I agree with ttbn
Immigration MUST be cut to counter rising home prices.
It's real simple do you want homes for your kids, or homes for foreigners
Until we can build them faster than they are needed, immigration has to be cut.

Secondly we need a better system for housing affordability.
And the only way we can do that is find a way to build aduequete liveable dwellings cheap as chips.

Years ago we had caravan parks everywhere, they worked well for holiday makers travelling and a lower tier measure where people lived in them for longer periods until they could do better for themselves.

And back in the old days caravan parks were a lot more liveable than housing commission streets these days.

My friend lives in a housing commission townhouse in a street which has many of them. A few houses down from her there is what she calls the 'screaming house' everyday there's dramas, adolescents out in the street screaming and making threats and fights, often sounds of house damage, no end of dramas for the whole street just because of this one house.
Next door to that house is another housing commission house which has been empty for months. No one will take it because of the crazy people next door. Kick the bad people out make it liveable for the rest of the street, and someone would take that other house, cops are there all the time, but no-one does anything.

Make these people the ones to live in tents, help those that genuinely need / deserve it.

There's no reason why government cant buy up larger blocks of land here and there where needed, with a plan to sell them off in 7 years time.
They can make money on the sale and buy more land.
Do it right, and it will cost the taxpayer NOTHING.

In the meantime, there's no reason why houses like this can't be put down where needed to slowly build up a greater supply.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCOgMYuKv2o

All we need is to take a few good ideas and find some smart people to implement them.

Lets say we contract these ideas (design and implementation) out to private companies
- they will ALL add their profit onto it, then it won't be affordable.

So what do we do?
We go to the Universitys and say this is what we want.
Cheap housing solution out of the box - See link above

Hold competitions at university's for the best designs, materials etc.
You put the existing parts of our society to use.
Offer 50k prize for the winning ideas / designs and have the existing experts we have in our university provide industry specific advice.
Cut out all the snouts that want a piece of the government contracts, lower the costs.

Find the best way to build them on production lines at the lowest cost, then find other ways to implement at low cost.

1 minute look, and I find this
Cert III in landscape construction
http://tafeqld.edu.au/course/17/17699/certificate-iii-in-landscape-construction

Ok, youngsters, you'll now do the practical part of your studies ON THE JOB.
One hand washes the other.
Cut costs, and turn it into a certifiable learning opportunity.
They can dig holes, plant tress rake topsoil, throw lawn seed around.
get work for the dole people to help.

Turn liabilities into breakevens.

If we don't find solutions, then the problem just gets worse
Do we want this instead:
http://youtu.be/yRWmKh13b50

This is what we will get if we don't focus our policies on finding the right solutions to our problems.

It a GUARANTEE, tent cities and people living in their cars are already a reality.

If we don't start thinking smarter and using what we already have to get things done, we're haddit.

- And this isn't just about housing -

AC, sad but true. "what she calls the 'screaming house' everyday there's dramas" The fact is there are dysfunctional people in society, how on earth we deal with these people is a real problem. Dysfunctional adults come from dysfunctional families themselves, they have dysfunctional kids, and generally live in dysfunctional neighbourhoods, its a vicious circle. That's a fact of life, and simply moving them on is not the solution, it just transfers the problem onto someone else.

My older brother who is a boarder line Nazi and school teacher, said the solution was to go around at midnight and put overdoses of heroin in all the letterboxes, then in the morning send the garbage truck around and pick up all the dead bodies, PROBLEM SOLVED.

One method of getting cheap housing is to make bottles of uniform sizes that can be used as bricks.
Coca Cola agreed to do this about 50 years ago for cheap housing in South America it was knocked back by various Marxist regimes because it would have been demeaning to house people in discarded American waste.
The fact that millions were already living in sub-standard housing built largely of waste didn’t matter.
A system of prefabricated frameless housing was available in Australia 50 years ago and it was banned for domestic use but has been used in industry with great success.

Hey Paul1405,
It's not a bad solution, but there's drawbacks.
The smartest and most entrepreneurial of the young street tuffs is going to figure a plan to rob all those mailboxes, then he will start his own little cartel getting all the other kids in the neighbourhood hooked on the harry.

So it's like yeah-nar.
It has some merit though.

I told you my idea to fix all these problems.
In the same way we have base level (socialist) standards of healthcare and education, we add to that by creating a base-level (socialist) standard for employment.

'The job you have when you don't have a job'

Unemployment is at 4%, that's pretty good, but how many are in full-time employment?
We can bring that number down to ZERO, and provide extra employment for casuals who arent getting enough work already.

Capitalism requires a pool of workers to prevent wage growth, so turn that pool of willing workers into a breakeven instead of a liability.