Australia has a building plan for almost everything. We need 1.2 million new homes, new electricity transmission lines, rail and road upgrades, hospitals, schools, and the venues and transport needed for the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Each ambition can be defended. Together, however, they expose a basic problem: Australia keeps announcing projects as if everyone will have their own private supply of engineers, tradies, contractors, machinery and materials. They won’t.
Infrastructure Australia says the five-year pipeline of major public projects has reached a record $242 billion. It estimates the infrastructure workforce is already short about 141,000 people and that the gap could exceed 300,000 by mid-2027. If the federal government decides to cut the immigration program, as is mooted, that figure will be even worse.
At the same time, the home-building task is slipping away. The National Housing Accord requires an average of 60,000 completed homes every quarter. The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show just 43,816 were completed in the March quarter. The National Housing Supply and Affordability Council expects about 980,000 homes over the accord’s five years under its early-2026 outlook, 220,000 below the target.
We often discuss the housing shortage as a problem of planning approvals, land or finance. All matter. But Australia also has a capacity problem.
Homes and megaprojects are not built in separate economies. They draw, to varying degrees, on the same project managers, engineers, surveyors, electricians, plant operators and labourers. They need concrete, steel, timber, cranes, trucks and earth-moving equipment. The overlap is not perfect – a tunnel engineer cannot simply become a house framer – but neither is it imaginary.
Infrastructure Australia’s report notes limited evidence that infrastructure work is currently pulling labour directly from residential construction, and further research is under way. That uncertainty is precisely why governments should measure the effect before committing billions of dollars, not discover it later through higher tender prices and delayed homes.
The pressure will not be evenly spread. The energy transition is taking construction deep into regional Australia. Infrastructure Australia forecasts the regional infrastructure workforce gap could grow from about 38,000 jobs in late 2025 to 181,000 in 2027, largely because of energy and utilities projects.
These projects are essential. Yet when a large temporary workforce arrives in a town with few vacant rentals, the pressure does not stop at the project fence. Workers compete for rooms and homes with nurses, teachers, families and people already struggling with rent. Without planned accommodation, a project that strengthens the electricity grid can weaken the community expected to host it.
The same collision is emerging in Queensland. Infrastructure Australia warned last October that the state would need almost 98,500 construction workers by March 2026 to deliver its infrastructure pipeline, against a forecast supply of only 43,800, as Olympic construction prepared to accelerate. Queensland still needs homes, hospitals and ordinary transport upgrades. A fixed Games deadline makes sequencing even more important.
The answer is not to stop building infrastructure. Transport and energy networks are often what make new housing possible. The answer is to stop pretending every project can be delivered at once without consequences.
Every major publicly funded project should therefore include a housing delivery impact statement. Just as governments examine environmental, financial and traffic effects, they should publish how a project may affect housing construction and nearby rental markets.
Project business cases may consider market capacity, but the public rarely sees a simple account of what a new project means for the government’s housing promise. Nor is there a consistent national method for tracing the effect from a project timetable to local building costs and rents.
This should not become another 500-page report. It should be a clear, standard assessment showing the workers and materials required, when and where they will be needed, likely effects on construction prices, pressure on rentals and any expected delay to public or private housing programs. Most importantly, it should examine the combined impact of all projects in the region, not assess each one in isolation.
Homes and megaprojects are not built in separate economies. They draw, to varying degrees, on the same project managers, engineers, surveyors, electricians, plant operators and labourers.
The statement should also set out practical responses. Governments could shift tender dates to avoid the same peak, coordinate purchasing across agencies, fund apprenticeships before construction begins and use more locally manufactured and prefabricated components.
Temporary modular worker accommodation could be designed for later conversion into key-worker, social or community housing. Major contracts could also require real training and local-supplier commitments, so public spending expands capacity instead of merely bidding up its price.
None of this is anti-development. It is what serious development policy looks like.
Australia’s housing, energy and transport goals are not separate promises. They are one national construction program sharing a limited pool of people, materials and time. A megaproject should not proceed on the fiction that these resources will appear from nowhere.
Before governments celebrate the next big announcement, they should answer one simple question: will this project help Australia build more, or make the homes we urgently need even harder to deliver?
Dr Ehsan Noroozinejad is an associate professor at Western Sydney University, coordinator of the NSW Affordable Housing Network and secretary of the WSROC Housing Taskforce.
More: