Social Housing as Infrastructure: A Position Paper on Reclassifying Social Housing as Critical Infrastructure under NSW Law

Social housing in Australia is administered as a welfare instrument: a last-resort response to market failure. This paper argues that the framing is wrong, and that its consequences are structural, cumulative and measurable. Social housing is infrastructure. It performs the same function for human communities as roads, water systems and power grids do for physical ones: it enables participation, stability and continuity. When it is withheld, degraded or sold, the costs are borne not by the system but by the people who depend on it. The paper proposes the reclassification of social housing under NSW law as critical infrastructure, and outlines three structural corrections that follow from that reclassification.