Albanese government to freeze construction code until 2029, fast-track housing approvals

ABC NEWS (Australia)

The federal government is moving to speed up decisions on housing approvals and limit further changes to the lengthy National Construction Code, just days after being urged to do so by the Economic Reform Roundtable.  Brendan Coates is the housing and economic security program director at the Grattan Institute, he says the changes should boost the number of houses built in Australia.

Transcript

00:00As the Productivity Commission showed in its recent report on construction productivity,

00:06builders face a thicket of regulations, whether it be the construction code, whether it be land

00:10use planning controls that make it hard to build in our major cities. These are major reasons why

00:14we face a housing shortage in Australia today. And it's why housing in large part has become

00:20more unaffordable and less attainable to Australians. And this is an urgent national

00:24priority to get more housing built as quickly as we can. The government has a target of 1.2

00:29million homes over five years that they're aiming to build. They're falling well short of that at

00:33the moment. And this is hopefully one step that will lead to an acceleration in the pace of new

00:37housing construction. It should make some difference at the margin, but really the way to make that

00:41difference, it'll mean fewer new changes or weekly changes that builders will have to deal with

00:46on those timelines that you've outlined. It means that the existing code will remain in place,

00:52which means builders can have more confidence that if they're undertaking innovations,

00:56that they satisfy the existing code, that they won't run afoul of future changes to the code if

01:02they're building those practices into their building models. But it doesn't necessarily change

01:06what's being built in Australia in the next six months to a year or two years, because the existing

01:12code remains in place. As we've heard at the roundtable, it is complex. That code remains in place.

01:18I think the other part of this that is important is the government will do a review of the code itself,

01:22and that's probably the more substantive change in the long run to work out whether there are aspects

01:27of the regulatory settings that are adding costs that don't add value that mean we get fewer homes

01:33built and those homes take longer to build.

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