On a dark and stormy housing crisis – what they said at Let’s Hack Housing

It was a dark and stormy night in Sydney last week for our Let’s Hack Housing open mic forum – after weeks of sunshine. And yet we got a great turnout. Vibrant engaged people with a passion to shape the future of housing in Australia. Because this is a national and global crisis and everyone there wanted solutions.

Here are highlights of the main takeaways but we will dive deeper into issues raised in coming weeks and months.

Huge thanks to our panellists – who were generous with their time and patience throughout, and likewise to our wonderful sponsors Warren and Mahoney

Following are some initial highlights of the conversations over two panel sessions.

What happened when we kicked off our Let’s Hack Housing event was it opened a can of worms. Or a massive rabbit hole that seems to only get bigger and more complex the more we peered into its inner workings.

The only thing clear at this stage is we can’t do this alone.

If you have views on solutions to the crises and want to contribute please get in touch.

We want to know more about new models of housing, how governments at all levels can deliver more affordable and social housing directly or in concert with the private sector.

We want to hear about innovative off-market ideas and protypes by communities or small bunches of people wanting to do their own thing.

Tell us about the clever, innovative developers and architects that you know who are designing housing that’s sustainable and brings people together in a village environment and how this might deliver better mental and physical health outcomes.

We want to know how these exemplar models can ignite change in other sectors of the market looking on.

And whether the private market sector can ever be flexible enough to meet needs below certain income levels?

We want to hear if you think housing at scale in precincts and forming part of a defence system for our future can actually be delivered by small boutique (or cowboy) developers anymore.

Or if you think that small innovative developers are the only way to get innovation.

We want to hear about what banks and non bank lenders are doing to solve the problem.

And whether Australia will ever get the housing tax reform that will stop the worst excesses of this now highly financialised product.

Are there new models of funding emerging in the superannuation funds or wealthy private investors? In the US there’s an emerging class of investors scooping up low income housing, sight unseen, and making a motza out of this increasingly scarce commodity.

According to our panellists on the night we’re in for a long period of housing shortages.

Let’s hear about the power of planning and connected thinking between all levels of government and the people and organisations scattered all along the demand and supply chain to improve our quality of life while protecting us from climate heating and extreme weather.

We also want to hear about construction innovation and new materials that solve our challenges on biodiversity and regenerative challenges.

It’s a mountain of never-ending work we’re laying out here, but one thing is clear, it’s the most exciting rewarding work you’ll ever do.

A huge thank you to our Indigenous People who shine a light on the fundamental principles we need to keep front and centre in all our work in all parts of the built environment. Country first, then people. Connect with both and you will care for both, as the wonderful Craig Kerslake of Nguluway DesignInc told us on the night.

Over the coming weeks we want to focus more on housing. Maybe that will stretch to months, or years after what we heard at our Let’s Hack Housing event last week.

Get in touch at editorial@thefifthestate.com.au

Or call 02 808 42291

Panel 1

Panellist or audience member	What they said
Craig Kerslake	Housing is about relationships across lots of sectors, but it has to get away from the idea of private space and start looking at relational space. (Craig elsewhere said that if you can see people and places you care about them)
Nicole Gurran	I were to sum up what I’ve been about for the past 20 years, it is resisting simplistic narratives about the housing problem and simplistic fixes. We’re still back at the very, very simplistic refrain that the planning system is preventing housing supply and making housing more expensive.
Michael Pascoe	I’m increasingly focused on the great crime that is the abandonment of public sector’s involvement in public housing. There is no silver bullet but there is a solution. It’s slow. But it’s to return to what we did to it for decades, successfully. That’s a quite massive government involved in housing. The call today is that the market will fix it but the market got us into this mess
Jess Miller	The concern is about cracking open solutions through implementation, as opposed to theoretically proselytising about it.  It’s about doing “everything all at once”. The City of Sydney is in really unique position in that it has planning agreements, quite extensive advocacy power, but is also limited as to what it can and can’t do. A big focus needs to be short term accommodation which has about 5000 dwellings. I don’t have a lot of faith in build to rent. I haven’t seen an example where that’s worked out fairly.
Cathy Callaghan	Shelter NSW has been advocating for the needs of low income people in this state for 50 years, and we’re concerned and focused on our vision for secure homes and security in homes (which means not being made to vacate at short notice or face steep sudden rises in rents). We want alternatives not just in price but dwellings that are well built and well designed.
Sue Weatherley	Housing is a human right. We need a planning system and a market system and a government that actually recognises that. We need housing in the right places that have good access to transport and services in areas that are not flood prone or fire prone. We need to protect biodiversity that will “talk to Country” as well and promote human wellbeing. Surprisingly, I’m actually talking about simple things like solar access and windows in bedrooms.
Tim Sneesby	At Waverley Council we’re looking at innovative ways to to increase affordable housing in that area. So for example, we recently introduced a 1% affordable housing levy on all new residential flat buildings and multi-dwelling housing, the first local government in Australia. Some of the issues we’re facing in places like Waverley is that it was becoming an ultra premium market, and we’re seeing occasions where nine, a block of nine apartments are knocked down to replace with a single dwelling. Over the last 30 years, if you look at the top four quintiles by household income, expenditure on housing has actually stayed the same, but for the bottom quintile it’s increased dramatically. So that’s really where the crisis is.
Maria Atkinson	Craig Kerslake tells us that loneliness has the same outcomes as smoking.
Craig Kerslake	It’s funny, when we start talking about housing, we always talk about it from a financial point of view. What’s it cost? How? How fast can we procure it? I’m an architect, so I’m in that world. Housing plans tend to be about 10 years. Aboriginal people talk about a 500 year plan. That’s your grandchildren’s grandchildren. So Aunty Lois would say you need to look well beyond. It’s a mercantile conversation. So councils are stuck in this sort of place of, saying we can’t afford to tax [developers] 1% and they’ve got these minutiae moves that they can make. We need to be bold here, guys, really. I’m not blaming councils, or government.  I’m thinking we need to be outraged. We need to be pissed off here, because the price of housing is unbelievably expensive. We need to have relationships with each other. You don’t care about your neighbour if you don’t know them. But here’s the thing in our culture is that if your neighbour’s not okay, you’re also not okay. Yet, the housing designs that we produce are all about the personal space, and then we want to get away with that private open balcony. Where are the spaces we can connect? How do you create community and layers of social cohesion?
Maria Atkinson	Are we done with blaming planning yet for the housing crisis? I just want to point out that even the NSW Productivity and Equality Commission, they got it wrong in the first report. They got a wrong in the second report. They got an awful lot wrong in the third report, but in the third report, they stopped [entirely] blaming planning
Sue Weatherley	We want to really reduce some of the risk in the system. We actually need a planning system that provides clarity and certainty in a far better way than current planning system does, and that would reduce some of the risk in projects.
Maria Atkinson	We’ve got quite a few people online as well that are talking about the crisis in Western Australia. We’ve got people in the room that thankfully came up from Victoria, and we’ve got people tell me about [dreadful] examples. So it’s a national issue, not just in New South Wales.
Peter (audience member)	The build to rent model does not work. I’ve built a model and it doesn’t work. I grew up in NSW Housing Commission, Fortunately, I’ve managed to travel all over the world, and I’ve seen a lot of affordable and social housing in other parts of the world. And the thing that strikes me is that we in Australia like to reinvent the wheel. I’ve yet to see anyone say, Okay, what’s specifically different about this great model in Sweden, this great model in Austria? Like detail it out and say, How can we adapt that model to Australia? What needs to change?
Michael Pascoe	It’s not a matter of reinventing the wheel. We did it. We had massive government intervention. And you know who the father of the Australian dream was? Bob Menzies. He wanted to have a nation of capitalists because he thought they’d vote conservative. And he was right. Under Menzies, there was massive amount of money put into housing commissions to build houses that could be bought, but also to rent. In 1985, 9.3 per cent of housing completed was public sector. A decade later, that was down 4.5%, and in the latest calendar year, 2023, still 1.9% but the very worst performance was in 2019 under The coalition government, we had Just 1.1%
Nicole Gurran	The “Auckland miracle”. When Auckland changed its planning regime to allow more high density and people said it brought down the price and rent of housing, what’s not often mentioned is that it also rolled back negative gearing. Not to mention border closures and the high interest rate environment. But all that is to say, If there is an area where planning controls are preventing medium and high density housing being built and it’s appropriate for it to be built, we want to be able to change those rules. When we see problems in the planning system, we want to improve it. In Sydney, there were no problems in 2019 right until COVID when there was high density housing,  we’ve had a building boom. But addressing those issues still doesn’t address the bottom 25 per cent of the market. So we’ve got to separate the need for good planning and diverse housing from the need to properly fund social housing. And to get to Peter’s other point, why is Australia different to Europe? The big difference is, not only do we not properly fund social housing for people on very low incomes, but we’ve also got so few of them [and they are in the form of social welfare]. We have no cross subsidisation financially. And we have no vision socially.
Maria Atkinson	What’s the political situation on housing?
Jess Miller	To describe the political situation would be to kind of be sitting in front of the pot that is simmering. It’s just full of intergenerational rage, and it’s been simmering along there for quite some time, and it’s like grown ups are just sort of standing back, watching the pot boil over, and nobody is willing to reach out and turn off the temperature. We can throw everything that we’ve got at a council level. The City of Sydney can do inclusionary planning.  It took four years for the state government to agree and we know that it works. It delivered more affordable housing. There’s been suggestions that (the City) take its whole capital budget and start competing with the private sector to buy more affordable housing. I think that’s a stupid idea, because they have nothing left for all the other things that people need in cost of living crisis. But I think, you know, people are really angry, and they’re getting really, really upset. And it’s not just young people who have been completely blocked out of the market who are getting angry is actually people in communities who are wondering why their cities are boring, and it’s because it’s full of people who are super rich, super boring.
Michael Pascoe	Tax is not the answer of itself. You know, we are incapable of doing the most obvious tender thing to limit negative gearing to new builds. So the investor market is not adding supply at all. So there are, there are things that need to be tweaked that will help. It’s the commitment to do it. We can find half a trillion dollars for nuclear powered submarines
Cathy Callaghan	We need to focus on building public housing [infrastructure]. We don’t have this argument about building public schools or public roads, public hospitals. It’s basic infrastructure. And money will be found this year – the New South Wales government found $5 billion.
Joe O’Donoghue (audience member)	Here’s a hypothetical. What are the three things you would do on your first day if you were suddenly appointed premier?
Tim Sneesby	I would change the multitude of taxation settings that treat housing as an investment. It’s not just needed. [I would impose] a capital gains tax on owner occupied housing. On claims that planning forces prices to rise for housing – there are two charts that show the price of housing and the price of farm land. In Australia they are identical, so we’ve got a common denominator here, which is a financialisation –  we’ve got record low interest rates, encouraging the funnelling of finance into housing
Sue Weatherley	I would take the 100,000 hectares of land used for car parking and use it for housing
Cathy Callaghan	I would restart the transport oriented development program that’s still being sorted, and go back to what was announced in December, which was 15% generally affordable housing and I would produce a schedule going up over time so we get a really huge affordable rental housing managed by the not for profit community housing sector
Jess Miller	I would get rid of lazy spaces. Just door knocking (for re-election to the City of Sydney as a councillor) I found so many buildings, houses, residential, that are sitting there doing nothing. Punish them financially to the point where they must do something with the property. And also the larger ethical question of why is it okay for some people to have 20 houses and other people don’t even have one home?
Michael Pascoe	Quoting a politician: We all know what needs to be done. We just don’t know how to get re-elected it after we do it.
Nicole Gurran	A big problem in the market is the lumpiness that comes from depending on prices going up to build housing. So you get deskilling of trades. The brilliance of reinvesting in social housing would to provide a pipeline of derisked sites [encouraging the industry to build housing and leading to responsible patient growth].
Jeremy Gill, Committee for Sydney, in the audience	The idea that adding affordable housing into development adds cost to development, and pass those costs on into homeowners is not correct. Development contributions where costs are not passed onto buyers, they are factored into the purchase prices that developers will pay for the land and there is absorbed by the land owner, rather than the home owner. The same thing applies equally to inclusion rezoning and housing targets. If we signalled clearly to the market that we will need to have a 20 or 30%, affordable housing target particularly on acquisitions that have not been made yet, that will be priced in to future development costs
Sue Weatherley	The story I always tell is the north of West Rail line. When they were building it, some guy bought a property in Cherrybrook for $1.5 million. A couple of years later, they announced a station and he sold his property for $14 million. So that’s a windfall gain, and he took all of that into his pocket and walked away (tax free)

Panel 2

Nick Dean	I lead the residential sector at Warren and Mahoney across Australia and New Zealand, and I’m based in Melbourne I live and breathe residential architecture, everything from single dwellings through to large scale, built to rent and everything in between. I’m a firm believer that it’s not a one size fits all solution, and we need to focus on the spectrum from end to end, from single housing through to large scale institutional development. I’m interested in how we can design things more efficiently, use our resources better and have a more efficient and more productive labour environment.,
Tim Williams	When I came to Australia, I was quite shocked that in London Lendlease built 35 to 50% inclusionary zoning in London and zero in Sydney. And I just didn’t understand how that had happened. And it’s not their fault, it’s our fault. We’ve heard lots of technical solutions tonight. [The challenge] as a community is to explain why business as usual is no longer working for all of us.
Fabrizio Perilli	As president of the Property Council NSW, and founder of developer Perifa (and previously CEO of Toga) I’m interested in how the development industry can create places that people wish can be proud of. At a project in Addison Road, Kensington we offered solutions for the homeless, with underutilised buildings and it’s a shame that hasn’t been taken up elsewhere. Also mixed use precincts, which is the way for the future and requires great design, great public places, public domain, creating amenity for not only the community living within the development but also the greater community as well.
Brian Seidler	As executive director of the Master Builders (NSW) I’m on the supply end that builds all of your beautiful buildings, and we represent from a mum and dad builder up to a Multiplex. In NSW, we have about 8300 business members. And we also get into the stuff that’s probably not talked about that much, and that is mental health for building workers. I think that’s hardly raised and we also talk about what’s a proper work life balance for a building worker. So I have in my hot hand a report that will be released in about three weeks, which has been a two year study with the University of Technology Sydney, about what is a work life balance, or what does work life balance look like in the building industry.
Liam Wallis	I’m up from Melbourne (where his company Hip V Hype is based) and we do a lot of our own development and also sustainability consulting. Our aim is to deliver exemplar projects in sustainability, to demonstrate to the market that best practice in sustainability is not only possible, but that it is commercially viable and that people want better, but importantly, we do a lot of work in the policy and strategy level. Our team are also focused on building engineering, so Passive House and the like. Buildings such as (the company’s) York where apartments achieved 8.6 star NatHERS and used 40% less energy than code compliant apartment. What we’re seeing is more of a focus on the person who is developing an asset, owning and operating an asset that’s across multiple asset classes. So we’re starting to see an alignment between commercial objectives and broader sustainability objectives,
Louise Crabtree-Hayes	One of the pieces of work that we released earlier this year (through Western Sydney University) was with the rental cooperatives in Australia, across NSW, South Australia, Victoria and WA, and they’re part of the social housing system, but they’re constituted as cooperatives, so members actually control the governance of the organisation, over things like design and development processes. This also includes things like tenancy selection and the governance and management of the stock. And so the other work that I do is with community land trusts, because they hold tights to land in perpetuity and take it out of the market. And because they’re there in perpetuity, they don’t build garbage, and they don’t partner with people who build garbage, because if they do, they’re the ones holding it at the end of the day, when someone says, In 20 years, why is my wall cracking; they don’t get to walk away.  And that’s something we’re starting to look at here, and how we translate those principles into the system that we’ve got here, so we can start to get those better housing outcomes, but also there’s better individual outcomes and the placemaking outcomes, such as absolutely stellar urban design, because the voice of community is determining what’s getting built and on what terms.
Michael Conminos	A former public servant now a consultant working with everyone around the table, whether infrastructure, human services, planning system or public finance.  The interesting thing about our work is the market pushes us in different directions, and the directions it’s pushed us in now to the community housing sector, to regional New South Wales. No one’s talked about that, yet we need to talk about that. And the last is coaching applicants to try and get things through quicker.
Maria Atkinson	Liam tell us about the co-ordination body in Victoria for planning?
Liam Wallis	There’s commendable action by the Victorian government. A single individual has been put in charge of implementing the (new) housing statement, and to Victoria’s credit, because we’ve really been stuck in the mud for a really long time, we’re starting to see some movement where projects that are prioritising affordable housing or seen as strategically significant have certain pathways available to them to bypass local government, to bypass kind of third party appeal provisions. One of the best moves the Victorian government did was to integrate planning with transport. It’s taken a little while to get up and running, and we’re starting to see some results that are meaningful now.
Maria Atkinson	So it’s a fix for a broken system?
Tim Williams	I think a new stage was reached 10 days ago when Tony Lombardo, chief executive of Lendlease, said he couldn’t afford to build mainstream housing anymore. There was no market for it, right? So something big has been happening on the private sector side, and we always hear about the problems on the public sector side, and I’m very sympathetic. But there’s been a problem for a long time. The single model that we’ve got in Australia, homes for sale, can’t deliver all the housing that we need. So something else has to happen. It’s a difficult place that we’re in, but I’m optimistic, the state government has some good people in place. I think we’re learning that some of the stuff that we’ve been doing for decades, it’s just not working and it won’t work again for a couple of years. The NSW government has good people in place to improve the outcomes, (including $5billion for social housing announced recently) We need a new generation of public, private partnering and innovation. Looking around Australia, maybe ideas from Victoria, for instance, and we need different kinds of money coming to housing, not just banking money with its limitations. We need infrastructure money coming in.
Maria Atkinson	Let’s look at rental and sustainable housing
Fabrizio Perilli	The housing crisis hasn’t just appeared the construction crisis. Construction costs have increased by 30% in a relatively short period of time, and it’s caught out a number of proponents in the industry. To be fair there are many companies that are technically insolvent, and that’s a real worry. So now they’re either walking away from delivering housing, because housing is considered a higher risk than other asset classes because of the 10 year liability you have post completion, or they’re basically putting a premium on their pricing. Couple that with, couple that with a planning systemthat hasn’t delivered on the needs of our state. There’s been a misalignment between state government and the local government, federal degree, but more state and local in terms of its the strategy, the initiatives, the objectives. And now we have an existing population that needs to be housed.
Maria Atkinson	But what are the solutions?
Fabrizio Perilli	There are no silver bullets. First we need diversity of housing. We’re trying to fit everything into the same square box. And I think in NSW maybe different to Melbourne we’ve become too rules based. Everything has to fit a box. The apartment design guidelines are not guidelines, it’s the Bible. In  other parts of the world there is a diversity of housing, type, size. It doesn’t mean that quality has to be less. I think the quality has to be high. I think the amenities have to be high. That’s a given. That’s a ticket to the game. Perhaps we can enter the market at a lower price, and work our way forward. We have the standard size, one bedroom, two bedroom, three bedroom apartment. If you have a studio, you can’t get bank finance. That’s unacceptable. The banking industry needs to come and join the conversation. We need to start looking at micro apartments as in Asia and Europe. And different forms of (rental) accommodation
Nick Deans	I couldn’t agree more. I think as architects, we jump through hurdles to design buildings that comply with the rules. They’re a hell of a lot more complex than they need to be, and as a result, they’re a lot more expensive to build, and unfortunately, that’s passed onto consumers.
Brian Seidler	Regardless of how much goes through the development system, we don’t have the builders to build. We haven’t got enough apprentices. If you look at the statistics, governments like to tell us that there are more apprentices going into the system, but only 50% are coming out. Parents are steering their children away from construction. The building Industry is not attractive. We followed all the problems which have emanated out of Victoria about bikie gangs…well, it’s probably worse here in New South Wales, it’s just not as open. And so how do we convince people that our industry is a good industry for young ones to go into? It’s very difficult. We must train people but also bring people from overseas with skills, or upskilling those.
Liam Wallis	Protectionist policies led by certain parts of the industry have meant that the only people that are allowed to build in this country are big burly blokes. We’ve got a percentage of the population that are asking to come onto sites to be part of that construction process. Just look at the success of the Women’s AFL (football) there’s significant number of people that want to get involved in construction, and we’re shutting them outWhat is the industry doing to open the doors greater diversity on site?
Brian Seidler	50% roughly of the population are female, 4% if we’re lucky, 3% are female trades people. It’s higher in the managerial side, just up to 30% but the number one issue, the number one issue, is flexibility of ours and our industry clients, developers, they want their buildings done a certain price in a certain time, and that flexibility won’t be included in the cost.
Maria Atkinson	Now about rental
Louise Crabtree-Hayes	The research on rental co-operatives (that controlled for location, age of the stock, gender, income, household formation) saw categorically that having a sense of agency and voice, even though all of these people are renters, made them feel that they had security. They had lifelong tenure. They said, I can live here as long as I want, and I want to stay here until, I’m not of this world, and they’re renting. It really showed that it’s not about the tenure it’s about what the tenure form enables. And so, and that’s a system that exists here in the Australian system, but it’s not something that we know about. So I think the point about diversity, it’s not just in terms of design, it’s in terms of what do we think particular tenure forms deliver.
Tim Williams	We tend to think that what’s happening in NSW and Australia is unique to us, and it’s not right. There is an Anglosphere crisis around housing and around the skills and money for housing. I run a sentence every now and again, (that) I’ve seen this crisis in NSW housing; I blame the NSW planning system. The private sector has been asking for the wrong kind of help from the public sector. Asking to kill the planning system is equivalent to saying the dog ate my homework. What they should be asking for is co-investment. In the 2010 crash, 2820 10 in England, we bought distressed assets off the private sector and made them socialised for 10 years, and sometimes we sold it back in the market. We need that kind of originality, because the market’s stuck.
Rose Iverson. TSA Riley (audience member)	What could we do with the pattern book in NSW to leverage it to achieve the outcomes we need to achieve. What can we do to use it to incentivise the housing outcomes that we want.
Liam Wallis	I was involved with the Future Homes project (in Victoria) and it didn’t work. It’s a really good example of like, misguided effort, in my personal opinion. So whatever budget’s allocated to pattern book, go and put it towards partnering and actually developing outcomes on the ground, build the buildings, design them with quality designers, and then spend your time, energy and effort taking as many people as you possibly can through that building to demonstrate the benefits of good design. Because site specific design responses are so complex that you cannot develop a pattern book that’s applicable across the multitude of complexity that relates to different sites.
Tim Williams	All the London squares are patented. If you haven’t got great architects, a pattern book is a great idea.
Sue Weatherley	There are opportunities to build housing in a factory
Cathy Callaghan	There’s currently 57,000 households on the approved social housing places. So with the state government’s push for medium and high density, particularly in greater Sydney, let’s assume the great number of renters will end up in those buildings, so to the architects in the room, the builders, what is the different needs that you recognise from your industry, that low income people need in high rise? If nearly all of your income is spent on your rent, and then you’ve got all the vagaries of being afraid of being evicted, imagine you have a disability, and you spend all of your time indoors, not going out to work. [It’s where good design becomes imperative] I think it’s a different experience when you’re very low income renter in high rise.
Fabrizio	I think you can have good quality design. It doesn’t have to be expensive. You can design something great at a very low cost budget. I think we have that product that allows people just to get into the market, to have a roof over their head, to have a bed, to have a place where they can cook, and actually just feel safe, and have the ability, over a period of time, to basically move through that system into a into maybe a more aspiring place to live as well. I think that’s one thing that we’ve forgotten as a society, and we’re trying to fit everything into one size fits all
Craig Kerslake	I grew up with Department of Housing, and I’m a board director at the Aboriginal Housing office. As an institution, we are knocking it out of the park. I’m an architect in the private sector, and some of the things that we talk about is strong homes, strong family. That’s our motto. So it’s really important to get that right. As an Aboriginal architect, we’ve created a model we called Auntie’s House, and it focuses on social outcomes. The first things we draw on a master plan are neighbourhoods, not looking at yield, not  looking at private space, we look at neighbourhoods, and then we layer that to private space.
Louise Crabtree-Hayes	It’s centralising the need to actually have the resident’s voice in design then we actually hear what people need in their housing design. So rather than presuming to know you’re working with the residents to say, Well, what do you need to build?
Adrian Harrington	I’m the former chair of Housing Australia, but now wear the hat of being in a privileged position of being on the board of the ACT  Suburban Land Agency. I’m a chair of a disability housing provider and advisor to an infrastructure fund manager who’s partnering with the community housing sector to bring institutional capital. So I’m seeing the three of the key parts. (The other bit I don’t see is I don’t sit on a planning or an architectural business). What I’m seeing at the moment is the great misunderstanding. You’ve got institutions who really don’t understand what community housing is. You’ve got government who really don’t understand the financial markets and the capital side of it – they want to see capital partnering. So I’d ask the panel, what do you think we need to be doing to get all these people who want to be at the table? Everyone’s saying they want to be at the table, but I think at the moment, they’re all still talking a different language
Michael Conminos	The unfortunate thing about this sector is that everyone looks through the lens of their discipline, which includes different vocabularies and mental models. So when you’re having conversations, often people don’t understand what you’re talking about, even though you understand words. So the more knowledge sharing, the better. Just take the time to understand who is sitting at the table with you, what their drivers are, their objectives. I’m a bit worried about how the conversation’s gone tonight, because we need to build stuff, and we either need public money to build public housing or we need risk based returns for market housing. At the moment, we don’t have enough of either. We need to de risk stuff. If it doesn’t need to be there take it out, but that needs to be a national mission so we can drive down costs without losing quality,
Nick Deans	There’s no secret. When you look at Skyline of our capital cities, you know, Sydney is probably the leading example, but Melbourne’s no exception, that you have buildings that are constantly trying to one up each other. And that translates directly into affordability. You look at some global cities, I’ve spent a fair bit of time in Tokyo, a lot of the architecture is actually quite vanilla, and it’s quite simple, but it performs its primary function. It provides safe, you know, safe homes that are healthy, clean, security of tenure, all of the things that we’re trying to achieve out of the principles and aspiration of housing as a country. There’s just this constant: every building has to be better than the next. But actually, at a certain level, there’s been a sort of a rhetoric tonight around housing as a form of infrastructure. Certainly people don’t approach roads and hospitals necessarily in the same way. So why should housing be different?
Tim Williams	About 15 years ago, somebody explained to me this revolutionary concept of residual land value, right? And the reason is the number of people in the public service, both in the UK and in Australia, that have never heard of residual land value. I raise it, partly because I think Property Council has not been doing its job to explain how development actually works. So instead of going on about planning. For example, if we want to do inclusionary zoning (in Victoria the Property Council killed it. It was an utterly disgraceful campaign around 1%) Instead if you tell us before we buy the land that you want us to do 3,4,5, per cent inclusionary zoning we pay less to the landowner. So there is a real, real need to have a proper conversation about the business model in the private sector the public sector, to understand how each other should work.
Brian Seidler	It doesn’t matter whatever happens with planning, we don’t have the builders to build. We’re probably talking 12 to 15 years before a young person is developed into a good business or building practitioner. The other way, of course, is bringing them from overseas. And during COVID, we had a whole host of people leave Australia; and go back to Ireland, Scotland, England and they haven’t come back. And so we’ve got that problem, and we’re just not attractive enough. So And what that means is the cost of labour will continue to go up.
Fabrizio Perilli	The next 10 to 15 years are going to be a struggle. We’re in a transition period. Let’s be really crystal clear, to build a 100 square metre apartment, or 80 sq m today in Sydney 15 years ago it was under $300,000 today, over $550,000 for a basic apartment with basic finishes. Now I’m sorry, but that is not affordable. In other parts of. the world you have low cost labour, here we don’t.
John Brockhoff, Planning Institute of Australia, in the audience	Strategic integrated planning – Macquarie Park is a great example. An enormous amount of new high rise apartments went in. And guess what? A site that they bought was a school. They built apartments and not long after they realised they needed a school and had to pay top dollar for the new school site. So a plug for integrated strategic planning, that if you rezone everything everywhere, all at once, you lose the ability to get a really good return on public investment and private investment in their own infrastructure. And although planning has been demonised tonight, it forms a really important role to get a great return on public investment.
Tim Williams	There’s a recent Northern Line Extension in London to Battersea Power Station, which was entirely funded up front by the Treasury. It put the money up, but the it was paid by a roof tax, effectively, from 15,000 homes were going to be built. It was 100% funded by development, right because it helped the value of the area of the private sector itself. So it was a quid pro quo. The value wouldn’t be there unless the public sector put the infrastructure there. The infrastructure was paid for by the private sector growth. There’s nothing wrong with this. Everybody wants to do it. We’ve got to start thinking like this.
Maria Atkinson	I’m hearing a rap that it’s everyone pointing the finger at themselves. So we want new financial opportunities through a tax system. It’s how we vote. Okay, personally, if we want to stop the demonisation and blame game, we require strategic, coordinated plans. We’ve got to stop the private industry being told that they have to solve social housing. We have low income housing that we want a national statistic for fairness. We need the long journey of encouraging talent to the industry being more productive and efficient in construction and developing the pipeline of delivery in different ways than we’ve historically done it. And we’re not giving up quality, beauty, open space, connectivity and all those social service and environmental services for renters, we need an intervention, and probably a specific one on models that would give security and tenure to, I think, a voice that is missing, and particularly missing a little tonight. So that’s a wrap from me.

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