1 Private rental housing provision in Australia: A Structural Analysis Paper prepared for the 2001 National Housing Conference Brisbane, October 2001 Tim Seelig Ph.D. Candidate Swinburne Institute for Social Research Abstract Federal and State housing policy is becoming ever more reliant on the private sector to provide housing for low-income consumers. This policy direction is being driven by a number of factors, including funding constraints for social housing, changes in attitudes around the role of government in social policy affairs, and also by assumptions about the capacity of the private rental sector. At the same time, while the supply of rental stock per se is quite healthy, there is evidence of significant market failure in the private rental sector, particularly around the supply of lower cost housing. Using the concept of ‘structures of housing provision’ as a framework for analysing the private rental sector, this paper investigates the institutional and structural processes of how rental housing is produced, exchanged and consumed, using Brisbane as a case-study. The structures of housing provision approach is used as a mechanism to help explain private rental housing trends and to assist in understanding how rental markets work. The paper, drawing extensively on recent, largely unpublished doctoral research into the political economy of private rental housing in Brisbane, seeks to raise important questions around the practicality of current housing policy approaches, which see a greater role for the private rental sector in the provision of lower cost housing. The argument is made that the social relations around housing provision are likely to have contributed to problems of supply at the low cost end of the market.