Last night, UNE Sydney launched something new: an ongoing public talk series built on a simple premise — that some of the problems facing Australians today are too big — and too tangled — for any one discipline to solve alone. Housing felt like the obvious place to start.
Welcome reception
We kicked off the evening with a welcome reception at 4:00 pm.
The reception was well-attended, with several guests arriving early.
Participants networked with each other and chatted about Australia's housing crisis
Talking to the different participants, it quickly became evident to me during the reception that housing is an issue of interest to all participants.
I had a wonderful time chatting with several like-minded individuals about the housing situation in Australia.
Panel discussion
We commenced the panel session with an Acknowledgement of Country.
We then had an opening, in which I briefly outlined an overview of Australia's housing crisis.
The room was nearly fully occupied, and the audience stayed engaged throughout the entire panel discussion.
During the opening, I noted that housing has been called the 21st century's defining 'wicked problem' — complex, interconnected, with no single fix. That framing turned out to be exactly right for the room. We brought together four panelists who rarely share a stage — a town planner, a housing policy advocate, a valuer, and a construction lawyer — and asked them not just to speak from their own corner of the housing system, but to respond to each other. Judging by the nearly 110 people who registered to join us in person and online, and the range of sectors they came from, we weren't the only ones who felt this conversation was overdue.
Here's how the panel discussion went.
Causes: what's actually driving the crisis
Each panelist opened with a different diagnosis, and together they painted a fuller picture than any single lens could:
Aashreetha (Aash) Koonu, a Senior Town Planner at Hawkesbury City Council, pushed back on the popular idea that planning 'backlogs' are the core problem: faster development approvals don't automatically mean the right homes get built in the right places.
John Engeler, CEO of Shelter NSW, pointed to geography — Australia is one of the most urbanised countries on earth, with roughly three-quarters of the population squeezed into about four cities, a straightforward supply-and-demand problem hiding in plain sight.
Samuel (Sam) Gardner, a Consultant and Registered Valuer at Marsh McLennan, traced the recent price surge to the ultra-cheap money of the COVID era, which supercharged borrowing power and left the market in a strange, frozen state today, where mostly only distressed owners are selling.
Thomas (Tom) Williams, a Construction Lawyer and PhD candidate at UNE's School of Law, described an industry buckling under regulatory complexity — contracts that were once ten pages now run to ten thousand, and disputes that should protect people instead price them out of justice (a $200,000 claim can cost $150,000 to pursue).
John offered maybe the sharpest line of the night on who ultimately absorbs all of this: in a healthy rental market, vacancy sits around 3–4%; ours has been under 1%. The people footing that bill are the ones keeping the economy running day to day — cleaners, carers, checkout workers — along with a newer and unexpected group: pensioners who own their homes outright but are being squeezed by rising strata levies.
Panelist #3: Samuel Gardner (Consultant and Valuer)
Panelist #4: Thomas Williams (Construction Lawyer and PhD Candidate)
Current state of play: where things stand today
The mood here was, surprisingly, more hopeful. John had come in from Canberra that same afternoon, fresh from a Parliament House briefing that drew 20 of the 150 federal MPs — a sign, he said, that housing has finally become a genuinely bipartisan issue rather than a niche one.
However, the panel was quick to add nuance. Sam noted that the viability of building more social and affordable housing depends heavily on which state you're in, given wildly different fiscal positions, and floated a provocative idea: government money might do more good unlocking land and infrastructure than buying property directly.
Aash flagged a real gap in the reform agenda — of all the recent NSW planning changes, she'd found only a single clause requiring existing social and affordable housing to be retained, with no binding targets pushing councils to deliver more of it.
Tom described how construction disputes have simply migrated from clogged courts to the New South Wales Civil and Administrative Tribunal (NCAT) to, most recently, NSW Security of Payment Act adjudications — without ever getting genuinely faster or fairer, since small and enormous claims are squeezed through the same ten-business-day process.
Where we're headed, and what the 'Australian Dream' even means now
Asked what happens if nothing changes over the next five to ten years, the answers converged on something less like an economic forecast and more like a warning:
Our major cities risk becoming unaffordable for the very workers who keep them running.
Builder insolvencies are likely to rise as margins shrink.
Unmanaged growth pushes us further into urban sprawl and all its downstream costs — heat, water stress, flooding.
John's closing thought landed hardest: if this isn't resolved soon, it stops being an economic or planning problem and becomes a political one.
The panel also pushed each other productively. John challenged the group's fixation on new construction, pointing out that new dwellings add only 1–2% to housing stock in a good year — meaning the far bigger opportunity might be smarter use of what already exists, from splitting under-occupied homes to rethinking strata itself. He also shared a memorable line from former NSW Planning Minister Rob Stokes: Federal tax settings, not planning policy, are often the single most powerful lever in the housing market. He gave a clear example: auction clearance rates shifted within days of the recent tax policy announcement on the 2026 budget night.
Reimagining the 'Great Australian Dream' for 2026 produced some of the night's best moments:
Aash argued housing shouldn't be a dream at all, but a basic right, with the real ambition being good-quality homes, amenity, and infrastructure.
John made the case for reviving the humble terrace and exploring land-lease models, arguing that what people actually crave is security and a sense of ownership, not necessarily land beneath their feet.
Tom saw the dream shifting to regional towns, powered by remote work and smart tax incentives.
Sam kept it simple: the dream is just living somewhere you've chosen — whether that's five acres or an apartment — not a fixed picture everyone's expected to want.
Toward solutions
In the night's most interactive segment, each panelist was asked to propose one concrete reform and another panelist was invited to 'stress-test' it.
Aash's idea was structural: build land value capture directly into planning law, following models used in the Netherlands and Singapore, so land value itself becomes part of the planning process.
John agreed but sharpened it, using Sydney's Wollara development as a live example — where developers argue that a 3% affordable housing requirement threatens project viability, while an entirely uncaptured 'view value' premium sits on the table.
Sam's proposal looked further out: diversify the Australian economy beyond mining, and spread economic activity across more cities rather than concentrating everything in Sydney.
Tom returned to something more human-scale: better access to justice through pro bono support and construction legal fees that scale with the size of the job, rather than a flat rate regardless of who's affected.
What the audience wanted to know
Our Q&A ran well over time — a good problem to have. Questions ranged from:
Has Victoria actually "got housing right"? The panel's answer: partly, but its geography and abundance of flat, buildable land do a lot of the lifting.
Negative gearing and capital gains tax reform, and whether recent changes risk entrenching the gap between existing homeowners and first-home buyers.
Escalating development costs from environmental constraints, and how site-responsive design and modern methods of construction (MMC) could help bring costs down.
Whether housing is being treated as a commodity rather than a right — the panel's view was that the fix isn't rejecting housing entirely as an investment, but 'taxing' it like one.
No silver bullet — but a clearer direction
If there was one message every panelist agreed on by the end, it's this: housing won't be fixed by any single policy, discipline, or sector working alone. It's an economic issue as much as a planning one, a legal issue as much as a social one, and it demands people who don't normally sit in the same room to start talking — and building — together. Time went by quickly during the panel discussion, and I feel that we could have easily spent another 12 hours talking!
We took a group photo together after the conclusion of the event!
A huge thank you to Aash, John, Sam and Tom for such a generous, wide-ranging conversation, to my co-moderator and co-organiser Dr Imelda Deinla; and to everyone who joined us in person and online and made the Q&A the highlight it was. This is exactly the kind of cross-sector conversation we hope to keep having through this event series!
Our next event will tackle another live and contested issue: data centres — and the growing tension between the AI boom and the communities living alongside it. Keep an eye on Eventbrite, LinkedIn and UNE Sydney's social channels for the announcement!
