August 2026

Australia doesn’t have a shortage of housing plans. It has a shortage of governments capable of turning those plans into homes.

The latest exhibit comes from south-west Sydney, where a $9 billion development proposing 11,000 new homes and 23,000 jobs has been abandoned after more than a decade of planning.

Ten years. Millions of dollars spent. Thousands of homes proposed. And the end result is precisely zero.

The Moore Point project at Liverpool was once promoted as the “Barangaroo of the west”. It was designed as a genuine mini-city, with housing for 21,000 residents, shops, offices, parks, a primary school and major infrastructure.

It also included around 2,500 build-to-rent apartments – exactly the type of additional rental supply the politicians routinely tell us Australia desperately needs – next to a train station and a hospital.

In other words, this wasn’t a speculative housing estate proposed in the middle of nowhere. It was a major urban development close to existing transport, employment and essential services.

Yet, after a decade of bureaucracy, the project is dead.

Liverpool Council says the State Government should have approved the project, but the NSW Government says flood evacuation constraints could not be overcome. Now the developer has withdrawn its plans.

Everyone has an explanation. Nobody has delivered the homes.

And that is the real story.

Australia’s housing crisis is constantly described as though it is some mysterious economic phenomenon. It isn’t.

We simply need more dwellings than we are building. We need to deal with how long it takes and how much it costs to create new dwellings. But no one in government, at any level, is taking up that challenge.

And governments at every level have created planning systems so slow, complex and risk-averse that projects capable of delivering thousands of homes can spend a decade trapped in assessment before disappearing altogether.

This is not a unique event in Sydney. Earlier this year I reported on multiple housing estate plans in Western Sydney scrapped after years of planning because two different arms of the state government could not agree on how to solve issues. Rather than find a way to make those thousands of homes happen, they gave up.

Across Australia, recent history abounds with stories like these.

The consequences are very real.

Liverpool Mayor Ned Mannoun says people are coming into his office crying because they can no longer afford their rent, including frontline workers performing critical jobs.

Meanwhile, 11,000 potential homes remain unbuilt – and will not be built.

Governments routinely announce ambitious housing targets, new taskforces and grand plans to improve affordability.

But housing targets are meaningless if the planning bureaucracy keeps killing the projects capable of meeting them.

The biggest threat to housing supply is no longer a lack of developers willing to build.

It is a system that makes getting homes approved so difficult, expensive and uncertain that investors eventually walk away.

And when they do, they take their billions — and their housing supply — somewhere else.

That is not housing policy.

It is bureaucratic incompetence masquerading as planning.