In finance this week, the Bureau of Statistics says the number of new houses and units being approved for construction is a lot lower than what's needed to keep-up with Australia’s growing population.
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00:00Well, at the rate things are going, the federal government has no hope of meeting its target
00:06of building 1.2 million new homes in five years to improve housing affordability.
00:12For starters, that's 20,000 new homes a month.
00:15However, the latest figures from the ABS show that only about 15,000 were approved for construction
00:21in November, which is a 3.6% drop over the previous month due to a slowdown in new units
00:27and apartments.
00:28And that's just the approval process, which means actual building work hasn't even started
00:33yet.
00:34And when you zoom out, just over 164,000 new homes were approved over the past year, which
00:40is nowhere near enough to keep up with Australia's rapid population growth, even despite its
00:45recent slowdown.
00:47On top of that, the average time it takes to build a new apartment has jumped to more
00:51than two years, thanks to surging construction costs, higher interest rates, and thousands
00:56of builders going broke in the last few years.
01:00It certainly won't help with the re-election.
01:01Meanwhile, the share market went up by just 0.3%, which isn't terribly exciting, with
01:07nine Qantas and IDP education among today's best performers, while mining stocks did badly
01:14again, as iron ore prices continue to fall on concerns about the health of China's economy.
01:20But there wasn't too much movement for gold and oil prices.
01:24Overseas, it was a mixed bag for Asian markets, while Wall Street received another boost from
01:29the AI chipmaker Nvidia, whose market value has now surged to a new record of about 5.9
01:35trillion Australian dollars.
01:38And the Aussie dollar has recovered slightly, but is still pretty weak at about 62.5 US
01:42cents.
01:44And that's finance.