The prescription
Double the houses. Halve the taxes.
Australia puts 5.5 cents of every dollar of GDP into housing, and 2 of those cents go on renovations: new homes get 3.4%. The prescription is another 5% of GDP a year on new homes, starting now and kept up until the stock has doubled, alongside a halving of taxes. Everything else on this site is diagnosis. This page runs the treatment year by year from today's actual baseline: 175,000 completions, net migration, births. Move the sliders and watch the curves.
Engine settings
Independent children per woman
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The housing tax nobody voted for
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Cost of living
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How far can the medicine be watered down?
Independent children per woman, for children born in 2035: babies per woman × the share who can own a home by 29. Blue clears the bar; red doesn't. The ring is your current setting
1971: 2.95 babies × 50% home ownership among 25–29s = 1.48. 2021: 1.70 × 36% = 0.61 (ABS Births; census via AIHW). Every path starts from today's birth rate of 1.48 and moves it at the published rate of +1.6% per 10% cheaper housing (−1.6% per 10% dearer). Ownership comes from running every income level through the buyer model.
Homes finished each year
Completions, prescription vs status quo, against what population growth needs
Homes vs households
Dwelling stock, millions, against households. Cheaper rent lets people form their own households, which absorbs part of the new supply
The median home, and what it costs to build
Real dwelling price vs construction cost per new dwelling, 2026 dollars. Where price falls below cost, the program is overbuilding
Rent
Median weekly rent, 2026 dollars. Rents clear the market for space; prices follow them
The housing tax nobody voted for
Scarcity rent (what households pay for housing above what it costs to supply) against what the country spends building new homes, both as % of GDP
Cost of living
Relative to wages, 2026 = 100. Housing is 20% of household spending, and its cost leaks into everything else through wages and shop rents
Income per person
Real GDP per person, 2026 = 100. Lower taxes lift trend growth; wages and the construction budget follow it
The first home
Age a 22-year-old on the median non-graduate wage buys, by the year they turn 22
States shaded by total fertility rate (darker = more babies per woman), ABS Births. City bars: median dwelling value today (Cotality, Aug 2026) and at the prescription's price level. Hover a state or city for values.
What if the shortage paid for its own cure?
A scenario where total spending on new homes each year equals that year's scarcity rent: the country pays builders exactly what it is already paying for the shortage. Taxes and migration follow your settings above
Homes
Dwelling stock, millions
Spending vs the shortage
% of GDP. In this scenario building and scarcity rent are the same line
All card values as a table
Why the houses, and why 5% of GDP
Start from where we are. Australia finishes about 175,000 homes a year. Net migration of 300,000 plus 106,000 births over deaths needs about 181,000 just to hold today's crowding, so the country runs behind on the current path every year, and prices ratchet up with every year of shortfall. Doubling the stock by some distant date misses the point. The shortfall is a flow problem, and it needs a flow answer.
Put an extra 5% of GDP into new homes and completions climb to a peak of about 500,000 a year, 2.9 times today. The curves above show what happens next. More homes per household means landlords compete for tenants: the median rent falls from $650 a week to $550 by 2035. A house is worth the rent it earns, so prices follow, and they move as soon as the program is believed rather than years later. Build costs fall too, to $411k a dwelling by 2035, for two reasons. Builders stop capturing a slice of an ever-rising asset price, and an industry building twice as much gets better at it; that is Wright's Law, the rule that has made every mass-produced thing cheaper. The building stops where it should: once rents have fallen to what a new home needs to earn to cover its holding costs, depreciation and a normal return on the bricks and labour in it, another home adds nothing. On these settings …. The stock doubles by 2047.
Is it possible? Taken together, it means housing investment of about 10.5% of GDP, against Australia's own record of 6.6% in 2003-04. That is Spain in 2006 (11.8%) or Ireland (13.5%), and both booms ended in busts because they were financed by credit bubbles, not by a country deciding to house its people. The cleaner precedents are Sweden's Million Homes Programme, which averaged about 10% of GDP across the 1970s, and South Korea's Two Million Housing Drive, which beat its target in four years (1988–91) by building 12 homes per 1,000 people a year. Australia builds 6.3. The binding constraints are permission and people. Permission is a law. People: 1.37 million Australians work in construction, and the prescription asks residential building to lift its output about 2.6 times ($90.7 billion of new-home work in 2024-25, plus $146 billion). That is the ramp setting under "Engine settings", and it is the one number here that should keep a minister up at night.
The housing tax nobody voted for
A home has to earn enough rent to cover its rates, insurance and upkeep, the return on the bricks, labour and serviced lot that went into it, and its slow wear. On today's numbers that is about $440 a week. The median rent is $705. The gap is scarcity rent: money paid for access to land that zoning has made scarce, collected by whoever got there first. Summed over every household, owners and renters alike (owners pay it to themselves, and the next buyer pays it to them in the price), it comes to about $158 billion a year, or 5.4% of GDP. That is a fifth of everything Australia's governments raise in tax, levied privately, without a vote, on the young and the renting. It is also more than the country spends actually building new homes: 3.0% of GDP in the model, 3.4% on the ABS's measure of investment in new dwellings. Australians pay more for the shortage than for the houses. And it doesn't stay in the rent. Every worker's wage has to cover it, every shop and warehouse pays it in its lease, and so it runs through the price of a haircut, a coffee and a nurse's shift. That is rent-seeking in the economist's sense: income from controlling a scarce thing rather than making anything. Double the houses and it disappears.
Why the taxes, and what halving costs
Halving the income-tax schedule moves the median worker at the peak of the earnings curve from keeping 68 cents of the next dollar to 84 cents, and puts about $12,000 a year back in their pocket. It also halves the revenue, and the arithmetic has to be faced. Australia's governments raised $839 billion in 2024-25. Half of that is $420 billion a year of spending that has to go. Here is where Chapter 1's numbers come in. Had the non-market sector matched the market sector's productivity growth since 2001, it would deliver today's services with about a quarter fewer resources. That is roughly half the gap closed by doing the same job as well as everyone else learned to. The rest is scope: an uncapped NDIS, industry assistance, the intermediation layer Chapter 3 describes. For scale: Australia's governments took 26.2% of GDP in 1980-81 and 30.2% today; halving lands at about 15%, below anything in the OECD record for Australia, which starts in 1965.
The growth payoff is the part that must be flagged. On the illustrative curve from the Stagnation essay, dropping from 30% to 15% raises trend growth by about 0.6 percentage points a year. That curve is a model, not an estimate, and on its own terms it peaks at a 20% tax take. Halving overshoots the peak slightly; cutting by a third captures the most growth. The sign is robust and the size is a judgment. Compounded over a generation, 0.6 points is a 16% richer country.
Every number above and on the cards is sourced on the Assumptions page.