A report from housing crisis advocacy coalition, Everybody's Home, revealed this week that job vacancies in some rural areas had surged about 200 percent since the beginning of the pandemic.
"The chronic lack of affordable housing in regional Australia/community is more than a social crisis. It's now a deep economic crisis as well," said Kate Colvin, spokesperson for the Everybody's Home campaign.
One of the worst impacted areas, the Sunshine Coast, a popular holiday destination in the Australian state of Queensland, has shown the effect most starkly. The report said that since March 2020 job vacancies in the coastal town have increased from 1,415 to 3,678, and rent has surged nearly 40 percent.
The report noted that this is forcing out low-income earners which often are vital to maintaining regional areas, especially those with large service industries. It estimated 786 million Australian dollars (543 million U.S. dollars) of economic output have been lost in the Sunshine Coast due to the increasing number of unfilled jobs.
A vacancy rate report from Australian housing platform, Domain, found that vacancy rates fell to their lowest point on record in July, nationally, vacancy rate sits at 0.9 percent, and 0.7 percent in regional Australia.
This has pushed rents up by 9.1 percent in capital cites and 10.8 percent in regional areas in the year to June 2022.
In response to the crisis, Australian left-leaning political faction, the Greens, called on the government on Thursday to implement a "2 year emergency rent freeze".
"An emergency rent freeze will give wages and incomes time to catch up to rents, which over the last 12 months have grown seven times faster than wages in capital cities," said Max Chandler-Mather, member of the Australian parliament for Griffith.
Colvin said the "lopsided" housing system is choking the economic potential of regional Australia. She called on the government to discuss the connection between housing and jobs at the annual employment summit to be held in Canberra next week.
"Expanding social and affordable housing by building an additional 25,000 new dwellings per year would give people on modest incomes more choice," said Colvin.
Associate Professor Chyi Lin Lee, a housing expert from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), told Xinhua on Wednesday that the reopening of Australia's borders has driven up rental prices as tourists, students and workers pour back in.
"What we have seen during the pandemic is that many short-term properties, e.g. Airbnb, have been redirected to the long-term rental market," said Lee.
"However, with the border reopening at the end of 2021 more properties have been returned to the short-term rental market, which consequently reduced the supply of rental properties, therefore, the competition among renters is getting more intense."
Additionally he said that the rise of remote work during the pandemic has put particular demand on regional areas as people moved to less densely populated areas while continuing their high-wage, inner city jobs.
"Urgent interventions are required to address the issues in regional areas. However, this is a complex issue as we all know that housing supply is very different compared with other commodities."
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