I think you're a brave group of people inviting somebody like me to come and speak about deregulation first thing in the morning, particularly after the night I understand you had last night.
On that note, I want to acknowledge my colleague in the room, Andrew Hastie MP, the Member for Canning and Shadow Minister for Industry, and obviously a dear friend and a very valued member of the leadership group under Angus Taylor. It's great to have you here today, Andrew. Welcome to Melbourne.
Thank you so much to the HIA for having me along today, particularly here in my hometown, a place that I am particularly proud of.
I want to acknowledge HIA National President Ian Hazan, Managing Director Jocelyn Martin, HIA Victoria President Glenn Mitchell, and HIA Victoria Regional Executive Keith Ryan, who gave me that very kind introduction.
Although I would have preferred to have been speaking to you in my hometown when my hometown was in a better state - and I don't mean Victoria, I mean the state of Victoria.
Victoria is not at all what it once was. It's become now, I think, on the national stage, a cautionary tale.
Household consumption growth in Victoria is the second weakest nationally, and Victoria's unemployment rate is now the second highest in the country.
Dwelling commencements, as I'm sure you know, are down, as is our population growth, our investment in equipment and our GSP per capita.
Our labour productivity per hour worked is lower here than in New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia and both Territories.
And you can feel this when you walk through the CBD of Melbourne, or in our suburbs, or in our regions.
And housing is such an important part of that story.
HIA's Australian Outlook describes an industry where underlying demand remains enormous, but at the same time, the economics of delivering the next home have become increasingly difficult.
Australia is going to fall short, well short, of Labor's housing targets, just when we need to be beating it the most.
And here in Victoria, you can see that gap so very clearly.
The Victorian Labor Government has set a target of 80,000 homes a year, but last year commencements totalled 56,630. This year, rates have slowed even further.
This room is full of people who know that hope doesn't build houses.
Any government can announce a housing target. It's not that hard. We just put it up in lights.
But everyone in this room knows that to actually get a house built, land, approvals, infrastructure, finance, trades and a project that stacks up is nothing like as easy as the announcement itself.
For too long, the housing debate in Australia has focused on helping people buy homes without paying enough attention to making it possible to build them.
Now HIA commissioned the Centre for International Economics to look specifically at this problem, and it found that around $373,000, or 43 per cent of the cost of a new house-and-land package in Melbourne, was made up of government taxes, regulatory costs and charges.
$373,000.
And those government-imposed costs had risen by 84 per cent just since 2019.
Every single additional tax, charge, assessment, standard or delay ultimately gets paid by the homebuyer.
And if we want cheaper housing, well, then we have to make it cheaper and simpler and easier to build them. It's that simple.
And on this point, there is a remarkable degree of agreement.
Now, Bill Kelty is probably a familiar figure to many of you. He used to be the President of the ACTU, and he still has a vocal place in politics, but not as a member of the Liberal Party. I would say he's not really a lifelong member of the Liberal Party.
On housing, though, he put it very bluntly.
Oh gosh, I don't know whether I want to be quoted on this one. Bear with me; you might have to use your imagination.
“Don't give me any more effing subsidies. Supply is a problem, not demand. Build the effing houses. Build the houses. Why can't you just build the effing houses?”
Well, that's a quote for the ages, isn't it?
But that's Bill Kelty.
At the same time, the Reserve Bank, who hasn't used quite such colourful language, has made the same point in obviously far more central bank vernacular, pointing to easing zoning and planning restrictions and streamlining approvals to reduce costs and improve project viability.
The IMF has also weighed in and identified skilled labour shortages, expensive land, weaker construction productivity, and complex regulations and approval processes as among the structural barriers that are holding back supply.
And Labor's own Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury, addressing the Chifley Research Centre - again, an official think tank of the Australian Labor Party - recently described the housing problem as “too few homes, delivered too slowly, at too high a cost”.
Genius.
He concluded, “We've designed a housing system where it is simply too hard to build.”
Thanks, Labor. It took me four years to get there.
But I don't need to convince this room that regulation and deregulation is part of the problem, because you guys are the ones that live it every single day.
You know exactly what happens when another approval is added, when another standard is changed, or another piece of paperwork lands on top of everything else.
And the answer isn't to compromise on safety or quality, but it is to get government out of the way where government doesn't need to be in the way.
The Productivity Commission has put numbers around what this industry has been saying for years.
Compared with 1995, Australia now completes roughly half as many homes per hour worked. Even after allowing for larger homes and improved quality, labour productivity in housing construction has fallen by 12 per cent.
So we take longer to build less.
Now, no one in this room is arguing against safe and high-quality homes, but there is a difference between having strong standards and making the process unnecessarily complicated.
And frankly, that's where government needs to do something that it has become increasingly bad at doing, and that is get out of your way.
This is where the Coalition plan begins.
In July, Angus Taylor and I released - and I'm going to hold up a prop here - our Plan to Fix the Economy and Protect Our Way of Life.
It is a down payment, 18 months out from a federal election, of what we will be offering at that election.
And we are very, very clear: only productivity, only productivity, will drive the growth that we need to restore prosperity to Australians.
And that means a serious and disciplined, economy-wide deregulation agenda.
We start with construction because it's too important not to.
When the National Construction Code was first written, it used to fit in a tradie's glove box. It was written for that very purpose.
But now you essentially need a flatbed ute just to carry the bloody thing around with you.
It has expanded out so far. 2,000 pages is ridiculous. It's ridiculous.
We have said in our Plan to Fix the Economy and Protect Our Way of Life that the Coalition in government will slash the National Construction Code down to size, while preserving core safety standards, with a stated objective of reducing the cost of a new home by up to $70,000.
This is a down payment on deregulation.
We have also already announced that we will rewrite four other Acts, most of which will be important to you in some way, shape or form: the Income Tax Act, the Competition Act, the Corporations Law, and the EPBC Act - an Act which is important for doing everything from developing a new housing site right through to opening a gold mine.
And today, I can also announce that a Coalition government under Angus Taylor will introduce the first-ever stocktake of Commonwealth regulation in over a decade.
We will charge the Productivity Commission with the task of overhauling the reams of rules and regulations that have accumulated over decades that are holding your industry and other industries back.
And we cannot make this a one-off exercise.
This is not a red-tape-cutting performative exercise for the cameras. It has to become an annual process.
Cutting red tape and deregulation must become business as usual for governments.
We'll also strengthen the regulatory impact statement process, which sounds incredibly dull, but I promise you, it is so profoundly important because it has been so badly weakened under Labor.
This means that if the government decides that a proposal doesn't need to have a normal impact assessment, that a policy could simply be made exempt from regulatory impact statements and consultations on that, well, then a government should have to explain why.
And it should have to do so transparently and in a timely way, with reasons for that exemption made public and tabled in Parliament.
Where an exemption is granted, there should also be a post-implementation assessment of whether a policy worked, rather than simply implementing something and then seeing it drift off into the ether.
We want to understand whether it worked. And if it didn't work, we'll unwind it or make it better. It's that simple.
We should understand whether a policy worked, what it actually cost, and what its unintended consequences might have been, because Lord knows there have been too many unintended consequences of the regulatory overload that is facing your industry and others.
Any exemption from an impact assessment should not be an exemption from accountability of government and of politicians.
Where an impact assessment is required, it should be a genuine and independent assessment, not simply existing material repackaged to support a decision that was already made, as was the case with Labor's capital gains tax changes.
Simply referring to a Senate inquiry as their impact assessment and going no further - and we can see the consequences of that played out every single day in your industry.
So we will be putting cutting red tape out of your business and keeping it out of your business part of our business.
Our plan also puts housing front and centre, and infrastructure, of course, is integral to that.
There is absolutely no point zoning land for housing if there's no road to it, if there's no water, if there's no sewage, if there's no power.
And that's why our Plan to Fix the Economy and Protect Our Way of Life also includes a $5 billion Housing Infrastructure Fund, and that's intended to help unlock 400,000 additional homes through that last-mile infrastructure, so you guys can do what it is that you do best.
Now, there's not much romance in a sewer connection, but there's even less romance in a paddock that's identified for housing for 15 years, while everyone waits for someone else to build that pipe.
So we will help you build that pipe, so you can get on with the job.
And we will link our migration settings to the number of homes that Australia actually completes.
Migration has made an enormous contribution to Australia, and it will continue to do so in the future.
But the number of people that are requiring homes cannot indefinitely run ahead of the number of homes that we can build without consequences for prices, for rents and for infrastructure.
And let's face it: we shouldn't invite people to our country that we cannot appropriately house.
But I want to finish by saying this:
This is the start of our policy. It is certainly not the end of our policy.
So, tell us what it is that you need - on tax, on skills, on infrastructure, on finance, whatever it is. Tell us how the government can help you and get out of your way so that you can get on with your job.
You are the people that build homes, not us.
You know where the bottlenecks are. You know what's making projects harder, what's making projects slower, and what's making projects more expensive.
So help us to help you.
Because our objective is very simple indeed: to make it cheaper to build, quicker to build, and easier to build.
And if we get that right, we give the next generation of Australians something that should never have become so difficult to achieve:
the chance to own their own home.
Thank you very much for having me.