We have to move the housing conversation beyond a game of political football about negative-gearing winners and losers. Australia needs a bipartisan, long-term, housing policy. Why? Because we have a slow-burn, deepening crisis that is affecting Australians who are already highly vulnerable and disadvantaged. They include:

• 206,000 households on the waiting list for social housing;
• 46% of those with greatest needs wait two years or more; and
• 105,000 were designated homeless in the 2011 Census.

The UN Rapporteur on Human Rights, following a visit in 2007, concluded that Australia was failing to deliver the fundamental human right of adequate housing because of the lack of any co-ordinated national strategy. Nothing has changed since 2007.