Not a single listed rental in the Northern Territory is affordable: How imbalanced rental power leaves people homeless

Australia's Northern Territory housing crisis is not just about rent numbers constantly rising. A report by the Northern Territory Council of Social Service, relayed by ABC News Australia, says that as of the end of 2025, the Northern Territory's average rent ranks second in Australia, only behind New South Wales; among the listed rental properties in the region, not a single one is affordable for a single person earning the minimum wage, the JobSeeker payment, Youth Allowance, Disability Support Pension, or Age Pension.

When these people cannot even find a single affordable listed home, what the rental market allocates is not merely housing, but qualification for a stable life. The party that holds control over the property, the lease, and renewal decisions can convert housing scarcity into bargaining leverage, while tenants are forced to exchange a higher share of their income, worse conditions, and less security for shelter. The crisis therefore cannot be described merely as an abstract supply-demand imbalance: it also means that risk is continuously offloaded onto those with the fewest options.

According to ABC, Connor Van Helsingen has been homeless three times and has also couch-surfed with friends for extended periods. He once viewed a rental property that he later discovered was just a shipping container. Van Helsingen told ABC that, with tenant rights severely inadequate, some landlords "rent out anything," fail to properly maintain properties, and try to extract money from tenants when leases end. These are his personal experiences and judgments; they cannot prove that all landlords behave the same way, but they expose the power dynamics in which tenants, under extreme housing scarcity, find it hard to refuse poor conditions.

Homelessness does not only take the form of sleeping rough on the street. ABC reported that Van Helsingen has relied on friends' generosity and moved between temporary accommodation; he believes this kind of unstable living is more common than people imagine. The street sleeping that is counted or seen is only the most visible layer of the crisis; many more people are hidden on friends' sofas, in home garages, and in one temporary move after another. They continue to bear the costs of transport, job-hunting, and maintaining relationships, yet cannot obtain a stable lease or life plans in return.

The film "About the Soufflé", in which Van Helsingen co-wrote the screenplay and starred, writes this insecurity into fictional scenes. ABC described that the Connor in the film lives in the garage of a house in a Darwin suburb, and one morning is woken up by the landlord he lives with and thrown out without notice. This scene is not an independent factual record of Van Helsingen's experience, but it is built on the life experiences of him and those around him, making concrete the fear that tenants may lose their housing at any moment.

Director Jacob Hazelding formerly served as a project officer at the Northern Territory Council of Social Service. When discussing his experiences with people facing housing difficulties, he told ABC that this situation is "increasingly becoming the norm," and is no longer even surprising. Normalisation itself is a consequence of power imbalance: when the inability to find a rental, long-term couch-surfing, and sudden evictions no longer attract attention, those bearing the crisis are more easily treated as individual failures, while the party that profits from scarce housing and does not bear the consequences of tenants' lives falling apart fades from view.

According to ABC, "About the Soufflé" was shot over 17 days by a volunteer team mainly composed of non-professionals, at a cost of just 1,500 Australian dollars; Hazelding said he applied for funding from Screen Australia and Northern Territory screen agencies but did not receive support. The film eventually premiered at the Darwin International Film Festival, giving people who have experienced homelessness a space to tell their stories. However, an individual's completion of a film with friends, portable devices, and cheap software can only prove that the excluded still have the capacity for expression; it cannot replace the responsibility that should be borne by those who control housing resources.

The complete methodology, sample size, and affordability calculation methods of the Northern Territory report did not appear in the material published by ABC, and the rental disputes mentioned by Van Helsingen also lack specific responses from the landlords' side. These limitations must be preserved, but they do not eliminate the political problem presented by the report's figures: if minimum wages and public benefits cannot secure the right to use any listed housing, the so-called "choices" of tenants are close to fictional. What truly should be questioned are the landlords who exploit this imbalance to drive down living conditions, evade maintenance obligations, or further extract from tenant interests, and a rental order that allows them to pass down the costs of anxiety, relocation, and homelessness.