A staple of debates about housing affordability in Australia over at least the last four decades has been lack of housing supply.
What that meant in the political debate, for a really large slab of that time, was an ongoing focus on the supply of new land for subdivision on the outskirts of our major cities, and who was to blame for there never being enough of it.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was talking about land supply again in federal parliament this week. But the issue is no longer about facilitating that urban sprawl. In fact, it is about the exact opposite.
National Cabinet will be meeting on Wednesday to consider what many people regard as our housing crisis. It will consider both the rental market and housing supply in the broad, amidst continuing pressure from the Greens — who have been trying to leverage their refusal to support the government's housing fund to gain federal interventions in the housing the rental market.
The Greens will not enjoy any particular victory on the issue of rental controls, which the PM is leaving firmly to the states which, in turn, might talk about renters' rights, but will not be offering up a rental freeze.
The more interesting, and challenging, issue really is on housing supply. And that's because of how it encapsulates so many of the issues confronting us — and our governments — right now.
These range from climate change to skills shortages, to the lasting impacts of COVID, and migration.
There's some really weird stuff going on
Housing Minister Julie Collins released an issues paper on the development of a new national housing and homelessness plan earlier this week (national homelessness week) which documented some of these challenges.
In general, there is some really weird stuff going on in the housing market.
The demand for housing, including rental properties, is surging, yet the rate of building approvals and commencements is slumping.
The Urban Development Institute of Australia noted earlier in the year that the greenfield development sector experienced an unprecedented 49 per cent reduction in sales activity in 2022.
All capital city greenfield markets saw a cliff fall in annual land sales ranging from 70 per cent in the ACT, 54 per cent in Melbourne and 30 per cent in Perth.
The national median lot price rose 20 per cent to $391,546. Those lots largely represent the urban sprawl that used to be the major frustration of housing supply debates.
But the UDIA also says the national new build of apartments experienced the lowest volume of sales in over 12 years, levels not seen since the GFC.
Last week, Bureau of Statistics data on building approvals showed the largest quarterly drop in over a decade, down 18 per cent for all dwellings and 21.4 per cent for apartments.
What's more, the average price of a new dwelling to be constructed has risen 50 per cent since pre-COVID.
Inflation, the surge in interest rates of the last year and a slowing economy have all played a part in these numbers.
But they highlight that the housing supply issue isn't, in any way, just about surging migration, as some would have it at the moment.
A silence has fallen
There has been an almost relentless string of collapses by construction companies, many caught out by being squeezed by rising prices when they had written fixed price contracts.
There's a shortage of tradies which is slowing down construction. But there are also less immediately obvious skills shortages that are affecting the actual development process: town planners, surveyors, building certifiers, to name a few.
The surge in natural disasters is also slowing things down. Local government in particular now has to deal with a range of emergency services to get a tick off on whether houses, or even developments, are resilient to fire and flood.
And that's before you even get to the thorny issue of what happens to all those houses that have been approved and built on flood plains. Many households around Australia have already experienced the bitter cost of those decisions in the recent catastrophic flooding.
But it feels like a silence has fallen over earlier commitments by all levels of government to address what to do about moving people after some earnest discussion about frank conversations we had to have in the immediate aftermath of all those floods.
The development delays are not necessarily the fault of local councils. Many councils in Sydney have actually been stripped of their planning powers but it is not clear that handing them to independent authorities have, to date, sped up the approvals process.
Climate change is also making housing more expensive: higher insurance premiums and energy costs.
Then there are the positive and negative impacts of COVID on housing supply. COVID made a lot of us rethink the way we live and work.
It has left many office buildings in our central business districts empty and thus offered the potential for a vast new supply of housing accommodation in refitted buildings. That could help the whole push towards greater population density which, if managed properly with good infrastructure and neighbourhood planning, is now seen as the preferred goal for our cities.
The pandemic also stopped migration for a while – which, in housing supply terms, might look like a plus. But particularly with international students all returning to start three-year courses, but no pipeline of students who have finished their courses leaving, there is an additional pressure on the housing market.
LoadingThe pressures are coming to a head
So federal and state leaders meet on Wednesday at a time when lots of short-term and long-term pressures for change on the way we house ourselves are coming to a head.
The clear picture is for much more densely populated inner cities, requiring a lot more urban and social infrastructure. And different planning rules. (And fascinating changes in our political geography down the track.)
The story in the regions is a very different one, and very much influenced by things like the pressures being raised by climate change and natural disasters.
There is an optimism that the fact that all the leaders meeting on Wednesday will be Labor (except for Tasmanian Premier Jeremy Rockliff, who is seen as on-side for much-needed change).
And there is also an underlying view that all of those state leaders have an interest in making "wall-to-wall Labor" appear to clearly deliver some positive outcomes, given the last time it happened it was not perceived to have ended well by voters.
Much of the debate on housing in the lead-up to this meeting has been on the stand-off with the Greens on the federal government's housing fund, and on the Greens' politically successful prosecution of the rental crisis, even if there really isn't a huge amount the federal government can do directly about addressing rents.
But there has been a lot of policy work going on behind the scenes by both federal and state governments in the lead-up to this meeting and it could potentially mark a really important shift in the way governments think about housing.
Whether that delivers any immediate political dividend is unclear. But the housing crisis is real. And Wednesday's meeting needs to do some substantive work to address it not just in the short term but the long term.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.