Councils must stop holding back development

Building to relieve the housing crisis still lags in NSW, and Premier Chris Minns has correctly laid a huge part of the blame on the failure of sluggish councils to tackle housing supply.

In a grim achievement, NSW is falling behind other states in efforts to build homes.

But new changes to NSW’s 50-year-old planning act, including a three-person Housing Delivery Authority with power to set significant developments on a fast track and to bypass councils, are aimed at taking development out of the doldrums.

Minns said the labyrinthine planning system not only acted as a drag on construction but that it had hampered the provision of new housing. “That’s been like that for 15 years. I found that the greatest resistance to the planning reforms early on was from our own bureaucrats, and if they’re not touching planning decisions as they move through the system, they’re not happy,” Minns told the Herald’s Shane Wright and Alexandra Smith.

To prove his point, Minns said NSW built six houses per 1000 people every 12 months while Victoria delivered eight houses per 1000 people, and Queensland nine. In the three months to the end of June, just 9638 homes – houses and units – were completed across NSW, the lowest quarterly result since 2014. For the 2024-25 financial year, 42,411 homes were finished, a drop of 33 per cent on the 63,497 completed in 2019-20. There were 12,304 homes completed in Victoria in the June quarter and 55,208 were finished last financial year. Over the past four years, almost 50,000 more homes have been built in Victoria than in NSW.

The waning building statistics suggest something is dreadfully wrong in NSW. But after curtly reminding municipalities that “local government is just an act of the state parliament”, Minns diplomatically followed up by saying he did not want to just bash the councils.

He was at pains to point out that a number of mayors had gone out on a limb to get more housing going, and he was keen to work with municipalities. “We can’t pass the buck any more. We’ve got the levers that we can pull to get housing going. More often than not, we’re getting good outcomes with local councils, and we want that to continue. And I actually do want to ramp up the pressure or the heat on local mayors,” he said.

But the desultory NSW building figures sit uncomfortably against the successes of some other states in building to relieve the housing crisis. They also raise serious questions about Minns’ ability to achieve his June 2023 commitment to enable the construction of 314,000 homes over five years as part of the NSW government’s commitment under the National Housing Accord.

Minns also noted NSW’s biggest problems all came back to housing, whether it was industrial relations, skilled labour shortages, the cost of living or family budgets. Many councils would do well to think outside their boundaries when considering building applications.