Australia’s Housing Fund Risks Missing Its Target as Timber Makes Its Case

An Australian National Audit Office report has confirmed 38,568 of the Housing Australia Future Fund's 40,000 homes remain undelivered with three years to run.

Exposed cross-laminated timber lines an apartment under construction at Cowper Street in Glebe, where XLam pressed 2,590 cubic metres of NSW-grown pine and floors on the eight-storey towers rose in as little as a fortnight. (Photo Credit: courtesy JPW)

Delivering Australia’s 40,000 promised social and affordable homes has become a race against its own 2029 deadline, with the auditor-general counting just 1,432 delivered two years in. That is according to an audit of the $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund released by the Australian National Audit Office on Tuesday, which found Treasury designed the fund well but never took clear charge of delivery.

“Buying homes is not building homes,” opposition housing spokesman Andrew Bragg said of a build rate running at one new home a day, with 762 built by community housing providers and the other 670 newly built by private developers, then bought by a provider before, during, or immediately after development. The deeper fault, however, lies within Treasury, the audit found, with applications open from January 2024, while the department did not finalise most of the rules governing the program until May 2026.

“This program is being delivered in one of the toughest construction markets in decades,” Housing Minister Clare O’Neil said in accepting all five of the audit’s recommendations, arguing the report backed the fund’s design and that Treasury saw cost pressures early. Her government now has 38,568 homes to deliver in 36 months, in a market where the wider 1.2 million home National Housing Accord is also tracking a year behind schedule.

The completed Cowper Street towers rise above Glebe’s tree canopy, crowned by rooftop solar canopies that power Australia’s first fully electrified social housing. (Photo Credit: Alicia Taylor)

Building at the pace those numbers demand is what timber has proven possible, with NSW’s first mass timber social housing swapping 19 ageing dwellings in Glebe for 75 new homes, its pair of eight-storey CLT towers raising floors in as little as a fortnight. Opened in March for Homes NSW, The King’s Trust Australia, and Bridge Housing, the $65 million Cowper Street project is exactly the apartment-format community housing providers must now deliver at scale.

“Exceptional clients, exceptional risk tolerance, and exceptional fees,” GroupGSA’s Noura Thaha, the architect behind those towers, said, cannot remain the price of timber social housing. Her Fifth Estate contribution this month revealed every element of the Glebe design needed separate, costly Performance Solutions, because the National Construction Code still offers no Deemed-to-Satisfy route for exposed CLT apartments, leaving project teams to pay to solve the same problems twice.

It comes as IndustryEdge’s Tim Woods told May’s FTMA National Conference that mid-rise, the format that barrier holds back, had overtaken detached housing as the building type driving Australia’s housing growth, with 225,000 dwellings a year needed by 2034 and the frame and truss sector losing share in a market it built. Answering that, the Future Framing Initiative is testing standard timber framing to 15 metres and four to five storeys, with the Australian Timber Development Association’s Andrew Dunn steering the results toward the 2028 National Construction Code and the mid-rise standard it still lacks.

The Future Framing Initiative panel at FTMA’s National Conference, where research lead Professor Louise Wallis outlined work testing the existing timber stick to a 15-metre upper bound. (Photo Credit: Supplied by FTMA to Wood Central)

The market is already contracted, with Housing Australia listing 279 committed projects covering 18,650 homes across the fund’s first two rounds, and Round 3 has been open since 30 January to fund the last 21,350. Converting them is the program’s problem, with the social housing waitlist climbing from 155,000 to 169,000 in the decade to June 2024.

“Faster, safer and higher-quality housing, all made here,” is how AFWI Executive Director Dr Joseph Lawrence has described the goal of a connected fibre value chain, with the $200 million-plus research institute now running 30 projects from tree breeding through to engineered wood. On the auditor-general’s numbers, the fund must deliver nearly 27 times what it managed in its first two years in the next three years.

Source: https://woodcentral.com.au/housing-australia-future-fund-audit/