‍Housing productivity dead under Labor

‍Housing productivity dead under Labor

The Productivity Commission’s interim report into housing supply regulation confirms a litany of Labor housing failures.

Australia is not building enough homes where people want to live, housing has become increasingly detached from wages and Labor is forecast to fall at least 220,000 homes short of its 1.2 million homes target by June 2029. The PC report confirmed this fact yet again.

The report shows how Labor’s failure to improve planning, approvals and infrastructure is making housing slower, harder and more expensive to build. One development application for just two homes in Parramatta required 30 reports and plans across 60 separate documents.

The PC highlights housing projects being stranded by infrastructure failures. For example, construction was postponed in Sydney because sewerage connections were not delivered.

The Government excluded the PC from looking at the federal National Construction Code (NCC), which is key to fixing this, as it is being supposedly separately considered as part of the “Economic Reform Roundtable”, held back in August 2025 with little action since.

Even with this restriction, the PC managed to say that the NCC holds back innovation, stating that “ambiguity was partly caused by the lack of explicit recognition of prefabricated construction in the National Construction Code”.

Labor’s housing system is built around saying no to innovation and no to more supply. This is why the PC has called for a “build mindset” - to only regulate where necessary, and to keep approval processes simple. They wouldn’t have to do this if it was all tickety-boo.

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