Several policy announcements by the Australian federal Labor government in recent weeks claim to address the deepening shortage of affordable housing nationwide. In fact, these measures are a gift to the property developers and banks, while workers and their families will be locked into even greater mortgage debt.
With median house prices around the country now over $1 million, Australian capital cities are among the least affordable in the world. Over the past 27 years, average housing costs have increased by 483 percent, while average wages have risen by just 127.5 percent.
House under construction in Manly, Queensland [Photo by Orderinchaos via Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0]
The new measures—“pausing” changes to the National Construction Code (NCC) and acting as a partial guarantor for first homebuyer loans—will make house-building more profitable for construction companies at the expense of quality and safety, and cause tens of thousands of people to enter crippling mortgages for over-priced houses.
The “pause” to changes to the NCC until 2029 aims to reduce the “regulatory burden for builders and boost housing supply,” according to a joint press release by Clare O’Neil, minister for housing, homelessness and cities, and Murray Watt, minister for the environment and water.
A similar policy, presented by the Liberal-National Coalition during the 2023 election, was opposed by Labor at the time, on the grounds that it would lead to the building of “shoddy homes.”
Also announced was the loosening of environmental protections under the already inadequate Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC) in order to “fast-track” building approvals. Environmental groups have warned this will mean increased threats to biodiversity and threatened species due to rapid habitat loss through unregulated land clearing.
In reality, both regulation-slashing moves are the fulfilment of longstanding demands from major developers. Master Builders Australia chief executive Denita Wawn said they were “big wins for the industry,” because “simplifying regulatory requirements can improvement productivity,” by which she means increase profits.
Engineers Australia, a professional body representing engineers, opposes the “pause” in changes to the NCC, stating in a press release shortly after the announcement: “Australia must reject the false choice between speed and quality. Fast-built homes do not need to be low-quality homes.”
Reference was made by Engineers Australia to substandard construction, specifically the Opal and Mascot Towers unit complexes in Sydney, which led to both buildings being evacuated with long repair and legal processes for residents—many of the Mascot owners paying mortgages on uninhabitable units for almost 5 years.
Construction at Macquarie Park’s “Lachlan’s Line” development in Sydney’s northern suburbs by the developer Greenland Group came under scrutiny in 2023 for sub-par construction of basement joints in four buildings housing 900 people.
Further evidence of “shoddy” building practices was revealed in a 2023 Strata Defects Survey report prepared by the Strata Community Association NSW, which found that, of the 642 strata buildings researched, 53 percent had serious defects in common property in the 6 years following their construction.
It is not just residents, but workers who will pay the price for a further decline in standards in the industry as regulations are torn down. Teenager Christopher Cassaniti was killed in 2019 while working on the same Macquarie Park complex, when scaffolding collapsed, burying him under tangled steel. Fellow worker Khaled Wehbe sustained life-threatening injuries.
According to a UNSW study published in November last year, the construction industry has “higher rates of workplace injuries than the national average.” The study noted that in 2023, 45 workers were killed on the job and 16,600 serious workers’ compensation claims were lodged.
In another boost for the building industry and banks, the federal Labor government announced it would bring forward the start of the First Homebuyer Guarantee from January 2026 to October this year. The scheme will enable first home buyers to buy a house with only a 5 percent deposit, rather than 20 percent, with the government, not the bank or insurance companies, taking on the additional risk.
The federal Labor government is painting this scheme as a boon for struggling first homebuyers, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stating: “We want to help young people and first home buyers achieve the dream of home ownership sooner.”
In fact, the effect will be to lock many of these “young people and first home buyers” into a nightmare of crippling mortgages, under conditions where, according to the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council (NHSAC), new mortgagers are already having to spend on average 50 percent of household income on loan repayments.
Far from making housing more affordable, this measure is designed to further stimulate the over-inflated property market, in which house prices have already increased beyond the capacity of workers to afford them or even scrape together a down payment. According to the NHSAC, “aspiring home owners” currently need an average of 10.6 years to save for a deposit.
In a report written for the Insurance Council of Australia, lobby group Lateral Economics estimated the scheme would cause an overall 3.5–6.6 percent price increase by 2026, and an up to 9.9 percent rise in lower-priced areas.
The Labor government’s latest claims to be resolving the housing crisis carry the hallmarks of its previously announced “affordable housing” scheme. The $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF), a central pillar of Labor’s 2022 federal election campaign, has completed only around 5,000 “social and affordable homes,” a fraction of its target of 30,000. Moreover, it is not clear how many of these dwellings are newly built and how many have been purchased and given minor renovations.
At the same time, state Labor governments are in the process of destroying large swathes of existing public housing in NSW and Victoria. In Victoria, 44 public housing towers are slated for demolition, which will displace some 10,000 residents. At Sydney’s Waterloo South, 3,000 public housing residents are set to be turfed out.
In both cases, the transparent motive is to drive working-class and poor residents out of the inner city to free up valuable real estate for lucrative private development. While privately owned and operated “social housing” will be included in the new construction, it will be more expensive and offer less security of tenure than the public housing it replaces.
Housing is a basic social right, but under capitalism it is increasingly becoming a privilege. What is needed is the socialist reorganisation of society so every worker has a safe and decent place to live without the threat of eviction or bankruptcy hanging over their heads.
The acute shortage of affordable housing, like every aspect of the deepening social crisis, is an indictment, not just of Labor, but the entire political establishment and the capitalist profit system itself, under which housing is not considered a basic human right, but a profit centre for the wealthy.
For the working class there is only one alternative, a fight for a socialist program. A workers’ government can place the building industry, as well as the banks, property developers and other major corporations, under democratic workers’ control and public ownership. Then society’s vast resources can be put towards fulfilling real social needs, including high quality housing for all.
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