Victoria's Housing Success Story: When Developers Complain, Maybe We're Doing Something Right
There’s something deeply satisfying about seeing developers grumble about Victoria while simultaneously watching our state outperform the rest of Australia on housing delivery. Call it schadenfreude if you like, but when property developers are complaining about a jurisdiction, there’s a decent chance that jurisdiction is actually prioritising people over profit margins.
The numbers tell a compelling story. Victoria is building 2.2 homes per 1000 people each quarter, compared to the national average of 1.6. We’re on track to hit 98% of our national housing target while NSW languishes at 65%. Melbourne house prices have flatlined while Sydney, Brisbane, and Canberra have shot through the roof. Yet developers are apparently telling each other “ABV” - Anywhere But Victoria.
Good. Let them go build their shoebox apartments in Brisbane or their cookie-cutter McMansions in Perth. What Victoria has figured out - and what the property industry seems to hate - is that housing policy should serve residents, not investors.
The transformation has been decades in the making. Remember when Melbourne’s CBD was a ghost town after 6pm? The Postcode 3000 initiative changed all that, bringing tens of thousands of residents into the city centre. Yes, some of those apartments are small. Yes, they house international students and young professionals. But that’s the point - those people need somewhere to live, and putting them in the CBD means they’re not competing for family homes in the suburbs.
What’s particularly clever about Victoria’s approach is how it’s systematically dismantled the NIMBY infrastructure that has strangled housing supply across Australia. Planning Minister Sonya Kilkenny’s willingness to call in developments and override obstructionist councils is exactly what we need. When residents in leafy Boroondara protest against townhouses near train stations while outer suburbs like Wyndham grow by 400%, something is fundamentally broken.
The new Townhouse Code is especially promising. Modelled on Auckland’s successful reforms, it allows three-storey townhouses to be built without the usual avalanche of objections and appeals. Neighbours can’t derail projects that meet basic standards. Councils can’t drag their feet for years. It’s deemed approval for medium-density housing - the missing middle that Australian cities desperately need.
Walking through Melbourne’s inner north, you can see the results. Projects that would have been tied up in appeals for years are getting built. The Nightingale developments - those quasi-communal townhouses that are so popular people have to win ballots to buy them - represent what’s possible when planning systems prioritise housing delivery over property speculation.
The developer complaints about Victoria being “broke” and property prices not going up fast enough reveal everything you need to know about their priorities. They want quick profits from speculative investment, not sustainable housing supply. They want prices to keep rising, not stabilise at affordable levels. They want planning systems that protect their margins, not ones that deliver homes for ordinary people.
Sure, Victoria’s property taxes are higher than other states - 47% of the state budget compared to 37% in Queensland. But these are mostly land taxes, which are economically efficient and don’t distort markets the way stamp duty does. They capture some of the value created by public investment in infrastructure and services. They discourage land banking and speculation. They’re exactly the kind of taxes we should be using more of, not less.
The grumbling about quality control is more legitimate. When you’re building at scale with limited tradies, standards can slip. The horror stories about bulk builders cutting corners are real and concerning. But that’s an argument for better regulation and enforcement, not slower approval processes. We can have both quality and quantity if we’re smart about it.
What frustrates me is how this success story gets buried under developer complaints and political point-scoring. Victoria has cracked the code on housing supply while maintaining liveability. We’ve managed to keep Melbourne affordable while other capitals price out entire generations. We’ve shown that state governments can override local obstructionism when the stakes are high enough.
The next challenge is replicating this success nationally. NSW needs to learn from Victoria’s playbook instead of continuing to protect wealthy enclaves from density. Queensland needs to stop relying on sprawl and start building up around transport nodes. The federal government needs to back states that are actually delivering homes, not just making announcements.
Because at the end of the day, housing is a human right, not an investment vehicle. When developers are happy, ordinary people usually aren’t. When developers are complaining about planning systems being “too hard” or taxes being “too high,” it often means those systems are finally working for residents instead of speculators.
Victoria isn’t perfect - no state is. But we’ve shown that political will, smart policy, and a willingness to upset vested interests can actually deliver results. If that makes developers unhappy enough to take their money elsewhere, I say good riddance. We’ll keep building homes for people, not profit margins.