So, many people will live all their lives in rented accommodation and their proportion is growing as many middle-income couples who, in former times, would have moved on to home ownership, now do so at a much later age – or go into retirement as renters.

The value of the age pension is based on the implicit assumption that retirees own their home. If so, living on the age pension is tolerable. If not, having to rent privately pushes age pensioners below the poverty line. That’s particularly true of single, usually widowed pensioners.

For many years, the federal government dealt with the problem of people on very low incomes by funding the states to provide a lot of what used to be called “housing commission” accommodation, now called public housing.

Trouble is, the rise of neo-liberalism has made government ownership of housing deeply unfashionable. As the Grattan Institute’s Brendan Coates reminds us in a paper issued this week, the national stock of about 430,000 public housing dwellings has barely grown in 20 years, while the population has increased by 33 per cent.

Whereas in 1991 public housing accounted for about 6 per cent of all housing, it’s now less than 4 per cent. Some of this is made up by government-subsidised “community housing”, but not much.

In public housing, rents are capped at 25 per cent of tenants’ incomes. By contrast, Coates says, the typical low-income private renter pays 37 per cent of their income.

When the Hawke-Keating government turned away from public housing, it shifted to paying rent assistance to people on social welfare. But these payments have failed to keep up with private rents.

The Morrison government says spending on social housing is up to the states. But compared to the feds, the states have a lot less money to spare. Anthony Albanese’s Labor has proposed setting up a $10 billion “housing Australia future fund”, the earnings from which would be used to finance the building of additional public housing.

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Coates proposes a fund twice that size, which he calculates would provide 3000 extra housing units a year, in perpetuity. Which, he says, would cost the taxpayer very little. He also wants the feds’ rent assistance to be indexed to the cost of renting.

The point is that when people on low incomes become unable to afford private rents, the next step is homelessness.

If, under pressure from all us affluent home owners, neither side of politics is willing to make home ownership more affordable by removing the many tax breaks that make it so attractive as a form of investment, then the least they – and we – can do is reduce the housing pain of those who really struggle to rent a place.

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