The bigger picture

Accommodation as an industry sits at the intersection of two long political conversations: hospitality of the stranger, and the right to travel. Both conversations are older than capitalism. Both have been politically contested for centuries. Both reach Australian operators today through frameworks none of them designed.

Hospitality of the stranger has its roots in pre-industrial communities across the world. The duty to receive a traveller, to provide food and shelter without payment, to protect a guest under one's roof, was a political-religious obligation in many traditions, including Pacific, Mediterranean, Indigenous Australian, and Islamic. The emergence of an inn-keeping economy in medieval Europe, where a stranger paid for a bed and a meal rather than receiving them as a duty, was a political shift as much as a commercial one. The American anthropologist David Graeber argued that the move from obligation to payment in human relationships was one of the central political shifts of the modern era, and the transformation of hospitality into an industry is one of the places where that shift is most visible.

The right to travel is the other thread. For most of human history, ordinary people did not travel for pleasure. Travel was for traders, soldiers, pilgrims, refugees, and the wealthy. The political idea that ordinary people had a right to leave their region, their country, their continent, and to be received elsewhere, is a relatively recent political achievement, contested every step of the way, and still incomplete.

The colonial transfer

Australian accommodation arrived in its modern shape through colonial transfer, primarily from Britain, and the political assumptions that travelled with it have been doing political work in the country ever since.

The British inn-keeping tradition reached Australia in the nineteenth century, embedded in licensing regimes, in the politics of who could buy alcohol where and at what hours, and in the architectural and operational templates that still shape Australian pubs and country hotels. The colonial transfer carried a political vision of which kinds of people were welcomed, which were watched, and which were turned away, alongside the commercial transfer of the business model itself.

What that political vision excluded is also part of the history. Aboriginal travellers crossing Country had their own systems of obligation and welcome, developed over millennia. The colonial accommodation industry was built on land taken without consent and operated under political assumptions that explicitly excluded First Nations people from many establishments well into the twentieth century. The political history of accommodation in Australia cannot be written without that exclusion at its centre.

The development of the railway hotel, the seaside boarding house, and the regional country pub in nineteenth and twentieth century Australia mirrored similar developments in Britain, North America, and continental Europe, with local variations. The political ideas about who travelled, why, and what they were owed travelled with the building types.

Mass tourism and the twentieth century

The twentieth century brought political ideas that reshaped accommodation globally and in Australia. The labour movement won the right to paid holidays in most industrialised countries between the 1930s and 1950s. The political achievement of paid leave produced the conditions for mass domestic tourism. Australian operators in coastal towns, regional centres, and ski fields built their industries on the back of a political settlement they did not author.

International mass tourism arrived later, accelerating after the 1960s. Cheap aviation, currency liberalisation, and the political stabilisation of post-war Europe produced visitor flows that no Australian accommodation operator had previously seen. The international visitor who walked into a Cairns hotel in 1985 was the product of political decisions made in Geneva, Brussels, and Washington as much as Brisbane.

The Dutch-American sociologist Saskia Sassen has argued that the global economy of the late twentieth century produced a particular kind of place she called the global city, where international flows of capital, people, and ideas concentrate. Sydney and Melbourne both function partly as global cities in her sense, and Australian accommodation in those cities operates inside a political environment shaped by global flows beyond domestic political control.

The neoliberal turn

The political settlement that produced mass tourism shifted again from the 1980s. Government-owned hotels were privatised. Regulation of the industry was loosened in some areas and tightened in others. The state stepped back from being a direct provider of accommodation and stepped forward as a regulator, a tourism marketer, and a deal-maker with global hotel chains.

The political programme behind these shifts was executed in different forms across most countries that previously had significant state involvement in tourism. The political idea that accommodation should be entirely a private commercial matter, with the state's role limited to setting rules and selling destinations, was contested at the time and is contested again now.

The neoliberal turn produced the conditions for major hotel chain consolidation, foreign ownership of significant Australian accommodation stock, and the political invisibility of accommodation as an industry that requires public infrastructure, public planning, and public consideration. When operators today find their political conversation with state and federal governments mediated through tourism marketing rather than industrial policy, the framing was set by political decisions made decades earlier.

The present moment

Platform capitalism and housing politics are reshaping accommodation now, and both reach Australia from elsewhere.

Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia, and other platforms operate under political-economic models developed in Silicon Valley, with regulatory frameworks designed in California, Brussels, and Singapore. Australian operators have been absorbed into platform politics they did not choose, and the political resolution of platform power is being decided largely outside Australia.

Housing politics reaches the sector at the same time, through a political backlash against tourism intensity in places where short-term rental, over-tourism, and resident displacement have become live electoral issues. From Barcelona to Lisbon to Amsterdam, the political conversation has become part of how cities govern. Inner-city Australian LGAs are starting to follow that international pattern. Council elections in Sydney, Melbourne, and the Gold Coast are increasingly fought on housing politics that include accommodation operators as visible actors.

The political conversation about climate is also reaching accommodation, particularly through insurance and through international standards on emissions disclosure. International climate conferences shape what corporate clients and institutional investors require of accommodation operators well before any Australian regulator catches up.