The Business Council of Australia (BCA) supports the continued focus of the Government and the Productivity Commission on addressing barriers to new housing supply. Evidence clearly shows that the solution to fix the nation’s housing crisis is more housing supply. Our members include the Chief Executive Officers of many of the nation’s leading companies. The business community depends on employees having access to well-located, well-serviced housing, and on customers who have the capacity to spend in the broader economy. Of course, housing supply is not simply about supporting the nation’s growth, fundamentally it is about providing choice to Australians about where they live, and their proximity to job opportunities, family, and community.
This submission responds to the information requests in the Commission’s May 2026 call for submissions paper. It draws on the BCA’s recent work on housing regulation, including our 2024 housing paper ‘It’s time to say yes to housing’ and our annual ‘Regulation Rumble’ comparison of state and territory planning systems.
Key reform priorities
Australia must deliver enough homes not just to satisfy new demand, but also to resolve existing affordability issues. We must aim to meet growing demand that is not simply due to population growth but also shrinking household sizes and individual preferences. The only real and durable solution is to deliver more housing.
No single regulatory intervention will resolve the constraint to housing supply. While the Federal and state governments are working towards new supply, there are still many policy and reform opportunities available to push new supply further. New housing still faces a broad swathe of regulation impacting delivery across the entire project lifecycle. There is a need to focus across the lifecycle to ensure that regulation is as efficient and well designed as possible.
In respect to reform priorities, some of the key asks from the BCA’s 2024 paper included:
- Fix approval processes: Provide the option to elevate large housing projects from council to state government assessment and decision-making. Provide a single point of contact for referrals across government agencies, with enforceable service-level agreements. Implement metrics across all aspects of planning decision-making (from pre-lodgement to post-approvals) and monitor performance of all decision makers, with mechanisms that allow proponents to force decisions if statutory timeframes have been exceeded.
- Address zoning: undertake rezoning across major cities and towns allowing medium and high-density development in the vicinity of infrastructure and services. Provide efficient proponent-led rezoning processes that are determined at a state agency level. Consolidate zoning types across a state to provide for broader application and consistency.
- Reform infrastructure contributions and charges: address issues around cost, nexus to housing, transparency, uncertainty, and delay in infrastructure delivery. Where contributions are not well designed and connected to the needs created by the development, they function as a tax on new housing supply.
- Update heritage laws: best practice heritage laws should be developed that restore the balance between building our cities and protecting unique and important heritage.
The regulatory settings across the nation differ from state to state, and sometimes from council to council. Since the BCA released our report in 2024, a number of jurisdictions have embarked on the reform journey in line with many of the recommendations we have made. Implementation however is not uniform and is often still a work in progress. While compared to the previous status quo, some of the reforms underway may seem significant, when viewed in absolute terms, there is clearly still much more to do. It is also worth recognising that the tax changes pursed by the Federal Government in relation to capital gains tax and negative gearing have been modelled by the Treasury as being counterproductive to the delivery of new housing supply.
Read the full submission here.
Related reports: