This report is the latest published by the Poverty and Inequality Partnership between the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) and UNSW Sydney. It has been researched and written for the partnership by representatives of the City Futures Research Centre at UNSW Sydney, Heriot-Watt University in Scotland and the University of Bristol in the UK. It is also supported by Mission Australia, National Shelter and Queensland Shelter.

This report, the first of two planned reports from this particular research project, looks at the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic – still rampaging throughout the world as this foreword is written – on housing and homelessness in Australia during 2020. Impacts of the pandemic upon housing and homelessness were inevitable, given its effects on the economy as well as public health. This report looks at what housing and homelessness policy changes occurred; how these changes were formulated; and how they were implemented, using both publicly available data and focused research undertaken by the report authors. It also looks at wider policy changes, such as the introduction of JobKeeper and the increase to JobSeeker payments, and what impacts those changes had on housing and homelessness policies.

This report is the first report published by the Poverty and Inequality Partnership in 2021. It follows the publication in 2020 of six reports, five of which were part of the core Poverty and Inequality in Australia series, and one of which was a partnership research report on spatial poverty in Australia. The report was written by Hal Pawson, Chris Martin, Alistair Sisson and Sian Thompson from the City Futures Research Centre at UNSW Sydney; Suzanne Fitzpatrick from Heriot-Watt University in Scotland; and Alex Marsh from the University of Bristol in the UK.