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.
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