With housing centre stage through the 2025 election, Hugh Hartigan and Michael Comninos set out four supply-side reforms in The Australian. The diagnosis is unchanged: across much of Australia the average household struggles to buy a home, let alone pay the rent. Demand-side band-aids do not make supply more responsive.

Policy should focus on reducing construction costs and recalibrating market settings so the private sector can deliver enough homes to meet new demand. Over-supply should be the goal: a sustained period where nominal dwelling prices rise more slowly than household incomes.

One: strengthen the National Housing Accord with better fiscal incentives. Transport infrastructure is a critical enabler of housing supply, yet federal funding remains largely detached from housing targets. The Commonwealth transfers more than $13 billion a year to the states for infrastructure. New rail funding should be explicitly linked to housing delivery, with more for states that meet supply targets and penalties for those that do not.

Two: review housing regulation and construction expenses with a goal of reducing housing costs by 20 per cent over five years. Material and labour costs surged during Covid and have stayed high. Many building-code changes over two decades have lacked rigorous cost-benefit analysis. Future changes affecting building costs should undergo transparent, ex-ante assessment.

Three: introduce national league tables on state housing performance. Accountability has been weak for decades. Independently produced tables should compare the cost of building and the number of developments blocked or scaled back — not just planning time frames.

Four: establish a long-term, set-and-forget social housing policy. The Housing Australia Future Fund injected capital, but a long-term subsidy mechanism remains absent. The US Low-Income Housing Tax Credit is instructive: private capital, shared risk, a steady pipeline. State first-home buyer grants, estimated at up to $2.5 billion a year, could be redirected.

Whoever forms government must be bolder, or risk leaving Australians further locked out of the housing market. Originally published in The Australian, March 2025. Hugh Hartigan is a former head of research at Housing Australia. Michael Comninos is adjunct professor at the City Futures Research Institute.

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