Units without car parks may have once led to ‘a riot’. Now, Miles wants more

Wrapping up a half-hour conversation with the head of Queensland’s peak property sector group as tables of industry types tucked into lunch, Premier Steven Miles was given a break from some of the tougher questions.

Instead, he was offered a chance to give closing comments to those in the Convention Centre room on Friday.

Residents in Teneriffe and Newstead struggle to find car parking and regularly rent spaces.Credit: Michelle Smith

“I reckon five years ago if the lord mayor had announced that we could build apartments without car parks, there’d be a riot,” Miles said, referring to what he described as a shift in political and community sentiment.

While Property Council Queensland executive director Jess Caire noted reaction to the recent announcement from Adrian Schrinner for his council’s plan to allow more inner-Brisbane apartments without parking for each resident “still got pretty heated”, Miles said it was “nothing like the environment was”.

“I think we’ve made an enormous amount of progress on political buy-in for the kinds of developments that we’re going to need,” he added. And he was not wrong.

Almost exactly five years ago, Brisbane City Council moved to require all new apartment buildings have a minimum of two car spaces for two-bedroom units – additions now said to come at an extra $100,000 a piece.

The new shift to bring Fortitude Valley, Milton, Kangaroo Point and Newstead (for now) into line with planning rules already in place in the CBD and South Brisbane requires sign-off from the state and community consultation.

Miles told the room he hoped to see the state’s share of the work done “as quickly as we can” and reiterated comments that he would like to see the changes expand further under the direction set out in the South-East Queensland Regional Plan.

“If we make this change, see if the sky really does fall in. If the sky doesn’t fall, maybe we can put [this in place in] some other locations in the city … particularly that have train stations,” he said, hoping to help councils fast-track such planning changes.

Faster action is needed, with the regional plan anticipating a need for 900,000 new homes for an extra 2.2 million residents by 2046.

The premier has spent the past 10 days linking those arriving from interstate and overseas – combined, a greater than expected, 120,000 in the year to September – to pressures on housing and the related infrastructure needed by communities.

He has even gone so far as to claim credit for federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s recent push along similar lines, as October’s key state election approaches.

While the question of whether changes to housing targets were needed as a result was asked of Miles over lunch, he was confident the one-year “surge” shouldn’t throw 20-year projections out.

Question came, too, on the need for more workers to build the houses, not to mention the multibillion-dollar pipeline of hospitals and roads and rail, or infrastructure needed for the 2032 Games – crunching construction nationwide.

Quizzed about the sector-wide impact of “best practice” conditions given to workers on some state government sites, Miles pushed back on the claims that such deals were driving up costs by 30 per cent.

“Anyone who thinks they could be paying 30 per cent less for labour right now and attract the workforce they need – that doesn’t stack up for me,” he said.

And he waved away the question about a rejected new $3.4 billion stadium at Victoria Park for the Games, pointing to the jump in the cost of the dumped Gabba rebuild from a $1 billion “back-of-the-envelope” estimate to $2.7 billion.

“What I really hope is that, once we can start getting some construction under way on the smaller venues, we can make the conversation a bit more positive and move onto what this is actually going to deliver – which is such fantastic new sporting facilities for the state, as well as the transport infrastructure of the future,” he said.