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Southern Cross University Law conference addresses housing and homelessness in the Northern Rivers

Homeless woman sitting on concrete floor

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Warwick Fisher and Aidan Ricketts
Published
10 February 2025

Housing affordability and homelessness have reached a crisis point in the Northern Rivers, aggravated by the twin consequences of global warming: fire and flood.

These issues will be the focus of Southern Cross University's one-day conference at our Lismore campus on 28 February 2025, entitled Land, Sharing and the Law: Innovative solutions to the housing crisis.

Southern Cross law academics Warwick Fisher and Dr Aidan Ricketts discuss the cultural movements and environmental impacts that have influenced our region’s housing landscape:

The rural land-sharing movement of the 1970s drove forward low-cost resettlement projects that challenged existing legal and developmental norms until eventually the Federal Government was forced to accommodate the burgeoning movement. Various changes to planning codes enabled such bold experiments to become a permanent feature of the region’s housing landscape.

Now, some 50 years later, housing affordability and homelessness are a national crisis.  Local communities are sceptical that government and corporations can fix the problem, and the search is on for new community-led initiatives that can more quickly provide affordable homes, dignity and security.

“Climate change compounds the challenge by increasingly impacting upon the existing housing stock. The 2022 floods that devastated the Northern Rivers, demonstrated the challenges of recovery and re-homing in the wake of more frequent and extreme natural disasters.”

Warwick Fisher
Warwick Fisher Lecturer (Teaching Scholar) Faculty of Business, Law and Arts

Future solutions to our current crisis may or may not resemble the land-sharing movement of the past, but a focus on sharing, and the courage to challenge existing governmental and corporate models of housing with innovative community led solutions is one that we have little choice other than to embrace. 

Our law academics have always reflected the region’s desire to challenge the dominant paradigm. The issues of housing affordability and homelessness in a region beset by the twin consequences of global heating – fire and flood – will be the focus of our one-day conference: Land, Sharing and the Law: Innovative solutions to the housing crisis.

We hope numerous other representatives of state and local government will also be attending but not as speakers: we want both our elected representatives and bureaucrats to listen to what the community has to say. This conference seeks to invite, empower and encourage innovative, community led responses to the wicked problems of housing and homelessness facing our communities.

If you would like to find out more about this conference and register to attend, please visit Land, Sharing and the Law: Innovative solutions to the housing crisis.

Article amended on February 24, 2025: NSW Minister for Housing Rose Jackson is now unable to deliver the keynote address. The program has been adjusted.

 

Media contact

content@scu.edu.au

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