Housing supply: what's holding us back? | Interim report

You'll often hear people say, there's no silver bullet in housing.

And that is true.

It's a complex problem, but probably regulatory reform, I think it's as close as you get to a silver bullet.

Regulation sits in every part of the process of delivering new housing, what you can build and where, who can build it, how they build it, what it's built with.

And there is very good reasons for having regulation in housing.

We all accept that.

We want regulations that support the safety of houses, the quality, the livability.

But when you load in so many regulations and processes that people actually can't build or, you know, if they could build, it would be infeasible.

We are continuing to feed into those difficult social and economic issues.

So this report's really focused on looking to improve regulation.

You've come up with four best practice principles.

The first one is adopt a build mindset.

What do you mean?

Great question.

I mean, the way I think about that one, Richard, is it's flipping the mindset from the world I think we are in, which is that in most areas, it's a no to adding more supply, except in a narrow set of circumstances or, you know, if you meet the 50 criteria.

We want to flip it around so that the default is essentially yes.

Yes, we can build new homes so long as you conform with the following basic standards.

So it's a shift in mindset, you know, in the way that you design your planning regulations, your approvals processes, your infrastructure delivery, all essentially pushing towards making it easier to build things.

I was thinking framing.

It makes the framing why not instead of why.

Exactly.

The second one is only regulate where necessary.

Can I get you to unpack that a bit?

Absolutely.

I think one of the really surprising things for me when we started to look at this is how many things that are regulated that are very visible to the people that are going to be buying or renting the home.