The Housing Industry Association says the Federal Budget represents another missed opportunity to tackle the nation’s growing housing shortage and resultant housing affordability crisis.

HIA's Senior Economist, Andrew Harvey, said that while the Budget provides some useful measures, including in skills and training, it contains nothing to address Australia’s chronic housing shortage and deteriorating housing affordability.

“Unfortunately, the Budget fails to deliver any dedicated policies to alleviate Australia’s chronic housing shortage, which at around 200,000 dwellings and growing, continues to place pressure on the household budgets of home buyers and renters,” said Harvey.

Harvey said that while it placed an emphasis on skills, training and skilled immigration, as well as improvements to allow more private investment in large public infrastructure … “These are positive and necessary measures, the inadequate funding of housing infrastructure has not been addressed,” said Mr Harvey

Consult Australia welcomed the Budget's focus on infrastructure investment and skills.

Consult Australia Chief Executive Megan Motto said:

'The Government's commitment to infrastructure investment and governance reform through an enhanced role for Infrastructure Australia (IA) will support private sector investment and certainty in the pipeline of priority infrastructure projects'

Consult Australia also welcomed a more active role by the Australian Government in our cities as signalled with the release of the National Urban Policy.

'The National Urban Policy serves to open the door to a stronger role for the Federal Government and a new reform agenda for our cities.'

However, additional funding of $10.1 million over four years, provided to improve the availability of data relating to sustainability does not reflect the urgency with which this issue must be addressed.

'The development of sustainability indicators is an important mechanism to benchmark our performance, but must be prioritised and clarified through further consultation with industry.'

Consult Australia also applauds reform improving the short-term supply of skilled workers.

'Increased investment in visa processing is critical to meet an increasing skills shortage that risks the delivery of projects relying on consulting services in the built environment.'

David Wheeldon

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