The Housing Solution — Part 1

Housing solutions, part one. Memo 6 set out the predicament; this memo sets out the first of the answers. A new Community Town zone — privately owned mobile dwellings on shared rural land, with communal kitchens, workshops and work space, portable between communities — as the entry rung to home ownership rather than a substitute for it.

1. The proposition

The Housing Predicament set out the position: 112,365 dwellings behind the national target at twenty-one months, a workforce short 90,000 people, 3,435 builders insolvent in a year, 386 lots on the market across Greater Perth, and rents rising at 8.1 per cent against wages at 3.4. Every constraint in that memo bears on building more houses, in the same places, in the same way.

This memo proposes something that is not that. It is the first in a series setting out solutions, and it takes one route: rural community living.

Australia has made it legal to share land at the end of a life and illegal at the start of one.

A retired couple can buy a home in a lifestyle village, own the dwelling, lease the site, and share a community centre, a workshop and gardens with a hundred neighbours. The model is legal, financed by banks and operated by listed companies. The only meaningful restriction is that residents must generally be over 55.

A nurse of thirty-five, a carpenter, a single parent or a couple saving for a deposit cannot do the same thing. Not because the model fails at their age, but because no planning instrument permits it.

This memo proposes one: a rural community living zone, in which privately owned mobile dwellings sit on shared land with communal kitchens, workshops and work space, under a lease that gives residents security and the ability to leave.

It is not a substitute for owning a house. It is the rung before it. A household lives cheaply, works, saves, and buys land later. What is missing from the Australian housing ladder is not the top. It is the bottom.

2. Who it is for

This suits a minority. Most Australians will not choose to live communally, and the case does not require them to.

It suits people at the start: young households with no deposit, workers in regions where nothing is available to rent, tradespeople and makers who need space more than they need a spare bedroom, people leaving a relationship, and people who want to live around others rather than alone.

The arithmetic works precisely because the share is small. Australia has approximately 10.8 million occupied private dwellings. One per cent is 108,000 households, each of them vacating a dwelling in a city or town.

The National Housing Accord is short roughly 64,000 dwellings a year against its own target. One per cent uptake exceeds a full year of that shortfall. Half a per cent clears most of it.

Communal buildings, an effluent system, water, power and access all have to be constructed. Section 6 sets the standards they must meet.

Eighty households as detached houses require eighty slabs, eighty roofs, eighty kitchens, eighty bathrooms, eighty driveways and a subdivision to put them on.

The same eighty households in a community bring their own dwellings with them — caravans, vans and transportable homes, built in a factory and driven in. What the site builds is the communal buildings, a shared effluent and water system, and an access road, on rural land already titled, already rated and already served by a road.

The site-built component is a fraction of the equivalent. The dwellings are manufactured off site rather than built by trades in short supply, and no new residential land is released to accommodate any of it.

3. What a community is

A single rural title. Twenty to eighty households, or fifty to two hundred residents. Each household owns its dwelling; the land is owned by an operator and leased to residents under a site agreement.

3.1 The private dwelling is mobile

A caravan, a park home or a transportable dwelling. It is bought outright at a fraction of the price of a house, it depreciates rather than appreciates, and it belongs to the household rather than to the operator.

Mobility is what makes the tenure protections at section 7 effective.

3.2 The shared buildings are the point

Communal kitchen and dining, laundry and amenities, and covered gathering space, built to the Building Code. The quality of the shared buildings is what distinguishes this from a caravan park, where shared facilities are minimal and the dwelling is the whole of the accommodation.

This is a standard the zone should require rather than encourage: a minimum communal floor area per resident, constructed and certified before occupation begins.

3.3 Work happens on site

Workshops for trades and makers, shared machinery, and connected work space. A furniture maker, a welder, a ceramicist, a mechanic and a software developer no longer need to be near a city; they need cheap space and a connection.

Income has been the recurring constraint on rural communities. A workshop and a network connection now support a business that previously required proximity to a city.

It also changes what the community is to the district around it. A settlement that only houses people is a cost to a shire. A settlement that produces is economic activity, tradespeople in a region that cannot get them, and businesses registered locally.

4. Why it is currently unlawful

The obstacle is not hostility and it is not the Building Code. It is that two separate bodies of law each answer a question they were not written for.

4.1 The caravan regulations

In Western Australia, living on land in a moveable dwelling is governed by the Caravan Parks and Camping Grounds Act 1995 and its 1997 Regulations — a licensing regime written for commercial tourist accommodation.

Under regulation 11 a person may camp on land they own for up to 3 nights in any 28 consecutive days, raised to 5 nights by the 2024 amendment. Beyond that, written approval is required.

Two further provisions prohibit the model outright. Regulation 9 provides that park homes may only be occupied in caravan parks. Regulation 12 caps the number of caravans on a lot.

Five nights a month without approval, a park home lawful only inside a licensed caravan park, and a cap on caravans per title. A community of fifty people on a 200 hectare farm is unlawful three times before any question of sanitation, water or fire is reached.

The classification is the underlying problem. A person living in a moveable dwelling on rural land is a camper, and camping is a tourism activity that the regulations limit by duration. The single exception is a person employed on that land in pastoral or agricultural work, occupying seasonally.

Neither describes a resident of a community. A person who lives on the land, works in its gardens and kitchens, maintains its buildings and contributes labour to the settlement is not a tourist, and is not an employee of a commercial farming operation. The nearest recognised arrangement is the willing worker on an organic farm, where labour is exchanged for accommodation and food — an arrangement that is well established in Australia and has no standing in these regulations either.

The law already accepts that working on land changes the analysis: that is what the pastoral exemption does. What it does not accept is work directed to the community rather than to an employer. A resident is therefore assessed as a camper, and permitted to remain for five nights a month.

One recent change matters. The 2024 amendment inserted regulation 11A, under which a local government may approve camping on private land for up to 24 consecutive months, and regulation 11B, under which an applicant refused by the local government may apply to the Minister within 35 days for approval of the same period. The state has already legislated an override of council refusal.

4.2 The zone that does not exist

The second obstacle is harder. Planning schemes assess proposals by use class. A scheme lists classes and states whether each is permitted, discretionary or prohibited in a zone, and an applicant must nominate one.

A community of this kind is not one use. It is dwellings, and communal buildings, and workshops and small business, and a working farm. Under a planning scheme those are separate classes with separate treatment.

Nominating caravan park imports the tourism licensing regime, which makes no provision for permanent residence, workshops or agriculture. Nominating rural workers' accommodation restricts occupation to people employed on that land, seasonally. Nominating multiple dwellings places the proposal in a class the rural zone does not contemplate.

There is no class for a settlement that is partly residential, partly communal and partly productive. No such class has been drafted.

The fix is to write it. A new zone and use class — Community Town — added to state planning instruments and adopted into local planning schemes.

It is a settlement type rather than a use class, which is what allows it to contain dwellings, communal buildings, workshops and agriculture at once. An applicant nominates Community Town and is assessed against the standards for that zone, instead of nominating one of four classes that each describe a fraction of the proposal.

Local governments do not need to invent it. The state creates the zone and the standards; a council adopts it into its scheme and applies it, in the same way every other zone reaches a local planning scheme. Section 6 sets out what the zone must specify.

5. The parts that already work

Almost every element of this proposal is already lawful somewhere in Australia. What does not exist is the combination.

5.1 Land lease communities

Residents owning a dwelling on leased land is an established tenure with its own legislation, including the Residential (Land Lease) Communities Act 2013 in New South Wales. It provides site agreements, security of tenure, rules governing site fee increases, and dispute resolution.

The tenure question is therefore already answered. It does not need inventing; it needs applying.

5.2 The Northern Territory

Under the Northern Territory Planning Scheme 2020, caravan accommodation is a permitted use in standard residential zones, removing local government control over stay limits and allowing occupation for up to six months without a permit, with a further pathway for permanent occupation by a dependant of the resident of the main dwelling.

An Australian jurisdiction has already decided that living in a moveable dwelling is a housing question rather than a tourism question.

5.3 Rural land sharing

New South Wales has permitted rural land sharing communities — multiple dwellings on one rural title with shared land and facilities — since the late 1980s. The mechanism exists. It is rarely applied, because minimum lot sizes and subdivision controls prevent it in most locations.

6. The Community Town zone

What is proposed is a single planning instrument that sets out, completely, how a Community Town is lawfully established. Not a set of prohibitions with an exemption attached, but a followable pathway.

It must specify nine things.

• Definition. A Community Town is a rural settlement of moveable private dwellings with shared communal, amenity and productive buildings on one title.
• Location. Minimum lot size, separation from boundaries, and maximum distance from a town with a school and a doctor.
• Scale. Maximum dwellings and maximum residents, with assessment tiers by size.
• Permitted uses within it. Dwellings, communal buildings, workshops, small business and continuing agriculture, permitted inside the zone rather than separately.
• Tenure. Site agreements under land lease legislation, with security of tenure and regulated fees.
• Services. Effluent, potable water, waste, all-weather access, fire management and evacuation.
• Approval. The decision-maker, the criteria, a statutory clock, and the appeal.
• Rates. A per-site or community-level charge, so that a shire receives revenue for the services its residents use.
• Decommissioning. What is removed, by whom, and against what bond, if the community closes.

The rates provision determines whether a council has revenue from the residents using its roads and services. Without it, approval imposes cost on the shire and returns nothing.

7. Portability, and why it matters

The distinctive feature of this proposal is not the dwellings or the shared buildings. It is that there is more than one community, and a household can move between them.

A resident who no longer wishes to stay — because the community has changed, because the work has moved, because a relationship has ended, or because they want to live in Queensland — connects the dwelling and drives it to another community. They do not sell at a loss, forfeit a bond, or litigate.

This addresses what happens when an arrangement fails. Where a dwelling is fixed to a site, a resident in dispute with an operator either accepts the position or sells at a loss. Where it is not, they relocate.

It also repairs the known weakness of land lease tenure. The protection offered by a right to leave depends entirely on whether the dwelling can actually be moved and whether there is anywhere to move it to. A single community satisfies neither condition. A network satisfies both.

Portability is therefore a design requirement rather than a convenience. It requires common site standards across communities, dwellings that remain road legal, and reciprocal arrangements between operators — all of which are matters for the instrument proposed at section 6.

8. What it would free up

Section 2 sets out the national arithmetic. The demand case is clearest in the regions.

The Margaret River region has described itself as facing unprecedented staff and accommodation shortages, with a worker shortage severe enough to affect the ability of businesses to open. Its tourism association, wine association, chambers of commerce, the City of Busselton and the Shire of Augusta Margaret River have worked jointly on solutions.

Regional vacancy rates recorded in Memo 6 are 0.1 per cent in Karratha and 1.5 per cent in Albury, against the 3.0 per cent the Real Estate Institute of Australia treats as balanced. Research published in 2026 found seasonal workers across Australia housed in shipping containers, caravans and portable buildings, with crowding affecting sleep and health.

These are districts where the accommodation shortage is documented by the councils themselves, where caravan parks are full through the season, and where the regulation that prohibits the only available land from being used exists in part to protect those caravan parks.

Every household that moves to a community vacates a dwelling elsewhere. That is the mechanism, and it operates on existing rural land with a fraction of the construction the same households would require as houses.

9. Trials

The proposal is that the model be tested before it is adopted at scale.

Four to six demonstrator communities, at least one on a metropolitan fringe and one in a region with a documented worker shortage. Each established under the zone proposed at section 6.

Servicing costs are the principal capital requirement, and a funding source exists. The Commonwealth's $2 billion Local Infrastructure Fund was established to deliver water, power, sewerage and roads for new housing, and since 5 January 2026 uncommitted allocations have been available to eligible projects regardless of jurisdiction.

What a trial must measure, and publish: dwellings vacated elsewhere per site, cost per resident housed, time from application to occupation, resident retention and turnover, businesses established, and performance against the effluent, water and fire standards.

Two years of that evidence would establish whether the model performs as described.

10. What has to change

Four instruments, none of which requires a referendum, new taxation or Commonwealth agreement.

• A new Community Town zone and use class in state planning instruments, adopted into local planning schemes, as set out at section 6.
• Amendment of the caravan and camping regulations so that regulation 9 does not prohibit park home occupation within an approved community, and regulation 12 does not cap dwellings within one.
• A residency definition. A person living in a Community Town is a resident, not a camper, and is not subject to the duration limits that apply to tourism.
• Performance-based standards for effluent, water and fire, with a proportionate certification pathway.
• Extension of land lease community legislation to cover these settlements, so residents hold site agreements and enforceable rights.

All four are state powers. None of them requires a dollar of recurrent expenditure. What they require is the decision that people living in moveable dwellings on shared rural land is a housing question rather than a tourism licensing question — which is a decision the Northern Territory has already taken.

11. What follows

Later memos in this series set out other routes.

• Subdivision and secondary dwellings on land already serviced.
• Townhouses, terraces and walk-ups, which most Australian zoning forbids.
• Community living in converted commercial buildings.
• Factory-built housing.
• Bringing long-term vacant stock back into use.
• Rezoning windfall capture to pay for servicing.

None of them replaces house building.

12. Sources

1. Western Australia, Caravan Parks and Camping Grounds Act 1995 and Caravan Parks and Camping Grounds Regulations 1997 — regulation 11 permitting camping on land the person owns for up to 3 nights in any 28 consecutive days; regulation 9 providing that park homes may only be occupied in caravan parks; regulation 12 limiting the number of caravans on a lot; and regulation 4 defining park home. Cited in section 4.1.
2. Western Australia, Caravan Parks and Camping Grounds Amendment Regulations 2024 — the increase from 3 to 5 nights in any 28 consecutive days; new regulation 11A permitting a local government to approve camping on private land for up to 24 consecutive months; and new regulation 11B permitting an applicant refused, restricted or revoked by a local government to apply to the Minister within 35 days for approval of up to 24 consecutive months. Cited in section 4.1.
3. Northern Territory Planning Scheme 2020 — caravan accommodation as a permitted use in standard residential zones, the removal of local government control over stay limits, occupation for up to six months without a permit, and the pathway for permanent occupation by a dependant of the resident of the main dwelling. Cited in section 5.2.
4. New South Wales, Residential (Land Lease) Communities Act 2013 — site agreements, security of tenure, regulation of site fee increases and dispute resolution for residents who own a dwelling on leased land. Cited in sections 5.1 and 11.
5. New South Wales rural land sharing community provisions, in force since the late 1980s — multiple dwellings on a single rural title with shared land and facilities, and the minimum lot size and subdivision controls that limit their application. Cited in section 5.3.
6. Queensland Government planning guidance on tiny homes, and Victorian planning guidance on moveable dwellings — the treatment of multiple permanent moveable dwellings on one lot as multiple dwellings, the statement that multiple dwellings are generally more suited to residential than rural zones, and council occupation limits commonly between 28 and 60 days a year. Cited in section 4.2.
7. Sovereign Australia Party, The Housing Predicament (Memo 6) — 10.8 million occupied private dwellings and the tenure split; the National Housing Accord shortfall of approximately 64,000 dwellings a year against target; average household size of 2.5 people and 26 per cent of households containing one person; and regional rental vacancy of 0.1 per cent in Karratha and 1.5 per cent in Albury against the 3.0 per cent treated as balanced. Cited in sections 2 and 8.
8. Margaret River Busselton Tourism Association, housing and workforce statements — the description of unprecedented staff and accommodation shortages in the region, a worker shortage severe enough to affect the ability of businesses to open, and the joint work of the tourism association, wine association, chambers of commerce, City of Busselton and Shire of Augusta Margaret River on solutions. Cited in section 8.
9. Research on seasonal and vulnerable worker accommodation published in 2026 — the reliance of seasonal workers on shipping containers, caravans and portable buildings, and the effects of crowding on sleep and health. Cited in section 8.
10. Australian Government budget papers and Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Housing assistance in Australia 2026 — the $2 billion Local Infrastructure Fund for water, power, sewerage and roads supporting new housing, and the availability of uncommitted allocations to eligible projects regardless of jurisdiction from 5 January 2026. Cited in section 9.