Retiree calls for end to NSW's ban on houseboat living amid low housing availability
Bill Phillips says his only expenses are fuel for the boat and his meals. (ABC Mildura-Swan Hill: Emile Pavlich)
Retiree Bill Phillips doesn’t pay for rates, water or electricity.
He lives off-grid in a permanent houseboat community in north-west Victoria.
“[For] people like me, who are retirees, it’s a cheap and comfortable way to live,” he said.
“Absolute autonomy.
“This afternoon if I want to go out fishing — untie, and off we go.”
Dr Phillips said he spent years working on water and environment policy in government and wanted to fulfil a dream of living on a houseboat somewhere in Australia’s inland river system, the Murray-Darling Basin.
“I always had a love and a passion for wetlands and rivers,” he said.
“So, for me, it was a natural progression.”
Houseboat living ban
The Murray River is under the jurisdiction of New South Wales, which doesn’t allow people to live on houseboats.
However, Dr Phillips lives in a small inlet off the Murray River, in Victorian waters called Bruce’s Bend Marina.
He described the New South Wales blanket ban as an anomaly.
“It doesn’t make sense to me,” Dr Phillips said.
“Why shouldn’t we, after our hard-working years, be able to live in this sort of environment?”
A New South Wales transport spokesperson said living in houseboats was not allowed because of safety risks, pollution concerns and increased noise and anti-social behaviour.
“I reckon there’s a couple hundred houseboats in Mildura, maybe more,” Dr Phillips said.
“At the moment, the majority of them you can’t live on.”
Spots are in such high demand that the marina’s management are in the process of creating an extra 16 berths.
Dr Phillips said for a regional city such as Mildura, which has a rental vacancy rate of less than 1 per cent of homes, it makes sense to encourage people to live on houseboats to ease pressure on available housing stock.
Housing solution
University of South Australia professor Andrew Beer, who has studied regional growth and aging populations, said living on a houseboat could benefit people at different stages in their life.
“When you look at houseboats, what you see is they can provide the solution for some people, at some point in their lives,” he said.
“But you can’t imagine it’s going to grow to such a large extent that you’ll see a significant movement of population from Melbourne, Sydney or Adelaide.”
According to data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, more than 29,000 houseboats and cabins were counted across Australia in the 2021 census, a near 12-per cent increase from 2016.
Professor Beer said there were many communities in the Murray-Darling Basin, including Mildura, that were trying to grow but had an acute shortage of houses.
“If people were able to live on houseboats, they would see both a boost in their population [and] potentially also a boost in their workforce,” he said.
He said permanent houseboat communities made sense for mobile workforces such as horticultural workers.
“We look for transportable accommodation all the time and we struggle with it,” Professor Beer said.
“If you think about it, a houseboat is a readily available form of transportable accommodation.”
A New South Wales government transport spokesperson said there were no plans to change transport policy to permit vessels to become a place of permanent residence or rental accommodation.