The federal government will be urged to help create 500,000 social and affordable rental homes in a plan that includes tax incentives for superannuation to invest in affordable housing.
The Everybody’s Home campaign director, Kate Colvin, will outline the community housing and homelessness sector’s plan at the National Press Club on Tuesday.
An Essential poll, also released on Tuesday, showed a majority of voters think the Turnbull government is not doing enough to fix housing affordability, including half of Coalition voters.
The housing plan calls for capital investment in 300,000 new social and Aboriginal housing properties and a new tax incentive or direct subsidy to leverage super fund and other private-sector investment in 200,000 low-cost rental properties. In the meantime, the government should increase rent assistance.
First-home buyers should be prioritised over property speculators by “resetting the tax system”, the plan says, endorsing changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax.
The Everybody’s Home campaign also wants nationally consistent renters’ rights, including the abolition of “no grounds” evictions, limiting rent increases to once a year and minimum standards to ensure rental properties are habitable.
The Essential poll found 62% of people think the government should do more to fix housing affordability, while 60% think the opposition should also go further. It had a sample of more than 1,000 and a margin of error of 3%.
The poll found 49% of Coalition voters believe the government is not doing enough and 57% of Labor voters believe the opposition should do more.
Colvin said the Everybody’s Home campaign would “address the entire housing system to make sure every Australian has a safe, secure roof over their head whether they’re buying, renting or at risk of homelessness”.
“Making sure everyone has a home is a top-order priority for Australians but it is not matched by action from our political leaders. That needs to change,” she said.
“Genuine home buyers are missing out to people building investment portfolios. There’s a chronic shortage of social and affordable rental options, and it’s causing record levels of homelessness.”
Last week the Australian Bureau of Statistics released statistics showing that homelessness had increased by 14% between the 2011 and 2016 censuses, with 116,427 people now thought to have no permanent home.
In the 2017 budget the Turnbull government unveiled a number of housing affordability measures including increasing the capital gains tax discount for affordable housing and allowing first-home buyers to use the tax benefits of superannuation to save a deposit.
Economists welcomed the measures but rated them less likely to affect house prices than Labor’s policies to halve the capital gains tax discount and to restrict negative gearing to new properties.
In comments to Guardian Australia a spokeswoman for assistant minister to the treasurer, Michael Sukkar, said the national housing market had cooled in the last six months but housing affordability would be a “permanent feature” of Turnbull government budgets.
“We can’t rest on our laurels,” she said. “The government remains committed to reducing pressure on housing affordability for Australians across the spectrum, from first-home buyers, to older Australians looking to downsize, to those who rely on social housing, and those who are experiencing homelessness.”
In March 2017 the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority put limits on interest-only loans favoured by negatively geared investors, which led to loans to first-home buyers increasing to their highest level in five years.
In February, Malcolm Turnbull said the government had taken a “more measured and calibrated approach to the housing market” and the Apra changes had resulted in a “big reduction in interest-only loans”.
Turnbull repeated the claim that the government’s policies were like “using a scalpel ... rather than a meat cleaver”, despite the revelation of Treasury documents that said the impact of Labor’s policies would be “relatively modest”.
