I acknowledge the Wurundjeri and Bunurong people and pay respect to all First Nations people present. My thanks to Emma Dawson, the talented new Executive Director of the Chifley Research Centre, for the invitation to speak with you today, and to Maurice Blackburn for hosting us.
Introduction
For nearly 2 decades, my wife Gweneth and I have lived in the Canberra suburb of Hackett, where we’ve raised our 3 boys. The suburb backs onto Mount Majura bush reserve. It has a modest but functional shopping strip: a supermarket, a café, a bike store. The houses are sturdy, unflashy, and uniform – typical of the mid‑century Australian public housing aesthetic. They weren’t designed to win awards. They were designed to meet need.
Hackett’s growth was rapid (Mobbs 2019). In 1963, the suburb had just 156 residents. By the end of 1964, it had grown to over 2,000. Builders such as Clayton Homes, ACT Builders, JJ Marr and AV Jennings worked under contracts that required homes to be delivered in 6 to 9 months. The Canberra Times described the pace as ‘breathtaking.’ In the 1963–64 financial year alone, 604 homes and flats were built in Hackett. By the mid‑1960s, the broader Canberra region was delivering over 2,400 dwellings annually – impressive for a city whose population was then under 100,000 (Canberra Times 1966).
These homes weren’t architectural masterpieces. But they were delivered fast, built to last, and priced within reach. Many are still standing, still lived in, still serving the purpose they were built for. That was abundance in practice – not abundance in opulence, but in accessibility.
Fast‑forward to the present, and the contrast is striking. In 2024, just 2,180 dwellings were approved in the entire ACT – the lowest annual total since 2006, and less than half the number approved the previous year (Lindell 2025). Over the past 15 years, the ACT has averaged around 4,700 approvals annually. The collapse in supply isn’t just a statistic – it’s a signal.
The decline is especially acute for the kind of housing that fills the space between detached homes and apartment towers. In the second half of 2024, just 7 significant development applications – those typically covering townhouses and other medium‑density formats – were processed in the ACT. None were approved within the statutory timeframe. The median wait was 117 working days. The longest took 192 (Lindell 2025).
To its credit, the ACT Government has acknowledged the problem. A new outcomes‑based planning system, introduced in 2023, was intended to provide more flexibility and clarity. But with greater flexibility came greater complexity. Documentation requirements grew. Timelines slowed. Builders and applicants struggled to adapt.
ACT Planning Minister Chris Steel puts it bluntly: ‘Townhouses, terraces, walk‑up apartments, are effectively prohibited in most residential zones in Canberra’ (Frost 2025). The ACT government’s draft Missing Middle Housing Design Guide is an attempt to break that pattern – to promote ‘gentle density’ options that align with existing neighbourhoods while expanding supply.
What the story of Hackett reminds us is that housing abundance doesn’t require revolutionary architecture or lavish public spending. It requires systems that work – contracts that deliver, approvals that flow, and institutions that see housing as something to enable, not impede.
The abundance agenda
When we talk about abundance, it’s easy to picture extravagance – glut, excess, waste. But in their new book, Abundance, US journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue for something more grounded, and more urgent: the idea that a rich society should be able to meet its people’s basic needs – housing, transport, energy, education – quickly, affordably, and at scale (Klein and Thompson 2024).
And yet, across the developed world, we’re falling short. The problem isn’t a lack of wealth, or ideas, or demand. It’s the quiet accumulation of obstacles. The book catalogues example after example of systems that are so tangled they can’t function.
In San Francisco, Klein and Thompson note that it takes an average of 523 days to get clearance to construct new housing and another 605 days to get building permits. This is one reason why the median home in that city now costs US$1.7 million, compared with US$300,000 in construction‑friendly Houston. The difference isn’t scandals, corruption or villains – just a tangle of approvals, agencies, consultations and codes.
Similar problems afflict the ability of the United States to build high speed rail and renewable energy, provide affordable higher education and healthcare, and support breakthrough university research.
The duo argue that this has had a direct impact on the wellbeing of many Americans. As they put it, ‘We have a startling abundance of the goods that fill a house and a shortage of what’s needed to build a good life.’
The deeper point isn’t about permits or flat‑screen televisions. It’s about what happens when systems stop being built for delivery. When process becomes the product. When every interest group has a veto, but no‑one has a deadline.
Klein and Thompson call this the ‘abundance crisis’ – a situation in which society has the resources to solve big problems, but the machinery of action has rusted.
Their argument isn’t anti‑government. It’s pro‑capacity. They want to design systems that are actually fit to deliver the public goods we keep promising. They believe in ambition – but only if it’s backed by execution.
Harvard’s Jason Furman adds a useful provocation. Furman, the former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama – warns that progressives can make the mistake of believing that all good things point in the same direction (Furman 2024). That climate action, job creation, housing supply and inclusive employment practices always align.
In reality, Furman says, policy is frequently about trade‑offs. Not everything desirable is mutually reinforcing. Not every worthwhile project can be done without cost or controversy. If we’re serious about delivering on progressive goals, we have to make hard decisions – and be honest about them.
Klein and Thompson’s book centres on the United States, a country with a political culture quite different from our own. So we shouldn’t expect its arguments to transfer neatly to the Australian context. Still, the book makes a compelling case that progressives must care about supply – a message that resonates here too. Abundance contends that the politics of progress requires a revival of production. A society serious about decarbonising, housing its people, and fostering a knowledge economy must also be able to string the wires, build the homes, and support the labs.
In short, abundance isn’t about utopia. It’s about competence. About saying yes – not to everything, but to the right things. And doing it before the opportunity passes.
Housing: the scarcity we built
In almost every major Australian city, the story is the same: too few homes, delivered too slowly, at too high a cost. And while interest rates and construction prices play a role, the underlying issue is institutional. We’ve designed a housing system where it is simply too hard to build.
Approvals drag on. Rules multiply. Outcomes are inconsistent. And the consequences are visible everywhere – from rising rents and overcrowding, to the growing number of people priced out of the communities they grew up in. From the 1960s to the 1980s, the typical home cost the average worker around 4 years’ earnings. Today, it costs 11 (Leigh 2024, 60).
For an example of the challenges of approval, take North Sydney. After an applicant files an application for development approval, councils are supposed to do the initial checks and lodge it in their system within 14 days. In the current financial year, just one in 3 development applications to North Sydney council have been approved in that time. The average lag is 41 days (NSW government 2025). That’s almost long enough to build a whole house in 1960s Hackett – and probably get change from a 10 pound note.
North Sydney council isn’t just slow, it also has a low approval rate. Between July 2024 and February 2025, the council approved just 44 new dwellings – barely 6 per cent of its pro‑rata target of 787 homes under the National Housing Accord (government News 2025).
This is not a small gap. It is a structural failure. Even where planning targets exist, the systems to meet them often don’t.
The result is that new supply lags well behind need. The drivers of demand aren’t just demographic – they’re structural. We have more single‑person households. More people living alone later in life. More renters in long‑term tenancies. As household formation changes, the housing system hasn’t adapted. In some parts of Australia, building a townhouse requires the patience of a monk and the paperwork of a tax audit.
Too often, the planning process is built for avoidance, not delivery. Zoning schemes reward conformity over quality. Local objections – however sincere – can block projects that meet broader strategic goals. Infill development is frequently stymied by rules designed to protect ‘neighbourhood character,’ even in areas within walking distance of jobs, schools and transport. As Housing and Homeless Minister Clare O’Neil puts it, ‘One of the biggest barriers we have is state planning systems, which have a default against building.’ (Kapetopoulos 2025). A CEDA report notes that the development application to build a three‑storey block of apartments in Sydney in 1967 was 12 pages long – today, such an application would stretch to hundreds if not thousands of pages (Wilson and Brooks 2025).
The National Housing Supply and Affordability Council’s latest report concludes that the planning approval process has a ‘strongly adverse’ impact on housing supply, observing ‘Poor drafting of statutory planning rules typically leaves too much room for discretion in interpretation, leading to delays and disputation in the development application process’ (National Housing Supply and Affordability Council 2025). In a recent submission, YIMBY Melbourne argued that ‘By national standards, Victoria has an outsized number of opportunities for third party appeal… What it doesn’t have is an outsized number of homes for people to rent, buy, and live in’ (O’Brien 2025).
A recent Productivity Commission research paper lays out the picture clearly. It finds that housing construction productivity in Australia declined by 12 per cent over the past 3 decades (Productivity Commission 2025). That’s a sharp contrast to most other sectors of the economy, where productivity has risen. The Commission also highlights post‑approval delays – connecting to utilities, meeting design compliance requirements, and finalising subdivision – adding months or even years between a planning tick and a finished home.
One reason is fragmentation. Planning, infrastructure, and utilities approvals are often handled by different bodies, on different timelines, with different incentives. A development might win planning approval, only to be delayed by water connection, power connection, or traffic impact studies.
Another factor is builder scale. Australia’s housing sector is unusually reliant on small and mid‑sized builders – an asset in terms of competition, but a vulnerability when processes become unpredictable. A large firm might absorb a delay. A small builder often cannot. Cashflow dries up. Trades move on. And a project stalls.
To improve both productivity and resilience, we also need to look at construction methods. Australia has been slow to adopt modern methods of construction – such as off‑site manufacturing, modular assembly, and engineered timber. These techniques offer faster delivery, greater quality control, and lower waste. Yet uptake remains low, due to regulatory uncertainty, financing challenges, and entrenched habits in the industry.
That’s where a smarter regulatory environment can make a real difference – not by picking winners, but by removing friction. Ensuring that innovative builders can use approved methods without constantly navigating bespoke processes. Giving planning bodies clearer guidance about when performance standards can replace prescriptive design codes.
There are promising signs. The National Housing Accord, agreed between the Commonwealth, states and territories, aims to build 1.2 million new homes over 5 years. It links funding to reform. It acknowledges that supply doesn’t just happen – it has to be enabled. And it recognises that governments need to do more than set targets. They need to align incentives, remove blockages, and create conditions for success. The Australian Government is also offering funding to states and territories to invest in local programs that grow the prefab and modular housing industry, and working to develop a voluntary national certification process for offsite construction to streamline approvals (O’Neil and Husic 2025).
The public appetite for this is real. A recent poll found that 94 per cent of Australians support more housing near public transport. Last year, the Sydney YIMBY movement asked local council candidates to sign a pledge that said ‘I believe that building more housing of any type, market or non‑market, improves affordability. I pledge to increase the density of my council. I will vote for strategic planning schemes that co‑locate dense housing types with transport networks and town centres. I will support planning policies that increase the diversity of housing types and tenures available in my community.’ Sixty candidates signed the pledge, and almost half were elected (Sydney YIMBY 2024).
But this isn’t just a story about planning. It’s about delivery. About systems that are capable of building at the scale a growing, ageing and evolving society demands. Systems that reward timely approvals, coordinated sequencing, and adaptive design – not defensive delay.
We need a housing system where people can live near where they work. Where renters have options. Where downsizers aren’t trapped in family homes for lack of alternatives. Where housing is not a source of anxiety, but an ordinary, achievable part of life.
That’s not just possible. It’s essential.
Infrastructure and clean energy: projects that can’t get to yes
In 2024, Tasmania took delivery of 2 of the most advanced ferries in the Southern Hemisphere. Built in Finland, the new Spirit of Tasmania vessels were designed to carry thousands of passengers and vehicles across Bass Strait – faster, cleaner, and more efficiently than their predecessors.
But there was one problem: the ferries had nowhere to dock. It’s a bit like buying a state‑of‑the‑art television and realising you forgot to build a wall to hang it on.
The Devonport terminal upgrades, initially costed at $90 million, had ballooned to nearly $500 million by 2025. The result? One ferry was leased to Europe. The other sat idle. Ferries that had been ordered and delivered could not be used. The political consequences were immediate – Tasmania’s Treasurer and Infrastructure Minister resigned – but the deeper problem was systemic. It was dubbed ‘Australia’s biggest infrastructure stuff up’ (Denholm 2024).
This wasn’t an engineering failure by the state government. It was a delivery failure: a failure to coordinate timelines, align contractors, and sequence dependent works. And it’s far from unique.
Across Australia, the infrastructure delivery record is mixed. When we get it right, we build high‑quality assets that last. But too often, we build late, over budget, and in ways that discourage innovation. As Infrastructure Minister Catherine King notes, when our government came to office, ‘Many projects lacked proper planning, didn’t have informed costings and weren’t ready for Commonwealth investment’ (King 2023).
The Danish academic Bent Flyvbjerg – Professor at Oxford, and the world’s most‑cited scholar on megaproject management – has spent decades studying why big infrastructure projects so often go wrong (see eg Flyvbjerg 2009; Flyvbjerg and Molloy 2021; Flyvbjerg, Holm and Buhl 2002). His key insight is that failure isn’t rare. It’s routine. Overly optimistic estimates meet real‑world friction.
Globally, Flyvbjerg finds that 9 out of 10 megaprojects go over budget. Rail projects overshoot costs by an average of 45 per cent.
According to the Grattan Institute, tunnelling rail in Australia costs around $700 million per kilometre – roughly double the cost in Sweden, a country with similarly high wages and strong worker protections (Terrill, Emslie and Fox 2021). Swedish construction workers are well paid, yet Swedish agencies deliver rail infrastructure more cheaply and predictably than in many Australian states. The difference lies not in labour costs, but in project governance – how risks are shared, how scopes are managed, and how delivery is sequenced.
The same challenges affect the energy transition.
Australia has world‑leading renewable potential. We’ve got more sun than a Bondi beach towel and more wind than a CPAC conference.
But realising that potential at scale requires new generation, new storage, and thousands of kilometres of new transmission – delivered fast, and delivered well.
None of this means that standards should be lowered. But it does suggest that systems need to adapt. When commissioning stretches by months, it affects financing, investor confidence, and the viability of future projects. In a context of increasingly unreliable coal outages and imminent coal closures, as well as emission reduction targets, delays can put system reliability and affordability, as well as the achievement of emission reduction goals at risk. When approvals take years, the risk isn’t just delay – it’s deferral. Projects get stuck. Capital moves elsewhere.
Governments are responding. Last year, after it was revealed that around $90 billion of renewable energy projects were ‘stuck’ in the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal, the Victorian government announced plans to expedite the planning pathway for renewable energy projects (Lee et al 2024). Across Australia, states are planning and delivering Renewable Energy Zones and working to streamline approvals.
The federal government’s Rewiring the Nation initiative is funding critical transmission upgrades, including through concessional finance to lower costs for consumers. Technical agencies are coordinating more closely on connection and compliance, and the Albanese government has provided additional resources to speed up connection times. In her first 2 and a half years as Environment Minister, Tanya Plibersek issued environmental approval for 63 renewable projects, more than during the Abbott and Turnbull governments combined. It represents enough power for the equivalent of 7 million homes (Bowen 2024).
But the real shift must be institutional. As Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen notes, ‘we need continual improvements to our planning systems to ensure faster approvals or refusals for renewable energy and transmission to help us meet our targets’ (Bowen 2024). The federal government’s single front door for major investors seeks to achieve this by streamlining how investors interact with the Australian Government, helping them navigate approvals processes and fast‑track major projects where possible (Chalmers 2024).
We need states and territories to work with the federal government to deliver a system that recognises the pace required – not by skipping safeguards, but by sequencing them better. A system that integrates planning with delivery, consultation with construction, ambition with execution.
Because without that, abundance remains potential, not progress.
Universities: ideas without systems
Australia’s universities are among the most productive research institutions globally. On a per‑capita basis, we generate more highly cited academic work than almost any other country. In fields ranging from quantum computing to virology, Australian researchers routinely make major contributions to global knowledge.
But for all our research output, we too often fall short when it comes to turning ideas into outcomes. Translating discoveries into new technologies, treatments, or policies is harder than it should be – not because the ideas aren’t strong, but because the systems around them are slow, opaque and risk‑averse.
A big part of the problem is structural. Over the past 2 decades, Australian universities have become markedly more managerial. According to a detailed study by Gwilym Croucher and Peter Woelert, between 1997 and 2017, the number of senior and middle managers in universities more than tripled (Croucher and Woelert 2021). The administrative workforce grew more specialised and more powerful. At the same time, support for the core academic functions – teaching, research, and outreach – stagnated or declined.
The authors don’t argue that all administrative expansion is unwarranted. Universities have become more complex institutions. They face growing expectations around student services, compliance, international partnerships and financial reporting. Some university org charts are now so detailed they qualify as minor works of cartography. But the shift in internal balance has consequences.
Many academics now report spending more time managing approvals than pursuing the work that attracted them to research in the first place. More time on grant administration than on experiments. More time on paperwork than on partnerships. Processes intended to ensure integrity and accountability can, in practice, frustrate innovation and collaboration. Intellectual property negotiations drag on. Ethics committees apply high‑stakes biomedical frameworks to low‑risk social research. Contract templates can vary from faculty to faculty. Each step, defensible in isolation, adds up to a system that demands patience where it should enable urgency.
The result is that promising ideas are more likely to stall inside institutions than outside them. Researchers with industry links are often told to ‘come back when it’s more mature’. Early‑stage companies struggle to get term sheets signed. In fast‑moving fields, the moment can pass before the paperwork is done. As Education Minister Jason Clare observes, ‘we are not realising the full potential of our university research because we lack the support needed to bring that research to the translation and commercialisation stage’ (Clare 2022).
This isn’t about blaming individuals. It’s about recognising that institutional cultures matter. If the path from lab to impact is slow, circuitous, or unclear, fewer researchers will try. Fewer ideas will leave the building. And more discoveries will fall short of their potential.
What’s needed is not less oversight, but smarter enablement. Streamlined intellectual property pathways. Support for staff secondments into industry and government. More consistent backing for translational research – not just at the commercial end, but at the point where ideas begin to show real‑world promise.
Programs like the Australian Economic Accelerator are a step in the right direction, helping researchers bridge the messy middle between grant funding and private capital. But most successful innovation ecosystems rely on well‑functioning public institutions – universities, hospitals, and public labs that know how to partner, how to share, and how to deliver.
We can’t afford for our best ideas to stall at the point of institutional friction.
The abundance mindset doesn’t end with housing and infrastructure. It includes knowledge. If we want more from our research institutions, we have to build systems that make good work easier to do – and easier to share.
Recommendations: building a system that delivers
Across housing, infrastructure, energy and research, the diagnosis is strikingly similar. We’re not short on ideas. We’re not short on demand. We’re not even short on capital. What we’re short on is the capacity to deliver at the pace and scale that the moment demands.
That’s what the abundance agenda seeks to change – not by doing everything, but by doing the essentials more effectively. Not by abandoning safeguards, but by insisting on systems that protect the public interest without paralysing progress.
The reforms we need vary by sector, but the principles are surprisingly consistent.
I. Focus on throughput, not just oversight
Governments have become good at setting goals and creating regulatory frameworks. But we often lack feedback loops that measure throughput – how fast, how affordably, how reliably projects move from concept to completion. What gets measured gets managed. If we want faster delivery, we need metrics that reward it – not just at the end, but along the way.
II. Align planning and delivery
In housing and infrastructure, delays often stem from fragmentation. A project might win planning approval, only to be held up by service connections, rezoning issues, or unclear subdivision rules. In energy, generation can be ready before the transmission is built. In research, funding might arrive before partnerships are in place. Better sequencing isn’t glamorous, but it’s essential. Institutions need to be judged not just on their own performance, but on whether they enable or impede the systems they’re part of.
III. Remove friction from high‑value processes
In each sector, there are chokepoints – development application approvals in planning, grid connection agreements in energy, intellectual property management in universities – that make an outsized contribution to delay. These aren’t areas to deregulate, but to redesign. Where processes are repeated across agencies or tiers of government, they should be harmonised. Where rules are unclear or outdated, they should be reviewed. And where the same project must be assessed by multiple regulators, coordination should be the rule, not the exception.
IV. Build institutional confidence
One reason for over‑regulation is fear – of failure, of blame, of reputational damage. The result is systems that push decisions upward, delay risk, and rely on external consultants to validate internal judgment. But the antidote to institutional risk‑aversion isn’t institutional recklessness. It’s capability. Staffed, trusted, accountable public institutions that can weigh evidence, make trade‑offs, and stick to timelines. Institutions that are confident in their role – not because they’re insulated from criticism, but because they are empowered to act.
V. Reward delivery, not announcement
Political systems tend to reward vision and ambition. But many of the gains in housing, energy and research will come from execution – not from grand new initiatives, but from fixing the parts of the machine that slow everything down. That means sustained focus on implementation. Regular progress updates. Transparent timelines. And the courage to admit where things aren’t working, so they can be improved.
As Prime Minister Anthony Albanese likes to say ‘you can’t drive on a media release’. The same goes for heating a home, connecting a region, or spinning up a new business. Good intentions don’t build infrastructure. Delivery does.
And the stakes go beyond project timelines. Australia’s productivity growth has slowed markedly over the past 2 decades. The causes are complex – demographics, investment patterns, technological diffusion – but institutional drag may be part of the story. When it takes longer to build, longer to connect, longer to collaborate, we don’t just get fewer outcomes – we get slower growth.
Reforming these systems – reducing unnecessary delays, improving coordination, and aligning accountability – won’t solve every problem. But it could go a long way toward restoring momentum. It could help lift productivity, support wages, and unlock opportunities across the country.
These aren’t flashy changes. They’re foundational. If we want to deliver more homes, more infrastructure, more clean energy, and more knowledge – we need institutions that are designed to do it.
Conclusion: from scarcity to capability
Across housing, infrastructure, energy and research, Australia faces a common challenge: not a shortage of ambition, but a shortage of delivery.
We are a country rich in resources, skills and ideas. But too often, the systems designed to get things done – approvals, compliance, coordination – are slow, fragmented, and over‑engineered. They don’t say ‘no’ outright. They just make ‘yes’ harder than it needs to be.
The abundance agenda isn’t about building without limits. It’s about removing the limits that no longer serve us. It’s about building homes closer to jobs and transport. Infrastructure that arrives when it’s needed. Energy systems that can keep pace with demand. Research institutions that make it easier to share and apply knowledge. It’s about replacing delay with delivery, fragmentation with follow‑through, and process for its own sake with process that works.
And the stakes are high – not just for equity, or emissions, or efficiency, but for productivity itself.
After the 2025 election, I was pleased to take on additional responsibilities as Assistant Minister for Productivity, working with Treasurer Jim Chalmers and the broader economic team. It complements my work on competition, charities and the Treasury – because productivity is a thread that runs through all of them. Without productivity growth, wages stagnate, investment falters and social mobility slows.
The Albanese Labor government inherited the largest quarterly fall in productivity in 45 years, with labour productivity declining by 2.4 per cent in the June quarter of 2022 – the sharpest drop since 1979.
Over the longer term, the picture is just as concerning. Over the decade to 2020, average annual labour productivity growth in Australia fell to just 1.1 per cent – the slowest rate in 60 years, and well below the 1.8 per cent average over the 6 decades to 2019–20.
Economists have debated the reasons: slower technological diffusion, demographic shifts, underinvestment in skills and infrastructure, an increase in market concentration and a decline in economic dynamism. But part of the answer may be that when it takes longer to build, longer to connect, longer to collaborate – everything slows down.
That’s where Abundance, the book that inspired this speech, ends. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that the values of progress – equity, sustainability, security – can’t be realised unless the systems that underpin society are capable of delivering them. As they put it: ‘to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need’.
Ambition without capability leads to frustration. Vision without delivery erodes trust. If we want the next decade to be one of shared prosperity and real progress, we have to be able to build.
Fewer homes means longer commutes and higher rents. Slower infrastructure means delayed access to new jobs and markets. More friction in the research system means fewer ideas translated into commercial or public benefit. Delay isn’t just frustrating. It’s costly.
Reversing this trend won’t happen overnight. But it starts with institutions that are trusted to act – not just to review, approve and regulate, but to enable.
It starts with aligning ambition and execution.
It starts with remembering that abundance isn’t about extravagance – it’s about capability. About having systems that match our aspirations.
Because the real question isn’t whether we can afford to build more.
It’s whether we can afford not to.
Note: My thanks to Dan Andrews, Jonathan O’Brien, and many colleagues and officials for insightful feedback on earlier drafts.
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