The Business Council of Australia has added its voice to the debate around the housing crisis - releasing a plan to ease housing shortages by speeding up approvals and reforming stamp duty. But urban and regional planning expert, Nicole Gurran, says the report's 29 recommendations add nothing new to the conversation.
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00:00I should say, I really welcome the Business Council of Australia making an intervention
00:07in the housing space, recognising the importance of affordable housing to the entire economy,
00:13not only the housing construction industry.
00:15So that's important.
00:17But I have to say, it's a bit as though this report were written by a chat GPT, you know,
00:22we've heard it all before, planning reform, make approvals faster.
00:27The problem is, and there's nothing wrong with any of that, but the problem is most
00:31of the states are doing that.
00:33They have been doing so for the past two decades.
00:36And the evidence is that at this particular point in the market cycle, we don't have a
00:42problem with bottlenecks in the approval process.
00:45The problem is bottlenecks in completions, in commencements, and in the industry bringing
00:52forward projects.
00:54And the particular bottleneck tends to be our target for planning reform, which is higher
00:59density development.
01:01So we can see if we look at the latest ABS figures that we've got a big stack of uncommenced
01:07dwelling approvals and the biggest stack, and this is almost doubled over two decades,
01:13and the biggest proportion of that two thirds are in the multi unit sector, which is just
01:20not viable under current interest rate conditions, and the cost of labour and materials.
01:27Certainly looking at infrastructure, that can be a real barrier to development, particularly
01:30greenfield development, which ironically isn't where the target for planning reform is.
01:37But I think if we're looking at ways to fund and unlock projects, and when we do so we
01:43should be looking at social and affordable housing projects, because they are able to
01:48continue whether the market is up or down.
01:51But we should be looking at, for instance, how we de-risk difficult sites.
01:55So we want to build higher density development around train stations that are well connected
02:00to jobs, and I think that is an urgent priority.
02:04Then we need to address the real barriers to those types of projects.
02:08And in many cases, it's about de-risking sites, you know, decontamination if they're former
02:14factories.
02:16It's about developing partnerships with, for instance, non-profit and affordable housing
02:21providers to make those very risky, financially risky projects viable, even at times when
02:28normal investors don't have the funds to go out into the market, and there are so many
02:33barriers facing first home buyers as well.