A place to call home

There’s something special that lives between the roof and the floor – a sacred realm, where memories are made, meals consumed and laughter moves from room to room. A home.

For Joshua Shaw, the leafy, low-slung town of Wagga Wagga was his world growing up.

“My home was everything,” the ANU politics, psychology and economics student says. “It was where my family gathered to laugh around the fire, where I cried after a bad day and celebrated after winning a tennis match.”

Young Australians are facing numerous challenges – from climate change to the cost-of-living crisis and increasing generational inequalities. As someone so connected to his own home, Shaw is deeply concerned by how dramatically our nation’s relationship with housing has changed in recent decades.

“There’s no way today’s Daryl Kerrigan would get a home, let alone a castle,” he says, referring to the classic Australian film The Castle. “The idea that some people in Australia have no home devastates me.

“The New South Wales Productivity Commission even warned that Sydney risks ‘becoming a city with no grandchildren’ because of how expensive putting a roof over our head is becoming.”

He notes that young people are disproportionately affected by this crisis.

“We are the ones who haven’t bought a house yet, meaning we are the ones facing the burden of lower wages and higher prices,” Shaw says. “This means we are also the ones forced to rent – perhaps for our entire lives.”

When Shaw was 10 years old, his grandfather bought him a year-long subscription to his local newspaper. It was the beginning of his advocacy journey.

“There was an incredible program called Youth Parliament, where my interest in current affairs evolved into a passion. Not so much a passion for politics as a passion for helping others,” he says.

Shaw’s time in parliament showed him that young people can make a difference – it’s a learning he wants to apply to tackling the housing crisis.

“We could establish something like the Citizen’s Parliament but exclusively for young Australians,” he says.

“It wouldn’t be dominated by those already politically active in the youth wing of a political party or involved in existing Youth Parliaments – it would be selected at random, comprising not just the Daryl Kerrigans of the future, but ordinary young Aussies from all walks of life.

“This group would be tasked with one job: to create bold solutions to our housing crisis.”

With young advocates like Shaw leading the charge, maybe one day every Australian will have the chance to call the space between the roof and floor more than just a house, but a home.