Rural Communities

The first of the housing solutions, companion to Memo 6, The Housing Predicament. Its argument is simple: Australia already knows how to build communities — it builds them for retirees and for mineworkers, lawfully, at scale and at a profit. This memo proposes opening the same model to everyone, on rural land, as the entry rung to home ownership.

1. The housing predicament

The companion memo, The Housing Predicament, sets out the position in full. In short: Australia is 112,365 dwellings behind its national target at twenty-one months, the construction workforce is short 90,000 people, 3,435 builders went insolvent in a year, and rents are 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.

Yet Australia already houses people another way, twice over. A retired couple may 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 lawful, financed by banks and operated by listed companies. A mineworker lives in a private room with a shared mess, gym, laundry and recreation building, in a village manufactured for the purpose. Western Australia alone has more than 135,000 mining workers on site. That too is lawful, financed and operated at scale.

A nurse of thirty-five, a carpenter, a single parent or a couple saving a deposit may not do either, because no planning instrument permits it. On their own rural land, they may lawfully stay five nights a month.

2. The solution: the rural community

The proposal is straightforward: open the model. A new planning zone — the Rural Community — in which privately owned mobile dwellings sit on one shared rural title, with communal living space, kitchens, workshops and work space, under site agreements that give residents security of tenure and the ability to leave, taking their home with them.

This is proven ground. Roughly 130,000 Australians already live this way, in about 900 land lease communities — a $12 billion sector financed by banks, run by listed operators and governed by working legislation, including the Residential (Land Lease) Communities Act 2013 in New South Wales. One in four new entrants to over-55s housing now chooses it over a traditional retirement village. New South Wales has permitted rural land sharing communities — multiple dwellings on one rural title with shared facilities — since the late 1980s. The Northern Territory has gone further and decided that living in a moveable dwelling is a housing question rather than a tourism question, making caravan accommodation a permitted use in its residential zones. CBRE has made the argument this memo makes: on the American model, the same tenure could serve first home buyers and families as well as downsizers. The only thing separating the proven product from this proposal is a clause restricting residents to people over 55.

The benefits are large, and they reach well beyond the residents:

• A home owned outright. The household buys the dwelling for a fraction of the price of a house, carries no thirty-year mortgage, and pays no stamp duty on land it does not buy. It lives cheaply, works, saves, and buys land later — the entry rung to ownership, not a substitute for it.
• A fraction of the infrastructure. A serviced block of land costs $126,811 to create in Victoria, before any house. A community builds one shared spine on one existing title — one wastewater system, one water supply, one power connection, one access road — and nothing enters a utility's network. The cost per household should fall to a fraction of the greenfield figure; that is a proposition for the trials to measure, not a measurement.
• Speed. A transportable dwelling is factory-built in ten to sixteen weeks and installed in days, against 11.5 months from approval to completion for a detached house nationally, 15.45 months in Western Australia, and land release programs that run from four years to a decade. A community houses its first household the week the shared services are commissioned, then another, and another.
• A different workforce. The dwellings come off a production line, not from the site trades the National Housing Accord is short 90,000 of, and capital follows arrivals — the model does not depend on pre-sales, a construction loan or a builder staying solvent for a year.
• The farm stays in the family. Site fees from two or three hectares give a farm an income stream without subdividing anything or selling the land — and sixty residents are labour, a market and a distribution point at the farm gate. Section 3 sets out why that matters at succession.
• Workers where the work is. Housing appears in the districts that cannot staff their businesses — documented by the councils themselves — without a land release program or a new suburb.
• Connection. A third of Australians report feeling lonely some or all of the time. Communal living is associated with increased social support and reduced isolation, strongest among older residents and strongest where residents run the place themselves. The claim is an association, not a treatment effect, and the trials are required to measure it.
• Houses released. More than 60 per cent of Australian homes hold one or two people while more than 75 per cent have three or more bedrooms. The tier aimed at people who already own a house releases the scarcest stock there is — South Australia now forgoes up to $103,830 in stamp duty to get one such home back on the market. A community releases the same house without the transaction.
• Reversible. If a community fails, the dwellings are driven away and the land returns to farming. Almost no other housing intervention can be undone.

Australia has approximately 10.8 million occupied private dwellings. If one per cent of households took this up, 108,000 households would be on the move, against a national shortfall of roughly 64,000 dwellings a year. Most Australians will not choose to live communally, and the case does not require them to — the arithmetic works precisely because the share is small.

The Australian housing ladder is missing its bottom rung, not its top. A rural community is that rung: a place to live affordably, own your home outright, work, save and move on — and every household that climbs it leaves a room or a house behind for somebody else.

3. The proposal, in detail

The zone. The state creates the zone and its standards; a council adopts it into its scheme and applies it, in the same way every other zone reaches a local planning scheme. It is a settlement type rather than a single use class, which is what lets it contain dwellings, communal buildings, workshops and agriculture at once — today those are four separate classes, none of which describes the whole, and no class for such a settlement has ever been drafted.

A community occupies one existing rural title and holds twenty to eighty households, or fifty to two hundred residents. No land is subdivided, no lot is created, and no second certificate of title exists.

The dwelling. A caravan, a park home or a transportable home, bought outright by the household at a fraction of the price of a house. It belongs to the resident, not the operator, and it stays road legal — mobility is what makes the tenure protections below real.

The shared buildings. Communal living space, kitchen and dining, laundry and amenities, and covered gathering space, built to the Building Code. Their quality is what distinguishes a rural community from a caravan park, where the dwelling is the whole of the accommodation — so the zone requires a minimum communal floor area per resident, constructed and certified before occupation begins, rather than encouraging it.

Work on site. Workshops, shared machinery and connected work space. A furniture maker, a welder, a mechanic or a software developer no longer needs to be near a city; they need affordable space and a connection. Income has been the recurring constraint on rural communities, and a workshop with a network connection now supports a business that previously required a city. It also changes what the settlement is to its district: a settlement that produces is economic activity, tradespeople in a region that cannot get them, and businesses registered locally.

The tiers. The zone sets standards, not prices — in the same way a residential zone produces both public housing and a waterfront house. Four tiers cover the range: supported, run with a funded service; entry, a second-hand van and the lowest site fee; standard, a new transportable with full communal buildings and workshops; and premium, what already exists for people over 55, where site fees run $180 to $320 a week. Only the supported tier requires recurrent public funding, and it should not be attempted without a service partner. The other three are commercial.

Indicative configurations, not a prescribed set. Resident numbers are ranges, not capacities. One template will not fit all three, so the zone sets standards and tiers the approval pathway by scale, leaving the form open.

Tenure and portability. Residents hold site agreements under land lease legislation, with security of tenure, regulated fee increases and dispute resolution — the tenure question is already answered by the existing Acts and needs applying, not inventing.

What this proposal adds is the network. A resident who no longer wishes to stay — because the community has changed, the work has moved or a relationship has ended — connects the dwelling and drives it to another community, without selling at a loss, forfeiting a bond or litigating. That answers the strongest objection to communal living: what happens when it goes wrong. It also repairs the known weakness of land lease tenure, because a right to leave is only worth what it costs to exercise. A single community satisfies neither condition; a network satisfies both.

Portability is therefore a design requirement: common site standards across communities, road-legal dwellings, and reciprocal arrangements between operators, all written into the instrument below.

The site agreement. The standard is the agreement, not the person. Entry is assessed against the capacity to meet it, as with any tenancy; the operator applies the same obligations — noise, fire rules, shared machinery, upkeep, the site fee — to every resident; and the agreement carries an enforcement path and an exit that does not depend on goodwill.

Where an arrangement is not working, the ordinary outcome is a household moving to another community rather than an eviction with nowhere to go. Shared living does not suit everybody, and the model only holds if it stays voluntary and the exit stays real.

The supported tier. The same physical model works for people who need support, provided the support is on site — and Australia has run it for over a decade as permanent supportive housing, at Elizabeth Street Common Ground in Melbourne since 2010 and Brisbane Common Ground since 2012. Four features transfer directly: it is permanent housing under a lease, not a program placement; support is offered, not compulsory; the operator and the support service are separate organisations; and tenancies are mixed rather than concentrated, because a ten-year study of 417 tenancies found a site composed entirely of high-needs residents the hardest configuration to hold.

The funding exists and is recurrent — under the NDIS, Specialist Disability Accommodation funds the dwelling and Supported Independent Living funds the workers in it — and the cost case is made: a net saving of about $13,100 a tenant in the first year housed, against a year of the same person sleeping rough.

On census night 2021, 122,000 Australians were homeless, and services turn away an average of 353 requests for help a day. A supported site releases no dwelling; it houses somebody who had none, and the memo counts that separately, never twice. The scope is stated plainly: this is housing with support attached — not a treatment service, a refuge or crisis accommodation, and not a substitute for any of them.

The farm. Australia has roughly 134,000 farm businesses, about 99 per cent of them family owned. The average farmer is 52, twelve years older than the average worker, and about 60 per cent of grain and grazing farmers reported sales of $400,000 or less in a recent year. The pattern is asset rich and income poor, on an asset that can usually only be realised by selling the farm — which is what forces sales at succession.

A rural community changes the arithmetic without changing the title: site fees flow from two or three hectares, the balance stays in production, nothing is subdivided, and the farm is not sold. Residents who want to work the land are the labour a small farm cannot afford, and a settlement of sixty people is a market at the farm gate. None of this touches the separate licensing of egg production, dairying, meat processing or food handling; what the zone changes is who may live there.

Rural workers. A property of fifty thousand acres may lawfully carry one house, because planning schemes count dwellings and a farm is allowed one. The rural workers' dwelling — the one instrument that exists — requires approval, is generally limited to one, must cluster with the existing house, and restricts occupation to a worker on that landholding. The stated purpose of those restrictions is to stop rural land being fragmented into house lots; but the only instrument planning offers is a dwelling attached to a title, so the control on fragmentation operates as a control on accommodation.

A rural community separates the two: it houses people without creating a lot, so the objection the rules were built around does not arise.

Some jurisdictions are already moving — Queensland allows accommodation for up to twenty workers without a development application, and a Victorian council has amended its scheme to permit worker accommodation on farm holdings above forty acres. The demand is not in doubt: more than 30,000 people were working under the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme by late 2024, about 90 per cent of them in agriculture and meat processing, in districts where there is nothing to rent. And the worker's position improves: under a site agreement the worker owns the dwelling and holds tenure independently of the employer, which is a different arrangement from a tied cottage or a bed in a shed.

The neighbours. A rural community is an agricultural use with residents attached, not a residential estate on agricultural land. The footprint is a few hectares, no title is split, and the land around it stays farmed. A resident accepts the agricultural context of the site — spray, dust, noise, hours — in writing, as a term of occupancy before moving in, which is a stronger position than a buyer in a rural residential subdivision, who accepts nothing and may object to everything.

The zone sits inside the right-to-farm frameworks New South Wales and Tasmania have already built, not beside them.

The instrument. One planning instrument sets out how a rural community is lawfully established, in full, as a pathway an applicant can follow. It specifies nine things:

• Definition. A rural settlement of moveable private dwellings with shared communal, amenity and productive buildings on one title.
• Location. Minimum lot size, separation from boundaries, maximum distance from a town with a school and a doctor.
• Scale. Maximum dwellings and residents, with assessment tiers by size.
• Permitted uses. Dwellings, communal buildings, continuing agriculture and any lawful enterprise, assessed against performance standards rather than drawn from a list.
• 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 the shire receives revenue for the services its residents use.
• Decommissioning. What is removed, by whom, and against what bond, if the community closes.

The enterprise provision is written by performance rather than by list for a reason. A planning scheme normally permits business by naming it, and anything not named is prohibited by omission — so an instrument written in 2027 will not contain the business somebody starts in 2033. Noise at the boundary, hours, traffic, waste, effluent load and fire are the things a neighbour and a shire actually care about, and they can be measured against any business without knowing in advance what it is.

4. What would have to change

Five state instruments and two Commonwealth changes. None requires a referendum, new taxation or a dollar of recurrent expenditure.

• A new Rural Community zone and use class in state planning instruments, adopted into local planning schemes, as set out at section 3.
• 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 rural community 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 these settlements, so residents hold site agreements and enforceable rights.

All five are state powers. 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 — a decision the Northern Territory has already taken, and one Western Australia has moved toward: since 2024 its regulations allow a local government to approve camping on private land for up to 24 consecutive months, with a ministerial pathway where a council refuses.

Two changes sit with the Commonwealth. Neither costs anything, and both currently operate to exclude this form of housing from support that already exists.

Rent assistance: a single person who shares a kitchen, bathroom or main living area is classified as a sharer on a materially lower maximum rate — the communal kitchen at the centre of this model is exactly what triggers it, and shared facilities in an approved community should not.

Dwelling recognition: moveable dwellings held under site agreements should count as eligible dwellings for Housing Australia funding, which in any case flows only through registered community housing providers, governments, or consortia including one.

The trials. 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. The capital requirement is the shared servicing, and a funding source exists: the Commonwealth's $2 billion Local Infrastructure Fund was built to deliver water, power, sewerage and roads for new housing, and since 5 January 2026 its uncommitted allocations are open to eligible projects regardless of jurisdiction.

Each trial measures and publishes: dwellings vacated elsewhere per site, cost per resident housed — the figure that turns the infrastructure proposition at section 2 into a measurement — time from application to occupation, resident retention, businesses established, performance against the effluent, water and fire standards, and resident social connection on a validated measure at entry and at twelve months. Two years of that evidence establishes whether the model performs as described.

5. Summary

Australia already knows how to do this. The dwellings are manufactured here, the tenure legislation is written, the finance is proven and the model operates today — for retirees and for mineworkers. The only thing missing is permission for everyone else.

A Rural Community zone supplies it: privately owned homes on shared rural land, communal buildings built to code, work on site, and the right to leave with your home behind you. It asks for five state instruments, two Commonwealth changes and a handful of measured trials, none of which requires new recurrent spending. What it offers back is the missing bottom rung of the housing ladder — a place to live affordably, own outright, work and save — and a house released behind every household that climbs it.

And together with its city companion, this is the answer to the housing crisis itself. The crisis is a shortfall of supply, and these two solutions capture supply that already exists and is currently captured by nobody — rural land that may not lawfully house anyone, and city buildings standing empty. The supported tiers house people who have no dwelling at all. Every other tier lowers the cost of being housed, directly through the cheapest lawful form of home there is, and again through the houses released behind every household that moves.

6. 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 a limited number of nights in any 28 consecutive days; regulation 9 providing that park homes may only be occupied in caravan parks; and regulation 12 limiting the number of caravans on a lot. Cited in sections 1 and 4.
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 by a local government to apply to the Minister within 35 days for approval of the same period. Cited in sections 1 and 4.
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, and occupation for up to six months without a permit. Cited in sections 2 and 4.
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 2 and 3.
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. Cited in section 2.
6. Sovereign Australia Party, The Housing Predicament (Memo 6) — 112,365 dwellings behind the national target at twenty-one months; the construction workforce short approximately 90,000 people; 3,435 builder insolvencies in a year; rents rising 8.1 per cent against wages at 3.4; 10.8 million occupied private dwellings; and the National Housing Accord shortfall of approximately 64,000 dwellings a year against target. Cited in sections 1 and 2.
7. Margaret River Busselton Tourism Association, housing and workforce statements — staff and accommodation shortages 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 2.
8. Western Australian local planning policies on rural workers' dwellings (including Shire of Serpentine Jarrahdale Local Planning Policy 4.14 and Shire of Murray), and New South Wales Department of Primary Industries, Rural Workers Dwellings (Primefact 839) — the requirement for planning approval; the general limit of one such dwelling; the requirement to cluster with the existing house; the express statement that approval does not support subdivision; and occupancy restricted to workers on the landholding. Cited in section 3.
9. Queensland Government, rural workers' accommodation provisions under the Planning Regulation 2017 (Schedule 6), and Swan Hill Rural City Council planning scheme amendment — accommodation for up to 20 workers without development assessment in Queensland, and the Victorian amendment permitting worker accommodation in farming zones on holdings above 40 acres subject to conditions. Cited in section 3.
10. Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry material on the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme — more than 30,000 workers engaged under the scheme by August 2024, approximately 90 per cent of them in agriculture and meat processing, with employer obligations covering pay, accommodation and welfare. Cited in section 3.
11. National Farmers' Federation and Deloitte analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics data — approximately 134,000 farm businesses in Australia, about 99 per cent family owned and operated, and an average farmer age of 52, some twelve years above the average for other occupations. Cited in section 3.
12. Meridian Agriculture analysis reported in the rural press, 2026 — approximately 60 per cent of grain and grazing farmers reporting sales of $400,000 or less, and the reliance of those businesses on off-farm income. Cited in section 3.
13. New South Wales Department of Primary Industries, NSW Right to Farm Policy, and Tasmanian right-to-farm legislation — the framing of right to farm as the conduct of lawful agricultural practice without interference from neighbouring land users, and encroachment by non-agricultural uses as the principal source of land use conflict. Cited in section 3.
14. National Disability Insurance Scheme, Specialist Disability Accommodation and Supported Independent Living — the division between SDA, which funds the dwelling and is paid to the property provider, and SIL, which funds support workers within the home. Cited in section 3.
15. Australian permanent supportive housing literature and provider material, including Brisbane Common Ground (operating since 2012) and Elizabeth Street Common Ground, Melbourne (since 2010) — permanent housing under a lease rather than program placement; support offered but not made a condition of housing; separation of the housing provider from the support provider; and mixed tenancy with approximately half of dwellings let to low-income households. Cited in section 3.
16. Analysis of Brisbane Common Ground using linked government administrative data — a net saving of approximately $13,100 a tenant in the first year of being housed compared with a year sleeping rough; and the ten-year study of 417 tenancies to November 2022 finding that arrears and behavioural issues were principal drivers of negative outcomes where provider sustainment measures were absent. Cited in section 3.
17. CBRE Australia, research commentary on land lease communities — approximately 130,000 Australians living in land lease estates, a sector valued at about $12 billion, and the argument that on the United States model the same tenure could serve first home buyers and families as well as downsizers. Cited in section 2.
18. Australian land lease sector guides and operator disclosures, 2026 — approximately 900 land lease communities nationally, site fees of $180 to $320 a week across the major operators, the treatment of site fees as rent for Commonwealth Rent Assistance, and approximately one in four new entrants to over-55s housing choosing land lease over a traditional retirement village. Industry and operator material rather than an official series. Cited in sections 2 and 3.
19. Cotality research on housing utilisation — more than 60 per cent of Australian homes occupied by one or two people, and more than 75 per cent of dwellings having three or more bedrooms. Cited in section 2.
20. Government of South Australia, stamp duty relief for downsizers, contracts from 25 March 2026 — abolition of stamp duty for buyers aged 60 and over purchasing a smaller newly built or off-the-plan home valued under $2 million, with an estimated saving of up to $103,830 a household. Cited in section 2.
21. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Estimating Homelessness: Census 2021 — 122,000 people counted as homeless on census night 2021. Cited in section 3.
22. Homelessness Australia, analysis of specialist homelessness services data — an average of 353 requests for assistance a day that services are unable to meet. Cited in section 3.
23. Western Australian Department of Mines, Industry Regulation and Safety data and Australian workforce accommodation industry material, 2026 — more than 135,000 mining workers on site in Western Australia, in villages of sleeping units, mess halls, gyms and recreation buildings manufactured off site. Cited in section 1.
24. Ending Loneliness Together, State of the Nation report — from a nationally representative sample of 4,026 Australians aged 18 to 92, one third of Australians feeling lonely some or all of the time. Loneliness is self-reported and measured differently between studies. Cited in section 2.
25. Carrere and others, scoping review of the effects of the cohousing model on health and wellbeing (2020), with associated cohousing literature — psychosocial benefits including increased social support and reduced isolation, strongest among older residents; the finding that participatory, self-governed arrangements outperform co-living without resident involvement; and the limitations of the evidence base, being predominantly small cross-sectional studies with a probable selection effect, supporting an association rather than a treatment effect. Cited in section 2.
26. Colliers Engineering & Design, Cost Per Lot Report 2026 — Victoria — average total development cost per lot of $126,811 in 2025, drawn from approximately 10,000 lots across Victoria's growth corridors. Cited in section 2.
27. Master Builders Australia, analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics building activity data, 2024–25 — 11.5 months between approval and completion for detached houses. Cited in section 2.
28. Institute of Public Affairs, analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics building activity data to June 2025 — Western Australia slowest in the country at 15.45 months from approval to completion. Cited in section 2.
29. Property Council of Australia (Victorian Division) policy paper on greenfield planning, and Housing Industry Association land supply commentary — the average Victorian precinct structure plan taking 4.2 years from commencement to gazettal, and the finding that bringing unzoned land to market as shovel-ready land can take more than a decade. Cited in section 2.
30. Published prices and lead times of Australian tiny home, transportable and modular dwelling manufacturers, 2026 — factory production of ten to sixteen weeks and installation within days of delivery. Trade pricing rather than an official statistical series. Cited in section 2.
31. 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 4.