AARON PATRICK: Despite Australians desperately needing to be able build houses cheaply, Labor won’t act
In the 215 days since the Albanese Government promised to reduce housing red tape, almost nothing has been done to lower the huge costs of building homes.
Senator Andrew Bragg recently checked out a new house in Nowra, on the NSW South Coast, and was shown a wheelchair-accessible shower recess that cost $40,000.
In an era where the necessities of life seem to get more expensive by the day, the Opposition housing spokesman wondered why Australia has gone out of its way to make building homes so expensive when there’s a national shortage.
“I feel sorry for someone who wants to buy a cheap house and isn’t allowed to under the law,” he told The Nightly. “It’s f---ed.”
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.It has been 215 days since the Albanese Government accepted a recommendation of its economic “roundtable” to slim down the five-volume, 2350 pages of rules that govern building construction.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers said on August 21: “We’ve asked (Housing Minister) Clare O’Neil to see where we can reduce complexity and red tape in the National Construction Code.”
The family home
The government’s official position is rule changes for houses and apartments are now “paused” until 2029, excluding safety and quality standards, which are often subjective anyway. Dr Chalmers repeated the we’re “streamlining the code” claim as recently as last week.
A new code will come into effect on May 1. Instead of containing fewer regulations, or no change, it introduces new ones, including mandatory solar panels in some situations and non-gendered bathrooms.
In 1987, a year before the national building code came into existence, Senator Bragg’s parents paid a company called AVJennings to build them a home in suburban Melbourne.
In almost four decades, the house hasn’t fallen down, killed anyone or committed an act of discrimination. That’s one of the reasons Senator Bragg suggests the rulebook could be cut by at least two-thirds without endangering Australia.
“It is still standing and it’s fine,” he said. “The houses haven’t changed that much.”
Wide and deep
Regulations add $200,000 to the cost of the average house, according to the government’s economic adviser, the Productivity Commission.
That cost is due to a building bureaucracy that is wide and deep, stretching from council inspectors to Canberra mandarins.
Officials from the Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB), whose livelihoods depend on long and complicated building rules, have been transferred to the Treasury department, according to Senator Bragg. They are now overseeing what is billed as a modernisation of the rules to help reach the government’s target of 1.2 million new homes by 2029.
They understand the problem. Building houses takes longer and costs more than when builders like AVJennings ran television advertisements.
“Fewer than half as many homes are built per hour worked than 30 years ago,” the project’s mission statement says. “For too many Australian builders, it takes longer to get approval for a home than it does to build one.”
But the project’s top-stated priority is not fewer rules but bureaucratic processes, including public servants’ power.
The document lists the first item for consideration as: “Governance and process, including: the ABCB intergovernmental agreement, governance of the ABCB Office, the role of the ABCB Board in advising building ministers, and the role of building ministers in directing the work of the ABCB.”
Public hearings
The hit to fuel prices from the Middle East war is not helping. Transport is a big part of the expense of buildings, and construction companies fear shortages of plastics, which are made from oil.
The housing minister, Ms O’Neil, met with representatives of the housing, construction, building materials, chemicals and transport industries today to discuss the problem. She promised to “work with industry to monitor price pressures and supply chain disruptions”.
In other words, we’ll watch and see what happens.
Her spokesman said: “It’s very clear that the government committed to pause changes to the NCC following the finalisation of the 2025 edition — something that was called for by the building sector. Senator Bragg can blow all the hot air he wants, but he voted against faster housing approvals under the EPBC act, and it was his government that allowed the NCC to balloon into the mess we’re working through now.”
Senator Bragg plans to apply pressure from opposition. He has set up a parliamentary committee on productivity, which is scheduling public hearings to force public servants to explain what they have done, if anything, to make it easier to build houses and apartments.
The Liberal senator has been particularly effective at exposing failures in the government’s $10 billion housing fund. Last year, he got Finance Minister Katy Gallagher to acknowledge the 340 homes then owned by the fund were bought — meaning there was no increase in supply.
As for houses built by the fund, they cost $690,000 each, on average. The Housing Industry Association calculates the average cost of a new detached home is a little under $500,000.
Which is another reminder that governments can’t help but make life more expensive.
