On a winter night in the Perth CBD, an outreach team from a homelessness service works its usual loop: the laneways behind the Murray Street mall, the shelter of the Wellington Street bus station, the cars parked overnight along the freeway on-ramps where people sleep because a car, unlike a park bench, can be locked. Western Australia is, by the measures a state Treasurer cares about, the richest state in the federation — an iron ore boom now in its third decade, consecutive multi-billion-dollar budget surpluses, and billions of royalty dollars a year flowing into Perth from the Pilbara. None of that appears on the outreach team's tally sheet. The 2021 Census found Western Australia had the highest rate of rough sleeping of any state or territory in the country, roughly double what it had been five years earlier. The mining boom did not skip the state's poorest residents. It ran straight past them.
What the government did
Roger Cook became Premier on 8 June 2023, succeeding Mark McGowan and continuing a Labor government first elected in March 2017 and re-elected by landslide margins in 2021 and again in March 2025. Housing and homelessness policy predates Cook, but his government has owned, expanded and repeatedly re-funded it. The framework is All Paths Lead to a Home: Western Australia's 10-Year Strategy on Homelessness 2020–2030, the state's first dedicated homelessness strategy, released in 2020 with an Action Plan 2020–2025 that set an explicit, numerical goal: end rough sleeping in Western Australia by 2025. Alongside it, the government created a Social Housing Investment Fund and has topped it up in almost every budget since. What began as a stated $2.6 billion in cumulative housing and homelessness spending — with a target of around 4,000 new social dwellings — had grown, by the 2025–26 Mid-Year Review, to a cumulative $6.3 billion since 2021, and by the 2026–27 Budget to $10.8 billion in total housing-related investment, alongside a term commitment to more than 5,000 additional social and affordable homes. The state has also drawn in Commonwealth money: a $209.2 million share of the federal Social Housing Accelerator, announced in December 2023, funding around 265 additional social homes and refurbishment of more than 300 existing ones.
The government is also mid-way through overhauling how people join the queue for social housing. In place of the single waitlist that has operated for decades, the Department of Housing and Works is introducing a four-tier priority classification system alongside a separate Register of Interest for lower-need applicants, intended to direct scarce housing to the people facing the greatest barriers first. As of late 2025 that reform was still described by the department as "in planning and implementation"; existing public housing application and priority-assistance arrangements remain in place until the new model goes live. It is a reform of how the queue is sorted, not, by itself, a change in how fast the queue moves.
The strongest case
A genuinely large investment, into a system the government inherited half-starved
Put the government's case at its strongest, because parts of it hold up. Western Australia spent much of the 2010s running social housing down rather than up: after the first mining investment boom ended around 2013, state budgets tightened sharply under the Barnett Liberal government, and social housing's share of the state's total housing stock fell over the following years — a genuine inheritance the McGowan and Cook Labor governments did not create. Since 2021, the money has moved: cumulative housing and homelessness investment has grown from roughly $2.6 billion to $10.8 billion, more than 4,000 social dwellings have already been delivered against a programmed total approaching 9,800 (approx.), and the state secured a further $209.2 million in federal top-up funding it did not have to chase. It has done this while posting budget surpluses rather than borrowing, at a scale few other states have matched alongside comparable investment.
The waitlist reform, too, is a genuine attempt at a harder problem than money alone can fix: replacing a single, first-come queue with a needs-based classification system is the kind of unglamorous administrative change that earlier governments avoided because it creates losers as well as winners. And setting a public, numerical target — end rough sleeping by 2025 — is more transparent than most governments attempt, even where, as below, the number has not been met. Credit is due for the scale of the spend, for a fund that keeps being renewed rather than left to lapse, and for naming the goal in public rather than managing it quietly.
The evidence
The primary record on outcomes is uncomfortable reading against that investment. The WA Auditor General's Management of Housing Maintenance Information report, tabled on 6 August 2025, found the public housing waitlist grew 56% in under six years — from 13,738 applicants in July 2019 to 21,480 in February 2025 — while the share of those applications classified as priority (the most urgent need) rose from 11.5% to 31.6% of the total. The priority waitlist specifically, tracked in figures tabled separately in the WA Parliament, grew from around 1,660 applications in September 2019 to roughly 6,115 by September 2024 and 7,755 by September 2025 (approx.) — growth of more than 350% in six years — with an average wait now estimated at around 92 weeks (approx.), and many applicants waiting more than three years.
The same Auditor General report found the department's own machinery is part of the problem. Maintenance spending rose 44%, from about $213 million in 2019 to $307 million in 2024, while the volume of maintenance work completed grew only 7% — a cost blowout the audit attributes largely to a rise in reactive, unplanned repairs (85% of all work) over cheaper, scheduled maintenance (15%). Only 51% of properties vacated for repair were returned to a re-lettable state within the department's own 14-day target, and almost $241 million was spent maintaining properties while they sat empty. Every property stuck empty for repair is a property not available to someone on a list that already runs into the tens of thousands.
The paradox of the boom
The waitlist has grown inside one of the wealthiest state economies in the country's history. Iron ore royalties alone are forecast to bring in close to $24 billion for the state over the four years to 2027–28, within roughly $30 billion in total royalty revenue (approx.), underwriting operating surpluses the WA Budget has put at around $2.5 billion in 2024–25 and roughly $2.4 billion in 2025–26, with surpluses of a similar scale forecast through to 2027–28. Media and budget commentary routinely describe Western Australia as the nation's richest state on a per-person basis, a description borne out by consistently the highest royalty and resource-driven revenue per capita of any state (ABS state accounts; WA Budget). None of that royalty flow moves in a straight line into social housing; it lands first in consolidated revenue, where it competes with tax relief, infrastructure and the operating surpluses that make the state's credit rating and its politics look good.
The same boom that funds the surplus also drives the pressure on housing. WA's resources-driven population and workforce growth has pushed private rents up sharply across both Perth and the regional towns that service the mining industry, squeezing the private rental market that would otherwise absorb people who cannot get social housing. The strain shows up hardest away from Perth: AIHW's Specialist Homelessness Services data for 2024–25 show that 39% of West Australians who used a homelessness service came from remote or very remote regions — chiefly the Kimberley, the Pilbara and the South West — even though only 6.3% of the state's population lives there. The mining towns generating the royalty revenue are, disproportionately, also generating the demand for homelessness services. It is the same boom on both ends of the ledger.
The critique
Judged against the government's own numbers, the record spending has not delivered the record result its funding announcements imply. The Action Plan 2020–2025 set a specific goal to end rough sleeping in WA by 2025; the government's own successor planning process — a new Action Plan 2025–2030, still in development as that deadline passed — is itself an admission the first target was not met. The ABS Census and AIHW's homelessness-service data point the same way: rough sleeping had roughly doubled in the five years to the 2021 Census, and 25,918 West Australians needed a homelessness service in 2024–25 alone, with an average of around 5,900 people (approx.) assisted on any given day that year. Social housing's share of the state's total housing stock sits at around 3.7% (approx.) — little changed from where independent state infrastructure planning put it five years earlier, and well short of the government's own 6% net-growth target set out in the same 2020 strategy that promised to end rough sleeping.
Western Australia can record a $2.5 billion budget surplus and the country's highest rate of rough sleeping in the same reporting year — that is not a paradox the boom explains away. It is a choice about where the royalty cheque goes.
Some of that gap is arithmetic, not malice: a state adding tens of thousands of residents a year through a resources-driven population boom needs its social housing stock to grow faster just to hold its share steady, let alone reach 6%. But the waitlist reform under way does not change that arithmetic — it only changes who is served first from a pool that is not growing fast enough, which is part of why the priority segment of the list has grown even faster than the list as a whole. The Auditor General's findings on maintenance make the shortfall partly self-inflicted: a department that returns barely half its vacant properties to use within its own 14-day target, while spending 44% more on maintenance for 7% more completed work, is not extracting full value from the billions it has already been given. Adding more money to the same fund, without fixing how quickly that fund's own stock is turned around, has not obviously closed a gap that has been widening for six years.
The risk to the future
A boom that keeps outrunning its own housing fund
If Western Australia's population keeps growing at the pace its resources investment is driving, a social housing program adding a few thousand dwellings every few years will keep losing ground against a 6% stock target and an "end rough sleeping" goal that has already slipped by at least one five-year deadline. Each budget cycle that responds by topping up the same fund, without lifting the underlying delivery and maintenance-turnaround rate the Auditor General has already flagged as under-performing, risks becoming a treadmill: more billions committed, and the same or a worse waitlist to show for it at the next audit.
The cost of that treadmill is not carried by the state's credit rating or its surplus headline. It is carried by the roughly 7,755 households waiting close to two years on the priority list (approx.), by the West Australians sleeping rough at the highest rate in the country, and by remote communities in the Kimberley and Pilbara generating both the royalties and the homelessness data in the same reporting period. A state with Western Australia's revenue has the means to close this gap. Whether it treats housing delivery with the same urgency it brings to the next royalty forecast is the test the next Auditor General's report will answer.