‍Address to the Centre of Independent Studies: A Liberal Approach to Housing

‍Address to the Centre of Independent Studies - A Liberal Approach to Housing

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Thank you to Michael and your colleagues for welcoming me here this afternoon.

For almost 50 years the Centre of Independent Studies has contributed magnificently to Australia, both culturally and economically.

At a time when the global centre-right is fragmenting, we here in Australia need the Centre of Independent Studies more than ever. Your ideas, your intellectual heft and your impact on our culture are vital to the strength of our democracy.

The CIS loves Australia. I love Australia. 

I worry we have lost a love of our country and this loss means trouble ahead for Australia. We need more to coalesce around. We need to do more to bring Australians together. 

We must never lose perspective that we are fortunate to be Australian and that we owe a great debt to our forebears. 

One of the best things that’s happened in my lifetime is the embrace of Indigenous culture. Nothing is more Australian, by definition, than the First Australians. 

The Great Australian Silence is dead and that is a positive change for our nation.

Today we acknowledge Indigenous Australia at formal events which is a welcome development. But sometimes a welcome or an acknowledgement occurs without the national anthem or any other words, and so we only hear part of the rich Australian story. 

I believe we should recognise and acknowledge Indigenous Australia and its unique connection and stewardship of country for 60,000 years. 

But we should also acknowledge that the British laid the groundwork for the most successful democracy on earth here in the antipodes. These institutions created the opportunities most Australians enjoy today, and are a beacon of hope for the millions who wish to join us. 

We are part of something bigger in Australia. Australia is probably the greatest example of the success of Western Civilisation. We are free, rich and tolerant. 

We should also acknowledge that Australia is the most successful diverse nation on earth, following the waves of migration after World War II. 

There should be something for every Australian at our civic occasions. We are all part of the Australian story. 

So today I acknowledge Australia and its promise to all. 

We are a special blend of traditions - the First Australians, the British and the post WWII wave of migration.

This Noel Pearson formulation is a gift we should embrace. We cannot have one part of the story without the others. This is our bond with one another. This is our history and our future together. 

We are lucky to share this great country with each other, and I am lucky, as the son of a migrant, to stand before you this afternoon.

With that said, let’s get to the order of business 

Australia is in the midst of a housing crisis.

Last year was the worst year of home building in the history of the Albanese Government.

Barely more than 170,000 houses were built. 

The government is over 60,000 homes behind their target this year.

Despite having a $60 billion housing agenda - this government is sending housing construction backwards.

Australia’s supply squeeze is making housing less affordable than ever.

Cotality found it takes more than a decade to save a standard 20 per cent deposit to buy a house in most capital cities.

The size of our mortgages are also through the roof.

The Parliamentary Library exposed that the average size of an owner occupied mortgage in March of 2022 was $603,000.

In June this year, it was $678,000.

Higher mortgages means less money in your pocket.

In March 2022, Australians were spending under $2500 a month on their mortgage.

In June ’25, this had almost doubled to $4,000.

Is it any wonder a poll taken last year by YouGov found a staggering 53% of 18-24 year-olds think Australia should be more socialist?

Owning a home is one of the core components of capitalism and democracy, so as the Australian dream drifts further out of reach, it is no surprise our younger citizens are losing faith in our system.

This is where the Coalition must act.

‍The death of NIMBYism

As a party, we must be firmly in the camp of getting more houses built.

I am determined that we turn our current weak level of urban representation, with its occasional tendency for NIMBYism, into a strength. 

The connection between owning a home and voting for the centre-right is well established, and we should not accept depopulation in our former strongholds.

Recent ABS data tells the story - in Willoughby, the number of children under the age of four dropped by over 20% between 2019 and 2024.

Other former Liberal local government areas that have depopulated - this time to the tune of almost 3,000 people - are in the electorates of Wentworth, Warringah and Bennelong.

They all used to have Liberal Prime Ministers.

Today, they don’t even have Liberal MPs.

The Liberal Party should be trying to boost supply in these areas, so future voters can settle into their first home, grow their family, and achieve the Australian dream.

‍Labor’s Culpability

So what blame should Labor bear for today’s housing crisis?

Anthony Albanese has been the Prime Minister for almost 1,300 days.

After 4 budgets and 4 years, we now know Labor’s housing plan.

It is $60 billion to build fewer houses.

The scoreboard is clear. Labor is only building 170,000 houses a year. They inherited a housing system that delivered 200,000 houses a year under the last Coalition government.

It is the most red tape in Australian housing history.

And it is stoking demand to shoot up prices.

The Housing Australia Future Fund - otherwise known as the HAFF - has been one of the biggest policy disasters of my lifetime.

The organisation that administers it, Housing Australia, is beset with governance failures.

Two years ago, the government directed Treasury to spend $24,000 of taxpayer funds on a secret investigation into Housing Australia.

In the last 12 months, over 25% of staff have left the organisation, and there are four active workers compensation claims ongoing.

Things are so bad at Housing Australia, the Minister Clare O’Neil has had to hire a senior public servant to be, what the government calls, “an observer” on the Housing Australia board.

Recent Senate hearings have revealed this observer has the right to speak at these board meetings - a ridiculous conflict of interest for a Commonwealth agency with a board that supposedly makes independent funding decisions.

It begs the question: What’s the point of the board?

Not only is Housing Australia’s governance shot, the HAFF is also wasting money.

In fact the HAFF’s spending is so bad, the Australian National Audit Office is doing a performance audit of the scheme.

The Housing Industry Association calculates the average cost to build a detached home in Australia is a tick under $500,000. 

The government finally admitted last week at Estimates that:  “The average total development cost for a home that’s funded under the HAFF is $690,000.”

Why should the taxpayer pay almost $200,000 more for Labor’s houses?

Data we had to fight the government to release shows the disbursement of taxpayer funds are significant.

For some projects, the mathematics shows funding coming in at well over $1 million per home.

The government says this is not due to the actual building of the house, but because of the ongoing availability payments - but they refuse to give us the breakdown of how much these availability payments are, and what they are being spent on.

Rather than building in the most efficient and cost effective way, Labor is subsidising the returns of investors. That is their priority - taking care of the superannuation lobby.

It’s a matter of public record that Labor consulted with the super funds when they were designing the way the HAFF’s availability payments would work. 

The developer Assemble, which is majority-owned by super funds Australian Super and HESTA, is the biggest beneficiary of the HAFF, receiving over $2 billion of taxpayer funds.

Under questioning in the Senate last week, the Government claimed Assemble received no money from the Commonwealth. Instead, they point to a company they claim is a charity that receives the money.

We have identified this charity.

It’s a shell company. The majority of their directors work for Assemble.

HAFF Round One also veered sharply into pork-barelling territory. Analysing the numbers, it turns out that a Labor-run State or Territory is getting almost 2,500 homes from the HAFF… whereas a Liberal-run State or Territory is getting barely over 500.

As well as wasting money, the HAFF is also moving slowly -

At last count, Housing Australia admitted it had only completed 889 homes.

Curiously, Housing Australia uses the word completed because they know they can’t use the word built.

In February, Finance Minister Katy Gallagher revealed the HAFF had “acquired and converted 340 homes”.

Acquiring and converting is not building. It’s buying. It’s also crowding out other buyers in the market like young Australians. 

Labor’s HAFF is a disaster. It is Pink Batts 2.0. We didn’t support it at the last election, and nothing has changed.

Social and affordable housing is important, but the government’s bureaucratic approach is failing.

Homelessness Australia says that under Labor, homelessness has never been worse.

‍5% deposits 

Housing should not be a political play-thing, and the government’s decision to massively expand the Home Guarantee Scheme is an irresponsible exercise in buying votes.

The original Home Guarantee Scheme was aimed at low and middle income Australians.

Under Labor, it is now a free for all.

Every single first home buyer - no matter their income, no matter their wealth - can now get the taxpayer to guarantee 15% of their mortgage.

Labor’s distortion will dump a $60 billion liability onto taxpayers, and push up house prices by as much as 10%.

The scheme began in October, and in the same month, Cotality revealed that house prices accelerated by 1.2% - the fastest monthly gain since June 2023.

This price hike was particularly felt in entry level homes, with the strongest growth in the lower and middle quartile.

Cotality research director Tim Lawless said the price growth was due to, “likely a pickup in first home buyers taking advantage of the expanded deposit guarantee.

The government announced this policy in April, but only commissioned modelling in July - three months after it was part of their election mandate.

Labor announced a demand-side housing policy without knowing its impact on house prices. Their maladministration has been laid bare by the simple truth that this same policy has managed to send first home prices skyrocketing.

It’s all about politics for Labor, and they certainly don’t care about the threat of taxpayer exposure, with Minister for Industry, Tim Ayres, bragging at Senate Estimates that the policy is, “very, very low risk”

But when Nick Gruen at Lateral Economics says Labor’s HGS could, “expose the government to up to $62 billion in contingent liabilities”, all Australians are entitled to ask questions about the way the government spends our money.

Red Tape

Last term, Jim Chalmers put over 5,000 new regulations into the economy, including more than 1,500 in Treasury and Infrastructure where housing sits.

At this year's election, we campaigned on freezing the biggest bit of housing red tape, the National Construction Code for 10 years.

Labor campaigned against this, saying we’d build shoddy homes.

Now, Labor says they’re freezing it for 5 years.

This won’t touch the sides; Labor introduced a huge expansion of the building rules in 2022, and will do nothing to pare them back.

The NCC now spans almost 3,000 pages and references over 150 Australian standards. Each of those standards is at least 50 pages long, often cross-referencing thousands more.

No wonder more than 3,000 construction companies went bust last year, up from just 1,700 when we were in government in 2022.

We want to eat a large amount of the red tape imposed by the NCC and we will have more to say about deregulation early next year. 

Our plan

So what is our plan? 

Labor’s housing policies are anathema to Liberal values. The government doesn’t build houses. People build houses.

Tradies and developers… painters and carpenters… These are the people I want to be busy.

The Liberal Party must be unabashed YIMBYs.

NIMBYism is a cancer.

We cannot abide it in the centre-right.

We must be a movement that holds home building and home ownership at the core of everything we do.

To have a home is to have personal security and personal responsibility. Home ownership is a fundamental Liberal value.

Housing targets and working with the states

Housing targets are not a bad idea. They help to drive purpose and give direction.

I am not opposed to Labor’s target. I am opposed to their failure to meet it.

We must try everything to get the supply side moving.

Australia is in a housing crisis.

Everybody should be held accountable.

The Prime Minister never fights with Premiers. He puts his personal popularity above everything else.

I believe we have to fight for housing. This is a national emergency.

There is good research showing upzoning not only leads to more houses, it also boosts construction productivity. 

A study by E61’s Matthew Maltman linked New Zealand’s sharp rise in labour and multifactor productivity during the 2010s to their residential upzoning.

A simple estimate suggests zoning reform increased Auckland’s construction productivity by approximately 8%.

This aligns with the work done by the Productivity Commission, who found that while labour productivity in house construction has fallen by 25% since 2001, labour productivity in higher density housing construction has increased by 5% in the same period.

Given Australia’s national productivity crash, I am a strong supporter of upzoning as a way to help course-correct.

But that’s not the only answer: the recent report from the Committee for Economic Development of Australia outlined how gentle density may also be another solution to the housing crisis.

CEDA demonstrated that if just one-in-four standalone homes in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth was developed into dual occupancies, it would add close to one million new homes, increasing housing supply by 9%.

As CEDA writes, 'gentle density' can deliver more housing in middle-ring neighbourhoods where people want to live, while making better use of existing infrastructure and transport networks.

‍More buildings and making better use of land 

We need more free standing houses with backyards.

We need more duplexes.

We need more apartments.

Put simply, we need more buildings. It doesn’t matter what they are. We need to build like mad.

We need to think outside the box - every backyard could potentially host a new house or granny flat if the owner wanted it.

The same can be said for the airspace above apartment buildings. Industry estimates over a 100,000 new homes could be added if strata corporations were incentivised to build on top of an existing building.

Of course, Australia’s housing crisis is nothing like the horrors of World War II, but when Winston Churchill couldn’t get 350,000 Allied soldiers out of Dunkirk, he didn’t create a bureaucracy, did he?

He asked for a flotilla of little boats which could all help solve the problem.

Perhaps we could draw inspiration from Sir Winston today - his decentralised little boats saved the British Army in Operation Dynamo. In our time, it might be that the decentralisation of home building will do the trick.

Individuals and markets will always triumph over slow government.

‍Migration and infrastructure 

Of course no debate on housing is complete without considering the impact of immigration on the demand side.

We should recognise that cutting migration will not singularly fix the housing crisis, but reducing it will help demand and should be considered.

We also have to make sure that migration policies are driving people into the country who can actually build homes. We are short 80,000 tradies. Last year, we only received 4,000 on visas. 

And connected to that is infrastructure.

The Coalition must pivot from our single-focus on building in greenfield areas.

Our previous election policy of $5 billion for essential infrastructure was good, but at the end of the day, it didn't go far enough, as we only allowed it for greenfield development.

Moving forward, this will change.

While funding announcements are subject to our formal internal processes, any housing infrastructure policy we take to the election will be for all housing. The money must go to where it is needed, and where it can be most effective.

House prices

Finally, as a Party, we must also be realistic about the future of house prices.

The social contract we have signed with younger generations is fraying. We cannot expect them to hold the line if property prices continue to expand exponentially.

In 2003, John Howard said he hadn’t found anybody who was angry because their house had gone up in value.

Well I’m happy to state it clearly here today - the cost of buying a first home is too high in Australia.

It is not a good thing that first homes in this country are largely unaffordable.

Try telling a 30 year old who has been working and saving for 10 years that it’s good that house prices continue to rise faster than their salary.

Housing cannot be a zero sum game. It cannot be treated wholly as an investment opportunity. Australia is a home owning democracy. If people don’t own homes, our system falls apart.

The Liberal Party is the Party of supply, development and home ownership. As 2025 comes to a close, I want all Australians to know that our Party seeks to represent them, and that our Party seeks to ensure all Australians can one day experience the dream of owning their own home.

At this moment, we are in the midst of our housing policy review, but rest assured, supply will be at the heart of any new announcements we make.

Thank you very much.

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