Tomorrow, Tuesday 3 November, the Reserve Bank announces its next cash-rate decision. Four increases this year have taken the target to 4.60%. Another quarter-point increase would make it 4.85%. The latest inflation figures give the Bank reason to remain uncomfortable. Headline CPI reached 4.3% in September, while underlying inflation was 3.6%. I expect the annual…
Back in May, the Grattan Institute released Wasted Space: Axe Car-Parking Rules to Ease the Housing Crisis. It received a reasonable burst of media and LinkedIn attention, but three months later I fear its central message has been filed under too hard, not quite right, or politically impossible. That would be a mistake. Because this…
Housing has a new competitor. Australia’s rapidly expanding data-centre industry is attracting billions of dollars, demanding substantial electricity and water capacity, and drawing upon many of the same engineers, consultants, contractors and financiers needed to deliver new communities. The issue is not whether Australia should build data centres. It is whether governments are coordinating the…
Australia’s housing pipeline is changing shape. Detached-house approvals are holding up, but apartment and townhouse approvals have fallen sharply. Student-visa reforms may slow household formation around universities. Brisbane, meanwhile, has increased planning capacity for smaller lots and medium-density housing. The common thread is composition. Headline population, migration and approval totals reveal less than where households…
The expanded 5% Deposit Scheme has had a big first year. Since the changes introduced on 1 October 2025, the government reports 102,594 Australians supported. Income caps were removed, property price limits lifted and the number of places uncapped. For someone trying to save a deposit while paying rent, that is a sizeable leg-up. My…
Earlier this month I had the pleasure of speaking at the Brisbane branch of the Urban Land Institute (ULI) Australia. The organisers asked me a dozen or so questions covering everything from affordability and population growth through to construction costs, infrastructure and the Olympics. Looking back on the discussion, four themes seemed to emerge. 1….
What if interest rates don’t fall? I keep seeing charts like the ones below. They all tell much the same story. Rates rise some more, inflation eventually behaves itself and sometime around late 2027 or early fiscal 2028 the cost of money starts heading south again. Maybe. But for mine, there is a growing risk…
The 2026 Intergenerational Report (IGR) is presented as a 40-year outlook, but reads like a defence of current policy. Housing – the major source of generational insecurity – barely appears. “Housing supply” occurs five times in 352 pages – see AI is of some use – while the report claims recent tax changes will create…
There is an old newsroom saying: if it bleeds, it leads. And of late, housing increasingly seems to qualify. The Weekend Australian has weighed into the Gold Coast housing market, reporting prices as “falling at a rate of knots” and discussing the prospect of substantially lower values. The underlying evidence includes asking-price data showing Gold…
The reaction to the May Federal Budget changes to negative gearing has been predictable. Many commentators are arguing that investors will now flood into off-the-plan apartments because the tax incentives increasingly favour new homes over established dwellings. Maybe. But I think many are looking at the wrong end of the telescope. The fundamental question isn’t…
