Peter Tulip

So it should be creating incentives for state and local governments to build more.

The places where housing is really expensive, most of the cost of it is land.

The actual structure that goes into a new house in Sydney or Melbourne is typically only a third of the value of the property.

It is true that construction costs have been rising quickly, but it's land costs that are the huge problem.

Yes, so Craig, we argue that zoning restrictions and planning regulations are the main reason that housing is so expensive, and in particular, it's so difficult to put up high-density housing.

And the reason for that is that, as you say, local residents don't like new apartment towers.

They think they're ugly and they lead to congestion.

That's a fair comment.

I don't think the views of noisy opponents are really representative.

There are actually a lot of people that like high density housing.

And you can see that just in the real estate ads where people will list proximity to shops, proximity to transport, all the other features of high density as real selling points.

The problem is that the people who like high density aren't represented in the decisions.

Typically, when a new building is being proposed, the people that will be living there, that is the beneficiaries, they don't even know about it.

It's several years in advance and who knows where you're going to be living then.

They also live, I mean, by the nature of the fact that it's new housing, they're going to live somewhere else.

So they're often not involved in local decisions.

And we see that when new high-rise apartments do go up, it doesn't really affect local land values.

You would think if there was a serious deterioration in neighbourhood amenity that nearby property values might be hurt.

But we look at lots of examples of high-density building in, for example, Chatswood in Sydney or Box Hill in Melbourne, and nearby property values move exactly in line with adjacent suburbs.

So we think that the complaints of resident opponents are both exaggerated and unrepresentative.