Sydney's housing squeeze shows no sign of letting up with new data showing New South Wales is only getting half of the building approvals needed to ease pressure.
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00:00The new figures will be disappointing for New South Wales residents, but for anyone
00:05who's been following this issue, they won't come as a surprise.
00:09Australia has a National Housing Accord target of 1.2 million new homes across the country
00:15by 2029.
00:17And New South Wales, for its role, has committed to 377,000 new homes over the same period
00:24of time, which works out to be about 75,000 new dwellings between now and 2029.
00:29Now we've known for some time that we are not on track to meet that target.
00:33In fact, Premier Chris Mins in January admitted that it was not going to happen, and sure
00:38enough this new ABS data confirms that not only is New South Wales not on track to meet
00:43the target, but that we are falling well, well short of it.
00:46The number of new dwelling approvals in New South Wales did rise in the month of May,
00:51as it did for every state and territory in Australia, but only by 2.9%, and it means
00:56that in the year to May, we've had about 43,000 new dwellings approved in the state,
01:01and that's only about half of where we need to be if we want to meet our National Accord
01:06target.
01:07Now obviously this is disappointing for not just the New South Wales government and New
01:11South Wales residents more generally, but also developers, and they have come out swinging
01:15against the Mins government in light of this new data.
01:18They say that we really need to ramp up the number of approvals being pushed through,
01:22the development applications being approved, the Master Builders Association has also spoken
01:27about the need for affordability in the materials space and also speeding up the amount of time
01:32it takes for these buildings to go up.
01:35Chris Mins in addressing the housing crisis has focused on high density living.
01:40He says that we really need to build up rather than out, and certainly there are a number
01:45of policies in place that encourage developers who are working on those really high level,
01:50high rise, high density apartments, those are often fast tracked and given approvals
01:55more easily.
01:56But yes, this new data out today just confirming what we already knew, which is that New South
02:00Wales is not on track to meet its housing targets and we really need to ramp up approvals
02:05if we do want to reach that 1.2 million new homes across the country by 2029.