Thank you Peter, thanks everybody for having me and making the trek out.
And anyone who's come from Woollahra, don't worry, it will be a lot easier very, very soon.
Can I acknowledge the traditional owners and also the distinguished guests, thanks Peter, thanks Michael and also Lucy and Malcolm Turnbull it's wonderful to see both of you.
And welcome our guest, the New Zealand Minister for Housing, Transport and Infrastructure, a global champion for housing, the honourable Chris Bishop.
Chris, I understand you're something of an expert on Australia and Australian culture.
So you may already know this, but a month ago, Triple J held a countdown of Australia's 100 greatest songs of all time.
It was a patriotic occasion, and the high point was reached at song five, when Australia's favourite songwriter, Neil Finn singing that great Australian ballad, Don't Dream it's Over.
If you haven't heard it, Chris, you should look it up. It's a cracker.
Which is all to say, in a roundabout way, we are absolutely shameless in this country, that if it is produced in New Zealand and it's of substance and it's good, we will brazenly claim it as our own.
They say that good artists borrow and great artists steal.
And Chris, I can honestly say when Labor came to government in New South Wales and we were developing our own housing policy for this state and we did take direct inspiration from your experiences in New Zealand, particularly in Auckland.
We watched what you were doing over there and we followed your experiment with new zoning laws and we took three main lessons from it.
One: that when you changed those laws, and when you made it easier to build new infill housing in Auckland, supply increased, with construction levels doubling in those areas.
And secondly when you increased supply like that, it put downward pressure on prices, particularly rental prices, which were up to 35% cheaper than they otherwise would have been, had it not been for the zoning and planning changes.
And three: by putting downward pressure on prices, younger people started to come back into the city and a bit of vibrancy into the city.
In neighbourhoods where there little to no upzoning, you saw the weakest growth in people aged 20 to 35.
And vice versa, it was the same story but in reverse, in the areas with strongest upzoning, you saw the biggest growth in that younger demographic.
And that's exactly what we need to power a city, a vibrant city, an exciting city.
And for us, this wasn't an idle experiment.
We paid attention because we were facing not the exact same problems, but far, far worse problems when it comes to housing inequality, and particularly housing inequality between the generations.
Sydney is a great city, but it's the second most expensive city in the world, behind only Hong Kong and by some measures it's the 800th densest city in the world. And I think those two things are related to one another.
For the last thirty years, we've been consistently outbuilt by Victorian and Queensland.
To put it in perspective, we build six homes per 1,000 residents every 12 months. There's a bit of a measure of output or productivity, so six per 1,000 every 12 months.
In Victoria, they produce eight houses per 1,000 people and in Queensland, it's nine houses per 1,000 people every 12 months.
So even though we've got the highest land prices, the highest increases in land prices, the highest rents, the highest increases in rents, the lowest supply, the worst pressure on young people, we're also building the fewest amount of houses.
As a result, we're losing young people every year, twice as many - twice as many - as we're getting back.
Last year, it was 40,000 young people packing their bags in the prime of their working life.
Now, interstate migration has happened in New South Wales. Generally, it was older Australians moving to Queensland for warmer weather.
But now we're losing young people. People that we want to be doctors and nurses and police officers. People that we want to start their own businesses, to become entrepreneurs.
People that we want to coach football teams and cricket and soccer teams, to join communities and start families, but not here in Sydney, in somewhere else.
I think we accepted a culture in New South Wales where it was always easier to find an excuse to say no, rather than a reason to say yes. And I think that's something Queensland did far better than us.
We had a situation where certain local councils, especially I have to say, some of the wealthier councils, had used their planning powers to make it almost impossible to build houses in those places.
Consider one example, but one of many, a few weeks ago, there was an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, where they interviewed a group of concerned residents in the suburb of Castlecrag.
These residents were opposed to an apartment block, proposed above some old shops, and it was 11 stories high, but it was eight kilometres from Sydney's CBD.
Now fair enough, you want to hear them out, you can't just dismiss opposition in a perfunctory way.
But then you do some further reading, and you find out that in the last 35 years, Castlecrag has built 33 homes - in 35 years.
And then you read another story, this time from Mosman.
Where in a remarkable act of candor, a local is asked if she's being entitled when she opposes new developments, new housing developments in her community.
To which she replied: Well, we are entitled.
And I thought that probably summed it up.
So on one hand, we're preserving certain established suburbs like a national museum exhibition, whether there's something worth preserving or not, regardless, and it's just unilateral and it's completely around some of those communities.
On the other hand, this is the other end of the housing dilemma, we've been adding a new street to the fringe of western Sydney every second week.
Friends, a great city can't survive as a museum.
A city is an organic, living thing and it needs to evolve with the times.
That's why over the weekend, we made what we thought was an overdue decision.
To finish Woollahra Station, so we can build ten thousand new homes within five kilometres of the CBD.
And some of you might know the backstory here.
It's both a slice of Sydney's history but also an insight into some of the more myopic tendencies that we've seen in the state.
When the Eastern Suburbs line was originally established and drawn up in the sixties, there was a spot marked off for Woollahra.
It was part of the original design, so basic construction was done and the platform was in fact completed.
But after a sustained, and it has to be said, successful NIMBY campaign that went all the way to the High Court, the station was scrapped.
I think that was the wrong decision.
In an attempt to protect Woollahra from change, you'd have to say it was incredibly successful.
Because over that period, in the last 50 years, Greater Sydney has grown by 74 percent, but Woollahra's population has declined by 10 percent.
So there are less people living in Woollahra today, than there were in 1970.
Which is a window into culture we're trying to stop or change in NSW.
It's culture of no.
A culture that has effectively blocked new housing, pushed up prices and forced a generation of people to question whether they've got a future in this city, that their parents and their grandparents were members of.
And to overturn something simple like that, you need more than a single policy.
You need transport oriented developments, low and midrise changes.
A patent book approval scheme that gets you a construction within seven days.
You need the Housing Delivery Authority that can come in over councils where necessary, and has already approved 70,000 new dwellings for New South Wales.
Put together, it adds up to a big change in how the state operates.
And when you make a big change you can expect opposition.
Sometimes from the occasional Liberal politician who wants to build a wall around the North Shore.
Or from Green MPs who say we need a million new houses but nowhere near any of their electorates.
Or maybe one or two Labor mayors around the joint who say the same thing.
But the truth of the matter is, we have to do something about the housing situation.
It's an urgent priority for the state.
As I said, the HDA has approved 70,000 homes in just seven months, and they've got the ability to do not just the zoning change, but also the development application change.
We feel encouraged here.
The movement for housing, driven the broader YIMBY movement, including I have to say, Peter, who's been an absolute warrior on Twitter.
And I think Michael is right, I think it's shifted for the first time in politics around this debate in New South Wales.
Young people have known it for a long time, but the older generation are appreciating that their children are not going to live anywhere near where they live, and perhaps more importantly, their grandchildren are going to live nowhere near where they live.
But at the same time we've got to resist the assumption that NIMBYism is dead and buried, or that it isn't lying dormant, because it will and it is ready to lurch up once again.
And I have to say, Chris, I've been told that just last week, there was a video game produced in Wellington, where you can throw a cricket ball at Chris Bishop's head, as a protest against his housing policies.
Don't worry Chris, we tend to bowl underarm to New Zealand.
But it just goes to show you this fight is very much alive, we have to put our helmets on and we need all the allies we can get.
And in that spirit I think it's fantastic that I can stand on stage tonight, with a liberal think tank, with a conservative Minister on a unity ticket for housing.
Because it's always tempting for politicians to run the game that the NIMBY line obviously yields.
There's always going to be a devil sitting on your shoulder telling you the easiest way to win a vote is to oppose something.
And without wanting to get overly political because it's not really my style, but I think the Liberal opposition in NSW are having these same conversations right now.
I don't think they've made a decision about which way they jump on this important initiative and I think it's an interesting political debate for them to grapple with.
The only thing I say is as they make that decision, I hope they listen to people like Chris Bishop, who are making an incredibly compelling and coherent case, right of centre, for more homes.
And I do hope quite sincerely that when they do decide their position, the forces for housing win out over the forces for NIMBYism.
Because this is far too important to get pulled down into the partisan swamp of politics.
Our best chance to hold the line and build the houses we need - is a united front - across the parties - with every MP who supports the agenda signing on.
That's how we can give business certainty.
That's how we can attract more capital to the New South Wales housing market.
If everybody is sure that the rules will be in place via legislation, regardless of who's in power, from one administration to the number to the other, then they'll invest in New South Wales.
And that's how we're going to get people in homes.
And that's how we'll give our kids a real sense of the future in this great city.
Thanks so much.
