Haas

• Or is it a case of that old mountaineering saying: the fog is thickest just before the summit?
• By this I mean how something as complex as housing can be reduced to one or two issues of the moment.
• Read more:
  To deliver enough affordable housing and end homelessness, what must a national strategy do?

But what about the new housing fund?

• The federal government says its new fund will provide A$500 million a year to build much-needed social housing.
• The Greens are demanding more direct funding of housing (at first $5 billion a year, now reduced to $2.5 billion) and a rent freeze.
• Read more:
  Albanese government tackles housing crisis on 3 fronts, but there's still more to do

Supply is only one piece of the puzzle

• It takes more than dollars to deliver a building.
• We must address all the phases: development, design, construction, operation and, after all that, end of life.

Development

New business and ownership models are needed. These include:
• Let’s not aim to centralise housing development.
• A final area for innovation in the development phase is planning.

Design

• Australian houses are among the world’s largest even though households are shrinking.
• As the Swedish saying goes: “The cheapest square metre is the square metre you don’t build!” Make houses more flexible and diverse.

Construction

• We need faster, cheaper and higher-quality ways of building.
• In contrast to building on site from the ground up, prefabricated, modular or industrialised house-building happens in factories.
• Up entering Swedish and German house-building factories, it is clear these are more inclusive workplaces.

Operation

• Improve building performance through better development, design and operation of housing.
• Occupants won’t be left with unaffordable “utility timebombs” with high running costs.

End of life

An increased focus on decarbonisation and sustainable use of resources will enable new approaches to reusing and recycling building materials. Re-using existing and obsolete buildings for new housing – adaptive re-use – is another way to provide more housing.

Where to from here?

Innovations like these could be applied tomorrow to help us do more with less. A final challenge to government: as we prepare to spend billions on building housing across the country, is it too outlandish to imagine we could invest a mere 1% of those vast sums in innovation programs? Innovation can deliver the increases in building productivity and capacity that Australia so badly needs.