$9 Billion Plan Scrapped

Australia has a housing shortage but it doesn’t have a shortage of housing plans.

It does have a shortage of governments capable of turning those plans into homes.

The latest exhibit comes from Southwest Sydney where a nine billion dollar development proposing eleven thousand new homes and twenty three thousand jobs has been abandoned after more than a decade of planning.

Now think about that ten years of planning, 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 twenty one thousand residents, shops, offices, parks, a primary school and major infrastructure.

The plan also included two thousand five hundred build to rent apartments, exactly the type of additional rental supply the politicians routinely tell us that Australia desperately needs, and it was located next to a train station and a hospital.

In other words, this wasn’t some 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.

The New South Wales government says flood evacuation constraints could not be overcome and the developer has withdrawn its plans.

Liverpool council says the state government should have approved the project.

Now everyone has an explanation for what’s happened but nobody has delivered the homes and that is the real story.

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

We simply need more dwellings than we’re currently building.

We need to deal with how long it takes and how much it costs to create new dwellings in Australia.

But no one in government at any level is taking up that challenge.

Instead, governments have created a planning system so slow, complex, and risk averse that projects capable of delivering thousands of homes can spend a decade trapped in an assessment before disappearing altogether.

Now this is not a unique event in Sydney.

Earlier this year 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 just simply gave up.

Now across Australia, recent history abounds with stories like those.

The consequences are very real.

Liverpool mayor Ned Manoon says people are coming into his office crying because they can’t afford to pay their rent, including frontline workers performing critical jobs.

The rents are high because there’s a chronic shortage which is not being dealt with.

Meanwhile, eleven thousand potential homes at Liverpool remain unbuilt and will not be built because our bureaucrats have a can’t do attitude.

Governments routinely announce ambitious housing targets, new task force 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 not a lack of developers willing to build.

The biggest threat is a system that makes it so difficult and expensive to get homes approved that investors eventually walk away.

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

The problem again and again is bureaucratic incompetence masquerading as planning.