Senator The Hon Murray Watt, Minister for the Environment and Water
The Hon Clare O'Neil MP, Minister for Housing, Minister for Homelessness, Minister for Cities
The Albanese Government is speeding housing approvals, passing the halfway mark toward its goal of assessing 26,000 new homes by July next year.
Since the announcement of the housing strike team in late August, an outcome of the Government's Economic Roundtable, almost 14,000 homes have been ticked for development under national environment law.
The milestone follows the approval of a new housing development at Bevian Road, Rosedale, in New South Wales featuring more than 700 homes, public open spaces and parklands.
This project was assessed under the Assessment on Referral Information pathway, one of the most streamlined assessment approaches under the current EPBC Act.
It is the fastest approval of a residential housing development under the Albanese Government.
The approval system for housing is set to only get faster, with the passing of landmark environmental law reform through the parliament last week.
Minister for the Environment and Water, Murray Watt said the government was giving the nation's housing pipeline a boost while ensuring strong national environmental protections are maintained.
"We are rocketing toward our goal of fast-tracking the assessment of the 26,000 housing projects in the pipeline by July next year," Minister Watt said.
"The assessment and approval of the Rosedale project in just 62 business days was possible due to good site selection by the proponent and the provision of detailed information on avoidance, mitigation and offset measures early in the process.
"This highlights the importance of proponents providing high-quality information upfront to achieve faster approvals and the positive impact of the new housing strike team.
"Our new environmental protection laws will simplify and streamline the approvals process even further for developments in areas where it's appropriate to build."
Minister for Housing & Homelessness, Clare O'Neil said the government made a commitment to remove red tape so that builders can get on with building.
"The speed at which some of these major projects have been approved shows that our government's focus on making it easier for builders to build is having a real impact.
"We have a housing crisis in this country because for 40-years we just haven't been building enough homes, speeding up the time it takes for a housing project to get approved is going to make a big difference to that.
"It's simply too hard to build a house in Australia today. There are endless layers of bureaucracy across three levels of government to wade through before builders can lay a brick.
"The Commonwealth can't fix this problem alone, but it's not going to get fixed without us. These numbers show that we've made a really meaningful start, with a lot more to come."
