Addressing Australia's housing crisis should not involve the blame game of pointing the finger at high immigration - an answer that is beyond ironic in a country where so many of us come from families that have recently settled on our shores.
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Of course, it is true the state of our housing market is nothing short of a national emergency.
For swathes of the population, the basic dignity of being able to afford to keep a decent roof over their heads is slipping out of reach and the prospect of ever owning a property seems like an impossibility.
But Australia should be capable of saying yes to migrants and capable of housing them along with all Australians.
The real problem behind our housing crisis is the lack of attention paid to supply-side reforms, the better matching of supply with demand from new housing stock, and better utilisation of our existing housing stock.
Currently we're not building enough homes to house the usual number of migrants, or Australians, either.
That's because we are structurally incapable of building enough homes to keep up with rising demand, let alone starting to address the structural undersupply in the market. And it is not for a lack of trying.
Over the past two years, on average, almost 103,000 houses have been under construction at any one time.
That is more than two-thirds higher than the average seen over the decade prior to the pandemic.
The above average number of homes under construction is a consequence of pandemic-era backlogs caused by lockdowns and the resultant post-pandemic challenges like high material costs, increased wages, and labour shortages.
That many of Australia's home builders are spinning their wheels on existing projects is partly why dwelling approvals and commencements are currently in the gutter.
This reality makes the federal government's National Housing Accord's stated goal of building 1.2 million new, well-located homes between 2024 and 2029 feel like a remote possibility at best.
Meeting that target means delivering 60,000 new dwellings per quarter for five years.
Australia has not delivered that many houses in a quarter this century. And it is hard to see how we could when higher interest rates restrict the flow of credit and one in three large builders have cashflow problems due to material constraints and staff shortages.
Recent reports indicate we may need as many as 90,000 additional tradies to plug the skills gap.
We need to make a concerted and strategic effort to overcome this structural barrier to building new homes.
First, we need administrative certainty. Currently, responsibility for meeting housing targets is diffused across several different ministers, departments, and datasets.
While much focus has been made of demand, with immigration as the bogey proxy, the real reform attention must be paid to supply, even as we see so many builders going bust in the current economic cycle.
Planning reforms can make the single biggest difference to the housing affordability question, but even that is not a quick fix.
One idea for the federal budget is to incentivise the states and territories to adopt to a more consistent set of planning reforms to drive predictability across zoning rules and building regulations - like assessment timeframes and sustainable and climate-resilient development outcomes.
Second, we need incentives and planning reform to stop seeing apartment living as just a steppingstone to the old quarter-acre block and instead view apartment living as equivalent to houses.
But for that we need to better design - a move at odds with the showbox-design mentality that has dominated apartment construction.
More medium- and high-density accommodation should provide for families with children with appropriate lifestyle infrastructure provided through more enlightened planning.
And Australian housing needs to be smarter - building the smart, climate resilient houses with lower carbon footprints, which saves households in the medium to long term while being more sustainable.
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Third, we need to better utilise existing housing stock. For instance, incentives that encourage appropriate downsizing as our population ages, will see a better fit between our citizens and their accommodation needs.
Moreover, better regulations and incentives that allow ageing Australians to use their 'spare bedrooms' for carers and other renters would better match demand and supply in our community.
Short-term thinking, yet again, is clouding the policy debate on housing. Policy should be focused on the medium- and long-term to pay dividends for Australia - for individuals, communities, and the economy.
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