envisaged public housing as a central feature of housing provision, while recognising that many people would, as opportunity arose, provide for themselves. The newly-formed Liberal Party had other ideas. They made much of Labor government minister John Dedman’s criticism of the idea of creating “little capitalists” through home ownership. In “The Forgotten People”, a broadcast Menzies delivered while in the political wilderness in 1942, he spoke of “homes material, homes human and homes spiritual”. The rise of the DIY suburb After Menzies won office in 1949, government policy favoured home ownership over public housing. Initially, however, there was not a great deal the government could do due to shortages of labour and materials, and the ten-year duration of the 1945 agreement with the states. Some people refused to wait, borrowed to buy a block of land, and used their weekends and summer evenings – and the labour of family and friends – to build for themselves. A few formed cooperatives, such as that which became the basis for the suburb of Lalor in Melbourne. In 1955, when novelist Patrick White published The Tree of Man, his story of a couple carving their home out of a colonial wilderness was a theme being reprised, in more genteel circumstances, by new generations on the expanding suburban frontier. In time, private contractors and larger companies such as A.V. Jennings – which became the largest of them all through its attractive designs, display villages and canny marketing – came to replace most of the do-it-yourself activity. The remarkable scene in the 1966 film They’re a Weird Mob of the construction of a Sydney home by a group of jolly building workers, including new Italian migrant Nino Culotta, was completely of its time. Homes were most commonly made of “brick veneer” or “fibro”. Suburbia generated its own iconography and, in time, a good deal of nostalgia. The Hills Hoist would be prominent in each. A metal rotary clothesline pioneered in Adelaide by Lance Hill, it became a symbol of Australia, instantly evocative of the postwar ideal – and increasingly the reality – of an Australian home on a quarter-acre block. A very suburban nation In Canberra at The Lodge, Bob and Pattie Menzies, and their daughter Heather before her marriage in 1955, lived as first suburban family in this very suburban nation. Tourist buses would stop outside in the hope of spotting them on the verandah. Weekends were for mushrooming in fields nearby. Canberra itself grew from a country town into a flourishing city under the impact of both public and private housing construction, as civil servants relocated and settled in its soon sprawling suburbs. The appearance was of individualism, thrift and self-reliance, amid a sense of sameness. The reality was that governments, including that of Menzies, had their fingerprints over pretty much every new picket fence in the country. The federal government funded war service homes for former service personnel. Bank regulation, the lending of the government-owned Commonwealth Bank, and federal financial support for building society loans helped ensure a good supply of cheap funds for aspiring homeowners. The Commonwealth provided incentives for state governments to sell housing to private buyers built under a new mid-1950s housing agreement.

And there were financial incentives for renters to buy the homes in which they were living. In 1964 the Menzies government also introduced a grant for first-home buyers, prefiguring later schemes of this kind.

Still, public housing remained an important aspect of housing provision. It was probably essential in sustaining the viability of Australia’s large immigration program, ensuring that both poorer “old” Australians and newcomers had access to housing, even if for many it might be a stepping stone to homeownership.

The South Australian Liberal and Country League government of Tom Playford used cheap and plentiful public housing, provided by the state’s Housing Trust, to attract both industry and workers.

Shaping 75 years of housing policy

The national policy shift in the 1980s away from mass public provision and towards public housing as welfare has been one feeder of the long-standing inability of governments to ensure that sufficient affordable housing is available for those who need it. In shifting the balance to private provision, the Menzies government had done some of the groundwork for this later, unfortunate change.

All the same, the achievements of the Menzies government in housing policy were considerable, and its housing legacy has a reasonable claim to being considered its most significant for how Australians have lived over the last three quarters of a century.

Unfortunately, its emphasis on supply, as well as its sharp focus on helping the owner-occupier rather than the speculator or investor, have been treated as too radical for modern governments to emulate. The depth of the crisis that this has induced finally seems to be shifting their appetite for such political risk.