October 2026

There are 588 public housing properties sitting empty in Canberra while 3,652 approved applicants wait for somewhere to live.

Some applicants have been waiting more than five years.

If ever there was a statistic that demonstrated the incompetence of government housing management in Australia, this is it.

At a time when Australia is experiencing a chronic shortage of public and social housing, with homelessness rising and thousands of vulnerable households struggling to find accommodation, the ACT Government has hundreds of dwellings standing vacant.

And apparently nobody knows quite why.

According to an article by Region Canberra, the ACT Legislative Assembly has unanimously demanded detailed information about public housing vacancies, maintenance, spending and management. The government has been given 60 days to produce the records.

The motion was introduced by Greens MLA Rebecca Vassarotti and independent MLA Thomas Emerson, who revealed that the public housing waiting list has grown by more than 600 households since 2024.

Meanwhile, the proportion of government housing meeting acceptable standards has deteriorated from 81% in 2016 to just 71% today. Emerson told the Assembly: “Something is fundamentally broken here.”

That’s something of an understatement.

The average waiting time for standard public housing applicants is now 1,875 days. That’s more than five years. And those wanting transfers between public housing properties face an average wait of 1,586 days.

Meanwhile, properties remain empty and others are falling into disrepair.

Liberal housing spokesperson Chiaka Barry highlighted one particularly disturbing case involving a constituent whose roof had collapsed and who had reportedly been waiting three months for repairs.

Barry made the obvious point that governments impose minimum housing standards on private landlords but apparently fail to meet those same standards themselves.

This is another example of the extraordinary double standards of government.

Politicians routinely lecture private property owners about their responsibilities, introduce increasingly onerous regulations and blame investors for Australia’s housing problems.

Yet governments themselves are demonstrably failing to provide adequate accommodation for their most vulnerable citizens.

ACT Housing Minister Suzanne Orr defended the government’s position, suggesting that producing the requested information would require new reporting systems because some of the data was not readily available.

This raises another question: how can a government competently manage thousands of properties without having accessible information about vacancies, maintenance and performance?

The ACT situation reflects a much bigger national failure.

Governments across Australia have failed to invest adequately in public and social housing, while allowing bureaucratic inefficiency and poor maintenance practices to compound the shortage.

The result is predictable: growing waiting lists, deteriorating properties and increasing homelessness.

Australia doesn’t just need more public housing. It needs governments capable of managing the housing they already own.