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Housing insecurity has become one of the most significant structural barriers to gender equality, safety, and economic participation for women and gender-diverse people.
Australia is at a moment of urgency and opportunity. Governments have committed to expanding housing supply, but without a gender-responsive approach, these investments risk entrenching inequality rather than reducing it.
A housing system designed for equality prioritises safety, affordability, stability, and participation. It reduces risk before crisis occurs, supports safe transitions across the life course, and delivers lasting social and economic value.
YWCA Australia’s 2026 Policy Platform sets out how Australia can move beyond short-term responses and fragmented systems to build a housing future where women and gender diverse people can live safely, participate fully, and age with dignity. Housing security should be ordinary, not exceptional. Gender should not determine who is housed, who is safe, or who is left behind.
This Policy Platform sets out a practical roadmap for delivering a more gender-equal housing system in Australia. It recognises that current housing and homelessness settings systematically disadvantage women and gender-diverse people, limiting access to safety, stability, and long-term economic security.
Structured around eight interlocking pillars, the Platform translates these principles into clear policy directions for government. Together, the pillars identify how to strengthen housing supply, improve affordability, and fund more and better services. Taken as a whole, the Platform repositions safe, secure and affordable housing security as a foundational driver of gender equality, productivity, and social wellbeing.
Hover over each of the pillars below for more information and a link to the full details about why the pillar matters, the system change required, and how YWCA Australia will act.
Increasing housing supply and expanding genuinely affordable homes through fair access policies that tie affordability to household income and need.
Positioning housing as both a human right and a foundation for productivity, participation, and national wellbeing.
Ensuring housing investment delivers both supply and sustained public value through gender-responsive design, location and integrated supports.
Investing in integrated responses that prioritise safety in the home, protect housing stability, and enable rapid rehousing, preventing homelessness driven by domestic and family violence.
Secure sustained investment in specialist supports that prevent housing insecurity and homelessness, and enable people experiencing homelessness to access and sustain safe, stable housing.
Provide national leadership to strengthen fairness, safety and security, and genuine affordability in the rental system, ensuring consistent protections for renters regardless of gender, identity, income, or location.
Confronting structural inequality by linking housing and homelessness responses to economic security, pay equity, care, and safety.
Position young women and gender-diverse people as leaders in shaping the housing policies, systems, services and solutions that define their futures.
The Executive Summary of our Policy Platform 2026.
YWCA’s journey mapping of gender-responsive solutions to improve housing and gender-equality outcomes for women, girls and gender-diverse people across their life course.
YWCA’s jurisdictional map of current policy and funding levers for major social and affordable housing initiatives, and specialist homelessness and domestic and family violence service initiatives across the nation.
The Safe Homes, Equal Futures campaign is calling on all Australians to join us in pushing for real change. Together, we can ensure everyone has access to a safe place to call home.
Join our Digital Activist Community: Become part of a movement of young advocates. Stay up to date with our advocacy work and take action online. You can join here.
Spread the Word: Follow us on social media at the links below, then share our policy pillars, graphics, videos, or your own personal story using #SafeHomeEqualFutures to inspire others to take action
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YWCA’s Policy Platform is grounded in the belief that safe, affordable housing is both a human right and a foundation for gender equality. Our advocacy is guided by the following principles, which together form the ethical and strategic framework underpinning our vision for a fairer, more inclusive housing system.