Vikki Campion: Why Australia finds itself facing an unprecedented housing crisis

The cost of building a home and owning land should be cheaper in Australian than most parts of the world but our policy makers have turned the Australian dream into a nightmare, writes Vikki Campion.

How do you make this work?

You do everything to shut down Australia’s steel, glass, aluminium and cement industries and lock up your forests so we can’t get timber. Then you import another 900,000 people over 18 months.

What will they do when they come in? Lie on the grass? Live in the park? Shelter under a bridge?

ABS data shows 87 per cent of migrants move to overcrowded Sydney and Melbourne.

It would be more intelligent to spread the population around, but putting a family home on a regional block is an environmental evil, the penance for which adds up to $350,000 in green tape.

The cost of building a house in Australia should be cheaper than in other countries because of the timber that we have in abundance, the steel and aluminium that we should make more affordably than anyone in the world with our coal and iron ore and bauxite, and bricks made from plentiful clay and heat.

With 26 million people in a country the size of Western Europe, our house blocks should be cheaper than anywhere else.

That they are outrageously expensive is due to one thing – government policy.

The federal government is borrowing $10bn for a housing fund for 30,000 homes when in the next breath, it used the Greens to pass a carbon tax making it more expensive to build a house.

Across Australia, state governments are locking up native forests, leaving the country 250,000 house frames short without planting an extra billion trees because we can’t cut down the wood we already have, based on this idea that if you harvest a tree, another tree never grows.

A natural forest would not exist in Australia if bush never grew back after being razed. Look at what happens after any bushfire.

Instead of conservative governments ratcheting this back, in NSW, former treasurer Matt Kean made this worse, locking out new housing outside the cities using green taxes under the guise of the Biodiversity Offset Scheme.

Country Mayors Association executive Craig Davies is fronting a review committee this month with a litany of examples where Kean’s BDOS is more expensive than the capital of proposals.

It’s single-handedly responsible for causing the loss of new family homes across NSW, student lodging in Moree, imposing a $1.375bn tax on the inland rail (up from $800m in October), and $1.2bn tax on transmission lines between Wagga Wagga and South Australia.

A small subdivision in Tamworth – one of the fastest-growing regional cities in NSW – worth $11.5m, was lost because the offset cost was $16.2m. What do you think was there prior? Remnant rainforest? It would have been a wheat paddock.

Davies points to Coleambally in Murrumbidgee Shire, originally planned to accommodate 2000 people in 1964. There are 1300 people now, and the BDOS tax to house another 650 is $24m for land that has been earmarked for homes for six decades.

The problem is the Teal/Green/Kean ilk foist these policies on towns they couldn’t find on a map. Coleambally is not the rainforested hinterland of Byron Bay.

It’s 38 days until the budget is handed down and the population forecast has changed to expect more immigrants after Treasury officials told the Economics Legislation Committee “Australia’s population and net overseas migration growth have picked up strongly” and “faster than expected”.

Yet, as of Thursday afternoon, our genius PM thanked the Climate 200 Teals and Greens for taking a bad idea and making it catastrophic, locking down a hard cap on coal and gas which are the major items making a positive change to reducing the forecast budget deficit.

You can only make affordable building materials with coal and gas generating cheap electricity to process raw products.

Under this week’s introduction of the Safeguard Mechanism amendments, those who process raw materials must slash their emissions 4.9 per cent every year or close up and leave Australia. They will probably do the latter.

According to ABS data released this week, there were three million permanent migrants in Australia who arrived in the 20 years to August 2021. Now officials are talking about another two and half Canberras’ worth over 18 months.

Where are we building for them?

Green taxes have forced more than $213m worth of new developments off the planning table in NSW, sending regional housing blocks up by $350,000.

Without massive construction cost inflation, you can’t have enormous population growth and puritanical “decarbonisation” policies.

We have a land rich in resources and so much space, but states and territories are strangling land supply for new homes, married to high-density infill policies that force families to give up backyards for concrete dog boxes while imposing green taxes on regional communities that cry out for workers and homes.

We have bound ourselves in anti-competitive green tape so the Teal/Green/Kean party posers can charter private planes to argue against natural gas and ammonium nitrate fertiliser in places they cannot even drive themselves to.

The question for them is how they plan to keep another 900,000 people fed, sheltered and warm while on the naive path of Australia’s minuscule contribution to global emissions. Something for them to ponder from their big backyards.