‘Too hard to build': Albanese government slams local councils over housing shortfall
The Albanese government has taken aim at local councils and top-heavy universities as being responsible for the nation's housing crisis and a drain on Australians' stagnating standard of living respectively, even as Labor struggles to meet its home-building targets.
In one of his first speeches since being appointed assistant minister for productivity, Andrew Leigh will argue on Tuesday that a 'thicket of regulation' is holding back housing, infrastructure and research.
Leigh's speech at the Chifley Research Centre in Melbourne comes just weeks after the government's own independent housing sector adviser, the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council, warned that the Labor government's National Housing Accord was set to fall 262,000 short of its 1.2 million target for new homes by the end of the decade.
Leigh will put the heat on local government, singling out North Sydney Council, which has been scrambling to repair its budget after the pricing regulator rejected a proposed 87 per cent rate rise, as a prime example of a slow-mover.
'After an applicant files an application for development approval, councils are supposed to do the initial checks and lodge it in their system within 14 days,' he will say. 'In the current financial year, just one in three development applications to North Sydney Council have been approved in that time. The average lag is 41 days.'
North Sydney Council was contacted for comment.
Leigh will note the council also has a low approval rate, approving just 44 new homes in the seven months to February this year, 'barely 6 per cent of its pro rata target of 787 homes under the National Housing Accord.'
The accord has linked funding to a target – agreed to by federal, state and local governments as well as institutional investors and the construction sector – of building 1 million well-located homes over five years from mid-2024.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers, following Labor's thumping election victory, marked a turning point in the government's priorities, telling the ABC's Insiders program in May that Labor's 'first term was primarily inflation without forgetting productivity. The second term will be primarily productivity without forgetting inflation.'
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