As Architects practising in regional New South Wales, we've been mulling on it since. Here's where we've landed.
We want to be clear from the outset: something needs to be done. Australia has a genuine housing crisis and the status quo isn't
working. The budget's intent, to increase supply, reduce barriers, and get more homes built, is not in question. What we want to
examine is the how, and what we risk losing in the process.
The budget's support for prefabricated and modular construction is the measure generating the most discussion in the industry, and
we understand why. The efficiency argument is compelling; homes built in a factory can be delivered faster, with more consistent
quality control and less reliance on an overstretched on-site workforce. In a country with a significant housing shortfall, speed matters.
But prefabricated construction is, by definition, designed away from the site it will eventually occupy. It doesn't know the land. It
doesn't respond to the local climate, the particular quality of light, or the accumulated character of the community it's being placed
into. That's not a minor aesthetic concern, it's a fundamental one about what buildings are for and what they do to the places they inhabit.
What makes a place feel like itself is partly its buildings. Standardised construction, deployed at scale, works against that slowly and
quietly.
Australia is an extraordinarily geographically and culturally diverse country. What works in subtropical Queensland is not what works at
1,000 metres on the New England tablelands. What makes Armidale feel like Armidale, its blue brick buildings, its particular streetscape,
its relationship to the surrounding landscape, is different from what makes a coastal town feel like itself. Prefab, standardised at a
national level, applies the same solution across all of these contexts. The efficiency gain is real. The cultural cost is also real, and it
tends to compound invisibly over time until one day a place feels like it could be anywhere.
There is give and take here and we accept that. We are not arguing against prefab categorically. We are arguing that we
should go into this with our eyes open about what we are trading, and that the conversation about place and character needs to stay in the
room alongside the conversation about numbers and speed.
The negative gearing changes; limiting tax concessions on established properties and redirecting investment incentives toward new
residential construction, are designed to boost housing supply by making new builds more attractive to investors. As a lever, it makes
sense. My concern is not with the direction but with what tends to happen when investment logic drives residential construction at scale.
The general rule of investment is minimal input for maximum return. Applied to housing, that pressure produces predictable outcomes: no
meaningful consideration of passive design, insulation specified to minimum code rather than to actual climate, materials selected for cost
rather than durability or performance. The building gets built quickly and cheaply, and then it gets lived in; expensively, uncomfortably,
and for less time than it should.
A house with no passive solar design in a climate that gets genuine winter costs more to heat every year for its entire life. A house built
with materials that degrade in fifteen years costs far more to maintain or replace than one built with quality from the outset. The
economics of cheap construction look different when you account for the full life of the building rather than just the delivery cost.
What's missing from the budget's housing agenda is a serious conversation about quality alongside the conversation about quantity. Supply
matters enormously, but supply of what? Homes that are energy inefficient and built to a standard that won't survive the climate they're
sitting in are not a solution to the housing crisis. They are the housing crisis, deferred by a generation.
What we'd rather see, and what we try to practice in my own work, is housing that takes both problems seriously at once. Efficient
where efficiency is possible. Affordable where that can be achieved without compromising the things that make a building genuinely livable
over time. Designed for the specific place it occupies; its climate, its landscape, its community. Durable enough to still be standing and
performing well in fifty years.
More homes. But homes worth having. Homes that know where they are.
The budget is a start. The conversation about how we build needs to keep pace with the conversation about how many.
