Private rental in Australia

Australia is one of a handful of countries where the private rental sector has been going through a period of expansion, with this modest growth being paralleled by a resurgence of public policy interest in the sector. The combination of market growth and renewed policy attention has set in train a process which, if sustained for two or three decades, may see the ascendancy of private rental to the degree that it will be challenging home purchase as the key tenure sector. Whether such a process is necessarily positive and in the long-term public good is a contested point and one which will be taken up in this chapter.