2 December 2025: THE SOLUTION TO THE HOUSING CRISIS!!

I had to do a speech for this UN event thing on the solution to the housing crisis.

1. This is NOT really what I think the exact solution should be. The elements and values I talk about are right but it's not entirely what I think. The UN is extremely woke, so for example, I don't really mention immigration except at the start. The ideas might resonate with you but I also don't go into things enough. If I had more time, I would have talked more about why everything current parties are doing is wrong.

2. It's written in the style of a speech, meant to be heard, not read.

Anyway, enjoy:

Last year alone, Australia’s population expanded by more than 650,000 people (the biggest jump since World War II) and 84% of that came from immigration. Yet in that same year, fewer than 180,000 new homes were built.

It is simply this: demand is rising rapidly, and supply is not. When more people want homes, but the number of homes stays basically the same, prices explode, and that’s exactly why young Australians are locked out of the housing market.

Immigration does not bring rising housing prices if supply is allowed to increase. But right now it is not.

So what is to blame?

Some say, “It’s the 1 million vacant homes! Rich people buy houses and don’t live in them!” But this makes no sense. In every census since 1981, about 1 in 10 homes have been recorded as vacant. In fact, there were more vacant homes in 1981 than now. So, if the number hasn’t changed for forty years, why would it suddenly be the cause of today’s crisis? It isn’t.

Others blame negative gearing or capital gains tax discounts. But this too, is not valid. These policies may change who owns homes – renters or buyers - but they do not change how many homes Australia has. And the number of homes is what determines prices. Some argue that negative gearing “lets investors outbid young people,” but if you make that point, you concede the housing crisis is routed in another issue. If supply was plentiful, investors and first-home buyers wouldn’t be fighting over the same tiny pool of properties.

So why are we in a housing crisis?

Because Australia is simply not building enough homes. Even the current government, who helped cause this, admits we are short hundreds of thousands of homes, and the gap grows every single year.

Demand is rising fast through immigration and there is no supply. Prices go up. Young Australians don’t get homes. It really is that simple.

So the real question is: why aren’t we building enough homes?

This is where the problem becomes obvious.

Governments at all levels have created an endless maze of barriers that make it almost impossible to build anything quickly or cheaply.

• Urban growth boundaries artificially limit land supply.

• Zoning rules forbid townhouses, duplexes, and medium-density housing in huge areas.

• The Reserve Bank estimates restrictive zoning alone makes homes 69% more expensive in Melbourne and 42% more expensive in Brisbane.

• Heritage laws protect everything from important buildings to random 1970s brick walls.

• Planning approvals can take 5 to 10 years before a single shovel hits the ground.

• Environmental assessments drag on forever, even when everyone knows the project will eventually be approved.

• Red tape adds consultants, lawyers, delays, paperwork and uncertainty.

• And construction costs are inflated by regulation, union rules, and things like GST on building materials.

Add all this together and you get the truth: government has simply made building too slow, too expensive and too risky.

So what is the solution?

We must dramatically scale back restrictive land-use rules and let homes be built again.

More supply means first-home buyers are not competing for the same few properties. More supply means prices fall. More supply means young people can finally enter the market. Hooray we solved it!

But of course, if we removed all restrictions, we would get high-rise towers shoved into peaceful suburban streets. So the solution needs to be smarter than that.

Australia has a massive amount of land. Only 0.22% of our country is urbanised. We are not running out of room. We are refusing to use it.

The solution is to start building outward instead of upward, often known as ‘Urban Sprawl.’ It means building new suburbs, new estates, and new communities on the edges of the city, rather than squeezing more apartments into existing neighbourhoods.

The solution looks like:

• Open new land on the outskirts of every major city.

• Build satellite cities like Ipswich, Geelong, Mandurah and Newcastle into proper urban centres.

• Cut the bureaucratic delays for subdividing land, no more 10-year approval timelines.

• Allow developers to build estates faster with clear, stable rules instead of endless uncertainty.

• Remove taxes on construction inputs, like GST on building materials, to lower the cost of supply.

This means we build more homes, build outward, build faster, let the market breathe.

Current restrictions on sprawl are obviously causing higher housing prices. When demand rises but supply is artificially capped, prices go up. Not because building is impossible, but because it is forbidden or heavily restricted.

One might say sprawl would cause more traffic. This is wrong. It assumes a 1950s model of the city where everyone lives in suburbs and commutes into the CBD and urban sprawl will cause more traffic. But only 12% of Australian jobs are in CBDs. The fastest growing job centres are all in suburban hubs. Even if we believed most work is in the CBD, stopping sprawl causes MORE traffic. By making the inner area more expensive in the status quo, middle income workers like nurses and teachers can’t afford to live near their jobs so they leapfrog OVER the restricted land and settle even further away which means longer commutes and therefore, more traffic.

To wrap up, we have made it clear that the housing crisis is a SUPPLY problem. And we’ve identified why not enough houses are being built. And we’ve shown the solution is let more houses be built, in an efficient way.

If we want to fix the housing crisis, we don’t need a miracle. We just need something far rarer: A government willing to get out of the way.

Let homes be built. Let land be freed. Let cities grow. Let the market do what it does best. Do that, and young Australians will finally have a future worth staying for.

Bye