By Terry Ryder, May 2026

Australia has a housing shortage. So naturally, governments are doing everything they can to stop people building homes.

The latest exhibit is Meriton – Australia’s biggest apartment developer – effectively walking away from Sydney and shifting its focus to Queensland.

The nation’s largest apartment builder, a company that has spent 60 years shaping Sydney’s skyline, has stopped buying development sites in Australia’s biggest city because the numbers no longer work.

Not because people don’t want apartments.

Not because Sydney doesn’t need more homes.

Not because there’s no demand.

But because government charges, taxes, regulation and planning delays have made projects unviable.

That is the housing crisis in one neat, ugly package.

Meriton Deputy Managing Director Daniel Hendler has said the company has not bought land in Sydney for five or six years because the cost burden keeps rising. “Adding cost, adding cost,” was how he put it.

Meanwhile, in Queensland, the same company can get approvals in five or six months. In NSW, comparable approvals can take three to four years.

That’s not a planning system. That’s a punishment system.

And the result is entirely predictable: capital goes where it is treated best.

Harry Triguboff and Meriton are now putting their energy into the Gold Coast and Brisbane, where the approvals are faster, the returns are better, and the bureaucracy is less hostile to actually building dwellings.

Meriton has reportedly invested more than $170 million in prime Gold Coast sites since 2016. It is progressing major high-rise projects including the 76-level Ocean tower and the huge Iconica development, with twin towers of 78 and 53 storeys.

It is also planning a $1.3 billion twin-tower project in the Brisbane CBD.

In other words, Queensland gets the cranes, the jobs, the investment and the new homes.

Sydney gets another press conference about planning reform.

This is why housing supply is so badly broken in Australia. Governments say they want more homes, but then bury developers under taxes, fees, delays, uncertainty and red tape. They talk about affordability while making new housing more expensive to deliver.

Every added charge ends up in the final price.

Every extra year in the planning system adds holding costs.

Every layer of regulation makes marginal projects impossible.

Then politicians look around and pretend to be mystified by the shortage.

The Meriton decision should terrify NSW policymakers. This is not some fringe builder complaining from the sidelines. This is the country’s number one apartment builder, recently recognised as such in the 2025 HIA report, saying Sydney has become too hard.

And this matters because apartments are central to solving the housing shortage in major cities. Sydney cannot fix its supply problem with slogans. It needs volume. It needs speed. It needs confidence. It needs the private sector willing to risk billions of dollars to create homes.

Instead, the message to developers has been clear: wait years, pay more, carry the risk, and maybe we’ll let you build.

That is how governments turn a housing shortage into a housing crisis.

NSW says reform is coming. Fine. But reform that arrives after the builders have already left is not leadership. It is damage control.

The verdict is simple: when the biggest apartment developer in the country chooses Queensland over Sydney, the problem is not the market.

The problem is government.