JENI O’DOWD: To fix the housing crisis, talk to those in the know

So much has been said and written about Australia’s housing crisis.

The Government believes winding back investor tax breaks will improve affordability for first-home buyers. The Coalition says we need to build more homes and link migration with housing supply, while Pauline Hanson argues migration is the main cause of the crisis.

She made that argument at the National Press Club last week, which actually showed why Australia’s housing debate keeps going nowhere.

Every side of politics seems to have a three-word fix for a crisis that is far more complicated than any slogan can capture. Build more homes. Cut migration. Help first-home buyers.

Yet the debate between politicians rarely includes the nuts and bolts of why housing isn’t getting built fast enough.

Planning delays. Approval bottlenecks. Red tape. Infrastructure constraints. Rising construction costs. Labour shortages.

These are not particularly exciting topics. But they are the reasons Australia isn’t building enough homes.

It baffles me that the Government doesn’t seek more public input from property experts with decades of industry experience.

During COVID, governments stood alongside medical experts at daily press conferences because they recognised the value of hearing directly from people on the front line.

Housing deserves the same approach.

If the Government is serious about building more homes, it should listen to the people who actually build them and not, as property expert Sam Elbanna says, continue to treat a supply problem as a demand problem.

Over the years, we have seen grants, incentives and shared equity schemes rolled out with great fanfare.

But if there aren’t enough homes and builders are dealing with rising costs, labour shortages and endless red tape, how exactly do we get more houses built?

That doesn’t mean immigration is irrelevant. Far from it.

Net overseas migration added more than 300,000 people to Australia’s population last year, which was almost three-quarters of the nation’s population growth.

I think most of us understand the problem. If the population is growing quickly but housing supply isn’t keeping up, something has to give. Right now, it’s affordability.

You could cut migration tomorrow and still be left with a planning system that takes years to approve projects.

You could offer more first-home buyer assistance and still have too few homes available.

You could change tax settings and still face construction costs that have risen dramatically over recent years.

Migration is part of the debate, but it isn’t the whole debate. We haven’t been building enough homes, and anyone involved in property will tell you that getting projects approved is a long, expensive process.

We already have an entire government council dedicated to housing supply and affordability.

The National Housing Supply and Affordability Council has repeatedly warned that Australia is not building enough homes to meet demand.

But for all the talk about boosting supply, there are few people around that table who are directly involved in building large numbers of homes.

Apart from chair Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz, the former chief executive of Mirvac, the council is largely made up of experts in housing affordability, social housing, Indigenous housing, homelessness and crisis accommodation.

If the goal is to build more homes, surely the people who finance, design and deliver housing should have a stronger voice in the conversation.

Australia’s housing crisis won’t be solved by a slogan or a 30-second TV grab.

The first step is something much less glamorous: pull up a chair and ask the people who actually build the homes we all live in.

Jeni O’Dowd is editor-in-chief of Kanebridge Quarterly