April 2026

Australia does not have a housing strategy. It has a self-sabotage strategy.

At the very moment the country needs more homes, faster approvals and lower building costs, governments are doing the opposite: fighting themselves over land prices, piling fresh compliance costs onto builders, changing the rules mid-crisis and trapping projects in approval purgatory for longer than it takes to actually build the house.

In one case, 1500 Western Sydney homes were stalled because one arm of government could not agree with another arm of government on what taxpayer-owned land was worth.

In another, a council took 450 days to approve a house that took just 200 days to build.

That tells you everything you need to know about the real problem. It is not demand. It is not just supply. It is government standing in the middle of the road, congratulating itself while traffic backs up for miles.

Start with New South Wales, where the farce is almost too absurd to parody. Landcom, the state’s own public developer, walked away from plans for the western Sydney suburbs of Tallawong, Rooty Hill and Austral after years of work.

Why? Not because the land was unavailable. Not because the sites were unsuitable. Not because builders could not build. The projects fell into a hole because Landcom and another NSW government agency, the Office of Strategic Lands, could not agree on the price of land already owned by the government.

The government blocked itself from delivering desperately needed homes because the government could not cut a deal with the government. You could not invent a better symbol of bureaucratic failure if you tried.

And these were not fantasy numbers in some consultant’s deck. The Rooty Hill site was expected to deliver 300 to 500 homes. Tallawong was flagged for diverse housing across 29 hectares. Austral had already seen plans lodged for more than 70 homes.

This was real capacity, real land, real need. Yet instead of bulldozers and tradies, we got negotiations, valuations, “strategic considerations” and – in the end – a shrug.

That is the modern housing crisis in one frame: governments promising supply with one hand while strangling it with the other.

The deeper problem is not one failed negotiation. It is a culture. We now have a system where public agencies behave like rival empires, not parts of a coordinated housing solution. Every department protects its turf. Every process becomes its own religion. Every decision gets filtered through layers of caution, valuation, review and political optics.

The result is paralysis dressed up as governance. Meanwhile, ordinary Australians are told housing is “complex” – as though the crisis arrived by weather pattern rather than being manufactured by years of bureaucratic obstruction.

Victoria offers a different version of the same disease. There, the issue is not one government agency fighting another over land value. It is the state loading more cost and more compliance – which means additional cost – onto an industry already on its knees.

The Victoria state government’s building and plumbing enforcement reforms have been blasted by industry groups who warn the changes could add up to 30 per cent to the cost of building a new home.

Think about that for a second. At a time when affordability is already broken, when builder confidence is shot, when new home construction is at a decade low, the answer from government is more paperwork, more reporting, more cost and less capacity.

That is not reform. That is economic vandalism.

And the people warning about this are not fringe voices. The Housing Industry Association says the bill lands at the worst possible time. Master Builders Victoria says it will significantly drive up construction costs, slow housing delivery and hit small to medium-sized builders particularly hard.

These are the businesses that actually build the homes politicians keep promising at press conferences. They do not have limitless balance sheets. They cannot absorb endless new compliance burdens while material costs rise, margins get crushed and fixed-price contracts become financial traps. Every extra impost gets pushed somewhere: into house prices, into rents, into delays or into builders leaving the market altogether. Usually all four.

The ACT is replaying the same script under a green-tinted banner of technical progress. New National Construction Code changes are being adopted while builders warn they will add between $14,000 and $55,000 to the cost of a new build.

Again, note the timing. This is happening during a housing crisis, in a high-cost environment, with households already smashed by higher rates, stubborn inflation and elevated construction costs.

And still the instinct from government is to add more requirements. Always more requirements. Never fewer barriers. Never a serious attempt to strip the system back to what is essential to get homes built.

Of course, the defenders of these changes will say standards matter. Fine. Standards do matter. But so does reality. A housing code that prices people out of housing is not a triumph of enlightened policy. It is a policy failure with a moral halo painted on top.

There is always a new justification, always a new worthy objective, always another layer of technical perfection to chase. But every new rule has a cost, and in housing those costs compound brutally. It is death by a thousand noble intentions. Tasmania and South Australia have refused to implement the same changes for exactly that reason: they understand that when the market is already under extreme strain, government should stop making it worse.

But that message is lost on the ACT Government, one of the worst in the country.

Then we get to local government, where the machine slows from dysfunctional to ridiculous. In Albury, a development application took 450 days to approve for a house that took roughly 200 days to build.

That is the entire crisis in miniature. We have built a system where approving a home takes more than twice as long as constructing it.

Nobody can seriously argue that this is a supply problem disconnected from bureaucracy. This is bureaucracy. This is the supply problem. Every month a project sits waiting for approval, holding costs rise, uncertainty rises, financing gets tighter and fewer projects stack up.

Add “red, green and white tape,” as the HIA put it, and you create a planning culture where builders spend as much time feeding the system as they do building homes.

This is why the standard political line about “unlocking supply” rings so hollow. Supply is not unlocked by speeches. It is unlocked by removing the blockages.

Stop government agencies hoarding or haggling over land that should already be in the pipeline.

Stop introducing legislation that hikes building costs when affordability is already in freefall.

Stop imposing rule changes that sound good in theory but make projects unviable in practice.

Stop forcing builders to spend 450 days waiting for a stamp.

The villain in this story is not mysterious. It is policy. It is process. It is institutional self-importance masquerading as public service.

And the sting in all of this is that every delay, every extra cost, every new layer of bureaucracy gets paid for by the same people: aspiring homeowners, renters and small builders. Not by the departments. Not by the ministers. Not by the committees that design the obstacles.

The bill lands on families trying to get into the market, on renters copping higher weekly payments because supply is throttled, and on builders being asked to carry the risk of a system that governments keep making heavier, slower and costlier.

Australia’s housing crisis is no longer just a market failure. It is a governance failure. Governments say they want more homes. Their actions say they want more process. And process is winning.

Until that changes, the housing shortage will not be solved. It will be administered.

And housing will keep getting more and more costly to supply.