James O’Doherty: Chris Minns needs to boost housing quickly

It is true that Sydney’s convoluted planning system will take time to unwind. But, for a Premier who has made housing supply almost his entire reason for being, Chris Minns needs to start delivering results, writes James O’Doherty.

It’s still broke, so don’t change until we fix it. That is the thinking behind state Labor’s campaign for re-election in 2027.

While the next state election is more than two years away, Premier Chris Minns is already formulating his campaign message. Do not expect much to change from the platform that delivered him government after 12 years of Coalition rule.

In a nutshell: reducing debt and stabilising the budget, rebuilding essential services by paying frontline workers more, and fixing the housing crisis by overhauling the planning system.

While Minns has made significant change on the first two of those promises, including massive public sector pay deals, on the third he is treading water.

Not only has housing supply not increased, some measures actually show things getting worse.

NSW is projected to fall short of ambitious housing targets agreed to in national cabinet by more than 100,000 dwellings, with just 151,670 new homes expected to be completed in Greater Sydney by 2029.

The six year forecast (172,970) is, woefully, 10.2 per cent lower than what was delivered in the six years before.

Premier Chris Minns has acknowledged progress on boosting housing is too slow.

Approvals for new homes are either flatlining or going backwards, meaning that nothing is going to change any time soon.

“I acknowledge that we’re not building anywhere near where we need to be,” Minns tells me.

So, at what point will he acknowledge he has failed?

“Why don’t you see how we’re going while we get there,” Minns says.

He also would not promise that NSW, in any year between now and the next election, will build the 75,000 homes we need each year to meet our targets.

“I don’t like making promises that I can’t keep,” he says.

He insists that the changes he has made to the planning system – including turbocharging higher density housing around transport hubs – “will make a difference”.

The Premier has also flagged “major changes” to the system to streamline a mazelike snakes and ladders approval process bogging developments down in red tape.

That flowchart – which struggles to fit on a single A4 page – took planning boffins months to create, after the Premier ordered a simple explanation of how the process works.

It represents, Minns says, “a decade, maybe 20 years, worth of additions, and add-ons, and compromises, without any deletions, that has left Sydney’s planning and NSW planning at the bottom of the pile”.

It is true that such a convoluted system will take time to unwind.

But, for a Premier who has made housing supply almost his entire reason for being, Minns needs to start delivering results.

The Premier’s biggest problem is that the people responsible for building the homes say Minns’s plans will not work.

Right now, developers argue, the economics do not stack up to build major developments.

Apartment blocks that are getting built will be nowhere near the reach of working families in growing suburbs.

Even if the global economy turns around and building becomes economically viable again, Minns’s laser-like focus on homes, risks missing the forest for the trees.

The government has already cancelled transformative major projects for jobs and innovation hubs, like a “super deck” over Central Station, because they do not do enough to deliver homes.

Now, he is considering turning the last historic bit of working port on Sydney Harbour into a Miami-style housing enclave for the wealthy. As a means of addressing the housing shortage, this verges on the perverse: Wrong area and wrong demographic.

Designs from the Sydney development “patternbook” designed to fast-track approvals. Pictures: Supplied

Critics argue that if housing is all that the Minns government cares about, we could eventually shift the dial too far, and turn Sydney into a city with plenty of homes but no jobs for the people to fill them.

“Governments are about priorities, particularly when you’ve got a housing crisis and young people are leaving, and it’s reasonable for us to say we’re going to focus on housing first,” Minns argues.

That is not the kind of thinking that delivered transformational infrastructure the Bradfield Oration has championed, like a new international airport, the southern hemisphere’s longest road tunnel, or Metro services that have revolutionised the Sydney commute.

Last week, business leaders, industry heavyweights, and former Bradfield orators all argued that the only limit to Sydney reaching its full potential is a shortage of ambition.

Minns has made it clear that housing is his sole infrastructure focus.

If he cannot deliver on that, and soon, he is in trouble.

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