Jacob Broom
The Albanese Labor Government proposed the Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF) as a centrepiece of its housing policy before the 2022 election. The HAFF funds social and affordable housing through the returns of an off-budget fund invested in global financial markets. This paper analyses the 2023 political debate around the HAFF. It uses the HAFF as a case study to examine the politics of financialised policymaking, investigating the political arguments made for financialised policies and the hegemony projects they represent. It is theoretically and methodologically framed by historical materialist policy analysis (HMPA), which calls for analysing policies in terms of the competing hegemony projects involved in their construction and contestation. I argue that Albanese Labor sees governing through financial markets as a central way to solve policy problems, and that this should give pause to celebrations of the return of social democracy in Australia after the 2025 election.