Engineers Australia have welcomed “Federal Budget initiatives to bolster productivity, lift housing supply and slash red tape”.

Yes, we definitely need more houses - which, IMO, is largely because of:

• the evil of those who developed neoliberalism,

• the amathia and emotional competence of those who agreed to be willing tools of that evil and push it and unqualified/inappropriate faith in markets despite the growing evidence of the problem of the profit-motive (bias towards most profitable housing units, which doesn’t favour those that are affordable),

• the greed, selfishness, shortsightedness, and hate of community of those those who became part of the landlordism plague,

• every politician who had at least one residential investment property but was still allowed - unethically, IMO (but not theirs - I have asked) - by Parliament to take part in housing affordability debates despite what I (but not them) consider the egregious conflict of interest since around the 1960s, and

• every person who hid or failed to make known the growing unaffordability of housing over the last three decades - especially the ones motivated by greed and hate of community (i.e., to “maintain housing value” - which, IMO, comes with a plethora of deplorable, anti-community local planning rules).

There’s another issue here: the climate crisis

On current Australian housing:

• “Australia’s poor housing contributing to cold-related deaths”architectureau.com/arti… “A medical study has found Australians are almost twice as likely to die from cold weather than the Swedes. Australian experts blame the high rate on the country’s poor housing and they say over 1,000 lives could be saved if Australian housing was better constructed and better insulated.”

• “Australia’s still building 4 in every 5 new houses to no more than the minimum energy standard” theconversation.com/aus…

• From 2022: “New research shows Australians want more efficient housing”renew.org.au/advocacy/n…

• “Australian houses are getting larger. For a more sustainable future, our houses can’t be the space for everything”eveningreport.nz/2025/0…

In fact, Australian houses have been described as functionally little better than tents. I once worked for a few weeks in Mongolia, where, with winter temperatures down to -30°C, a colleague of mine there commented that the coldest he had ever felt was in a house in Australia.

So, given that, will the new houses be suitable for the future, as well as being allowed to be small enough/simple enough to be affordable and more sustainable/energy & cost efficient?