Australia's rate of home building down by half from 1995: govt report

CANBERRA -- The rate at which Australia is building homes has fallen by half over the last 30 years, a government report has found.

The report, which was released by the Productivity Commission on Monday, said that decades of falling productivity in residential construction has restricted housing supply in Australia and contributed to increasingly unaffordable housing.

It found that the housing construction sector is completing half as many homes per hour worked as it did in 1995.

The report attributed the falling productivity to complicated and slow approval processes, a lack of innovation and difficulty attracting and retaining workers.

"The sheer volume of regulation has a deadening effect on productivity," Danielle Wood, chair of the Productivity Commission, said in a statement.

"If governments are serious about getting more homes built, then they need to think harder about how their decisions unnecessarily restrict housing development and slow down the rate of new home building."

The commission recommended that governments establish coordination bodies to speed up development and construction processes.

It called for governments to review their building regulations and address barriers to the development and uptake of new building techniques.

The federal government has set a goal of building 1.2 million new homes in Australia in the five years to 2029. In order to achieve the goal, 240,000 homes must be built every year.

According to the Productivity Commission, 176,000 homes were built in the 12 months to June 2024.