“While Andrew Leigh is singing the praises of traditional suburbs such as Hackett, the ACT government’s ideological mindset is to strategically bomb them with more apartments and higher-density living,” writes political columnist MICHAEL MOORE.

Andrew Leigh, local MP and Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury, has taken a swipe at the ACT government for its failures around housing policy. 

Prof Leigh’s speech to the Chifley Research Centre in Melbourne comes at a time when the OECD is warning that the Australian economy is being “hamstrung by a dysfunctional housing sector” and warned Australia to overhaul planning and competition laws or see a drop in the standard of living.

The minister reflected on his own suburb of Hackett – “typical of the mid-century Australian public housing aesthetic. They weren’t designed to win awards. They were designed to meet need”.

They were homes rather than “architectural masterpieces” and they were “delivered fast, built to last and priced within reach”.

At a time when there were just over 100,000 people in Canberra, the city was delivering 2400 new homes annually. Compare this to today’s Canberra with a population approaching half a million. Last year there were even less dwellings approved than in the mid-1960s, with just 2180 approvals.

No wonder there is a housing crisis, and young people are feeling shafted. As Leigh explains: “The collapse in supply isn’t just a statistic – it’s a signal”. It should also be a wake-up call for the ACT government. The consequences of government failures are “rising rents and overcrowding, to the growing number of people priced out of the communities they grew up.”

In his book Battlers and Billionaires: The Updated Story of Inequality in Australia, he identified “from the 1960s to the 1980s, the typical home cost the average worker around four years’ earnings. Today, it costs 11”.

Over the last 15 years the average annual dwelling approvals has been around 4700. Despite the increase in population approvals are not quite double what was achieved in the 1960s.

While Leigh is singing the praises of traditional suburbs such as Hackett, the ACT government’s ideological mindset is to strategically bomb them with more apartments and higher-density living. Planning Minister Chris Steel remains ideologically bound to focus on “townhouses, terraces, walk-up apartments”. 

This mindset is based on limiting the city’s footprint. Suburbs such as Denman Prospect and Whitlam have a mix of the more traditional blocks and higher density. The lack of supply of traditional blocks has pushed the price of housing in these suburbs well beyond the reach of the next generation. It is not as though there is a shortage of land in this country, and more is needed for housing.

The real criticism of governments around Australia, as Leigh sees it, “isn’t a lack of wealth, or ideas, or demand. It’s the quiet accumulation of obstacles”. Success in areas such as housing supply is “about competence. About saying yes – not to everything, but to the right things”.

It is not just in Canberra. There is a similar story across Australia – enough to motivate the OECD to point the finger at our nation. So where does the problem really lie? “Too few homes, delivered too slowly at too high a cost”. The problem is largely institutional with a “housing system where it is simply too hard to build”.

In his conclusion, Leigh identifies the problems with the systems including “approvals, compliance, co-ordination” being slow, fragmented, and over-engineered”. 

Over the years this column has regularly identified delay as a key tool to hamper decisions. In this context, Leigh points out “they don’t say ‘no’ outright. They just make ‘yes’ harder than it needs to be”.

His speech concluded with five recommendations to “build systems that deliver”. The ACT government would do well to take on board the thinly veiled criticisms of their federal Labor colleague. It is time to focus on throughput, align planning and delivery, remove the chokepoints in process and build institutional confidence with “trusted, accountable public institutions”.

This is not the time for grand announcements (that have become the hallmark of the Barr government) but rather to focus on repairing the parts of the system that retard progress.

Michael Moore is a former member of the ACT Legislative Assembly and an independent minister for health. He has been a political columnist with “CityNews” since 2006.michael moore.