By Terry Ryder, May 2026

The great Australian dream isn’t being killed by a shortage of ambition.

It’s being strangled by red tape.

Everyone in politics says they want more homes built. They talk endlessly about supply. They promise targets. They announce summits, funds, accords and plans.

But then they keep loading more rules, more costs and more delays onto the very people expected to deliver those homes.

One of the clearest examples is the National Construction Code.

Once upon a time, the building code was about the basics: life safety and structural safety. In other words, making sure homes didn’t fall down, burn too easily, or put lives at risk.

That was sensible. Necessary. Non-negotiable.

But over time, the code has become something very different. It has morphed from a practical safety framework into a sprawling policy wish-list.

Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg put the key question bluntly at a Federal Select Committee hearing on productivity: how did the National Construction Code go from around 200 pages to 2,000 pages?

That question goes to the heart of why it now takes much longer to build a home in Australia — and why it costs so much more.

The answer, according to Simon Croft from the Housing Industry Association, is that the goals of the NCC have expanded dramatically. It is no longer just about safety and structure. It now tries to cover amenity, sustainability, liveability, adaptability, resilience and whatever the next fashionable policy objective happens to be.

In other words, the building code has become the default solution for every political concern.

And that is a serious problem.

Mr Croft told the committee that the code now references more than 165 Australian Standards, and through those standards there are more than 1,000 secondary and tertiary references. He described the volume of regulation as significant, reactive and a “behemoth”.

That word matters.

A behemoth is not a tool. It is a monster.

And this monster is sitting on top of the housing industry at the worst possible time.

Australia does not have the luxury of gold-plating every new home with every possible feature that somebody in a bureaucracy thinks might be nice to have one day. We are in the middle of a housing shortage. We need homes built faster, cheaper and at scale.

Instead, we have created a system where young first-home buyers are forced to pay for features they may not need for decades — if ever.

Mandatory accessibility features, wider doorways, bathroom rail provisions, higher energy-efficiency requirements and layers of compliance may each be defended as well-intentioned. But affordability is also a social good. Supply is also a social good.

A house that never gets built because it has become too expensive is not helping anyone.

Master Builders Australia told the inquiry that home building productivity is 21.5 per cent lower than just over a decade ago. Apartment construction now takes around 33 months, compared with 21 months a decade earlier.

That is not progress.

That is regression dressed up as regulation.

The cost impact is just as alarming. Mr Croft said the most recent code changes, including seven-star energy and disability access requirements, added around $25,000 to the cost of building a new home. He also cited a Queensland Productivity Commission report finding that the growth of regulation and red tape has added 40 per cent to construction costs over the past decade.

So let’s stop pretending this is a mystery.

Homes are taking longer to build because the approval and compliance burden has exploded.

Homes are costing more because regulation keeps adding mandatory costs.

And housing supply is falling short because governments keep demanding more output while making the production process harder.

The NCC needs to be dragged back to its proper purpose: clear, practical, safety-focused rules that protect consumers without suffocating builders or pricing buyers out of the market.

Strong standards matter.

But so does common sense.

Australia cannot regulate its way to housing affordability. It has to build its way there.