The new head of Gladys Berejiklian’s department angers home buyers

The man set to come on board next month as head of the Premier’s Depertment with a $600,000 pay packet has dismissed the housing crisis as a “slogan”.

The politically correct mandarin who will lead the Department of Premier and Cabinet next month has enraged aspiring home owners and developers by denying there is a housing crisis.

Jim Betts, the head of planning in NSW, doubled down on that message yesterday telling developers “to get on and start building” the homes that have already been approved.

In one of his final acts in the Department of Planning before taking the top job Mr Betts told a summit on housing supply that critics needed to stop “throwing bombs’’ and said suggesting there is a crisis is “a slogan as much as anything.”

Steve Mann, chief executive of the Urban Development Institute of Australia, which hosted the summit said he was “hugely frustrated” that Mr Betts dismissed the NSW housing crisis as a slogan.

Jim Betts, who will soon become the head of the Department of Premier and Cabinet. Picture: Toby Zerna

“You cannot have the statistics we are facing and not see it as a problem,” he said. “If the Government doesn’t think it’s a crisis it is not paying attention to what is being said around kitchen tables and what it means for the next generation.”

Aspiring home owner David Reiling, 35, has written to the Commonwealth Party inquiry into housing to question how a bureaucrat such as Mr Betts, who earns more than $600,000 a year, could understand why he and his wife Sarah cannot get into the market.

“There are lots of events and meetings on the problems of housing affordability and it is the same group of people at the front with no real understanding of the issue,” he said. “The people with the problem don’t have a seat at the table.”

Urban Taskforce chief executive Tom Forrest said Mr Betts is “picking a fight as he walks out of the door on a failed system.

“Having overseen an underperformance in the area of approvals he is now telling the industry that it is unreasonable for us to blame the planning department for the current housing affordability crisis,” he said.

In a paper called Rebooting the Economy this year the NSW Productivity Commission found there had been consistent under supply of housing and predicted it would get worse unless there were major planning reforms.

Mr Betts has pioneered a number of cultural reforms in planning including cultural reforms to remove pin-ups from construction sites and a book club reading Aboriginal Australian writer Bruce Pascoe’s book Dark Emu.

One Nation MP Mark Latham said: “Betts is a disaster - totally obsessed with woke PC content in the workplace instead of the job taxpayers would expect from him: customer service, value for money, better planning and development approvals.

CEO of the NSW Urban Taskforce Tom Forrest has criticised Mr Betts’ appointment. Picture: David Swift

“If he had spent as much time at DPIE on development approvals as he did on LGBTIQBS then NSW would be booming,” he said. “To now make him head of the NSW public service shows how badly Gladys has lost the plot.”

Mr Betts said: “If, as some developers claim, the planning industry is in crisis, why are there more than 100,000 dwellings already approved, where construction has not started?

“We would expect the housing sector to get on and start building these homes, and work closely with the NSW and Local Governments to deliver supporting infrastructure, where required,” he said.

“Every reform that industry has asked for has or is being delivered as part of the biggest reform process in the NSW planning system in generations.

“The facts are, housing approvals have more than tripled since 2009, with more than 57,000 homes approved in the last year alone, which is well above the average for the last 20 years,” he said.

Originally published as The new head of Gladys Berejiklian’s department angers home buyers