The more things change in politics, the more they stay the same.
Nearly a decade ago, in June 2015, then Coalition federal Treasurer Joe Hockey told Australians that the solution to the nation’s housing affordability crisis was to “build more housing”.
“I say again in relation to what is reasonably expensive entry costs for first home buyers into housing in Australia, the best response is to build more housing,” he said, adding that there is a greater role for both state and local governments in accelerating the building process.
Australia then embarked on the greatest high-rise apartment construction boom in the nation’s history, which ran for nearly five years, as illustrated below.
As a result, Australia’s rate of housing completions peaked at 223,600 in 2017.
Many of these apartments ended up being defective, suffering from flammable cladding, cracking, waterproofing issues, and balcony defects.
These defects were uncovered in the Four Corners Report “Cracking Up”, which documented a systemic failure to safeguard the buying public from faulty workmanship.
For example, a November 2023 New South Wales government strata study found that over half of newly registered buildings since 2016 had at least one severe fault, with repair costs averaging $331,829 per building.
Australia’s population has also ballooned by 3.7 million since Joe Hockey made these comments in 2015, thanks to historically high immigration.
As a result, Australia has remained structurally short of housing, with both house price and rental affordability at record lows.
Now federal and state politicians and the industry are once again parroting the “we just need to build more homes line”, with the Victorian and New South Wales governments announcing plans to blanket-zone inner and middle ring suburbs for high-rise shoe box towers.
This comes despite construction lawyer Bronwyn Weir warning that building apartments “with purpose and speed” would inevitably result in corners being cut and widespread defects, as happened during the last boom.
“On current estimates, 50% of what will be built will have serious defects”, Weir told The AFR in January.
Instead of plastering the nation’s major cities with defective high-rise slums in a bid to house waves of overseas arrivals, the optimal solution is to significantly slow demand by slashing net overseas migration to sensible and sustainable levels of below 120,000 a year, as existed before 2005.
Australia is oversupplied with people, not undersupplied with housing.
