The Great Housing Hijack - In Conversation

The Great Housing Hijack reveals how vested interests pull the strings on the property market in Australia, and offers a solution for genuinely affordable housing for those who need it.

Everyone claims to want affordable housing, but no one wants cheap housing. While Australians on regular incomes dream of lower rents and prices, the housing policy debate has been hijacked, sailing further away from workable solutions.

Join leading economics commentator Cameron Murray and a panel of industry experts and academics as they discuss The Great Housing Hijack and consider how the best practice housing policies that Cameron draws upon from around the world could create a genuinely affordable housing program without compromising the interests of existing property owners here in Australia. 

Copies of The Great Housing Hijack will be available for purchase at the event. 

The event will also be available online for those unable to attend in person.

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Your Speakers: 

Dr Cameron Murray is Australia's leading expert commentator on housing. He is an economist and co-author of Rigged, and runs his own think-tank, Fresh Economic Thinking. He has been a tenant, a home owner, and a landlord, and he has worked in property development.

Catherine Cashmore is President of Australia's oldest economics organisation, Prosper Australia, Editor of Land Cycle Investor and Director of Cashmore & Co Real Estate. She has been working in the Australian real estate industry as a market analyst, and agent, for over 15 years. Originally from the UK, and having also lived in the US, she has extensive experience across a range of international markets.

Matthew Lloyd-Cape is an expert in socio-economic research and policy development, with a passion for social justice. Matt has had a diverse career, working with international development NGOs, universities, think tanks, and trade unions. Matt is an alumnus of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, where he earned an MSc in International Relations and Development. He also holds an MPhil in Political Economy from the Central European University. Prior to establishing the Centre for Equitable Housing, Matt worked in several roles at Per Capita, having joined the organisation in 2019.

Professor Libby Porter is a scholar of cities particularly the violent processes of urban place-making. Motivated by social and ecological injustice, her work is about how urbanisation creates forms of dispossession and displacement and what we might do about it. Her research aims to sharpen our understanding about the relationship between land and housing justice, the displacing effects of urban renewal, critical questions of urban governance and the politics of property. In her work, and life, Libby attempts to reckon with the politics and practices of learning, as a non-Indigenous person, to live lawfully on Country. Libby is currently the Director for RMIT University's Centre for Urban Research.

The event will be hosted by Professor Jago Dodson. Jago is the Director of RMIT University's Urban Futures Enabling Impact Platform. RMIT’s Enabling Impact Platforms is the University’s unique mechanism in bringing together researchers and industry experts to rapidly respond to large-scale, complex issues in society. Professor Dodson has an extensive record of research into housing, transport, urban planning, urban policy, governance, infrastructure, energy, and spatial labour market questions. Read about Jago's work. 

The Great Housing Hijack - In Conversation is supported by RMIT University’s Urban Futures Enabling Impact Platform. Thank you to our event partners The RMIT University Centre for Urban Research, Per Capita and Prosper.