WA lacking trust in State Government’s efforts to fix housing crisis despite positive signs in new home target

The WA Government is failing to convince people it’s tackling the housing crisis despite tracking third in the country towards its target for building new homes. This lack of trust will make it harder for the Government to take the more difficult decisions needed if it is going to solve the housing supply crisis, the head of new community-driven advocacy group Amplify believes. The organisation has surveyed more than 4000 Australians on their attitudes towards housing to put data behind its arguments to governments around the country to take bigger, bolder action. West Australians reported an equal-lowest community confidence score, on par with Tasmania, with just 33.1 per cent feeling positive about the direction housing policy. They also had low levels of trust in the Federal Government’s capacity to tackle housing, second only to Queensland. There was no jurisdiction where more than half of those surveyed had confidence in their government’s delivery of housing. Amplify chief executive Georgina Harrisson says that’s a problem because of the scale of the work left to do. While WA is tracking comparatively well towards its share of the target to build 1.2 million homes by mid-2029, it is still falling short – and doing so in an environment where there is a shortage of workers and a slow planning system continues to hamper progress. “They have a lot more to do and what you find in reform is obviously the last bit gets harder. You’ve grabbed all the easy low-hanging fruit, and then you’re on to the really difficult stuff,” Ms Harrisson told The West Australian. “When you lose the trust of the community, you then don’t have the social licence to do that really hard stuff. And so that’s why it really matters.” It also means that people come up with their own reasoning about the housing crisis that can have broader implications for social cohesion. A growing undercurrent of anti-immigration sentiment has fuelled large protests across the countries and is increasingly worrying politicians. One WA renter told researchers he wanted to see the State Government work with the Federal Government “to stop mass migration, which is making the problem worse”. Another woman, who owned her home, observed: “There should be more people with skills given the migration intake but all migrants that have settled here don’t seem to have any building skills.” Many people highlighted the lack of tradies as a problem. WA is on track to build about 107,500 homes by mid-2029, or roughly 86 per cent of the 124,300 share of the national housing accord target, according to Amplify’s research. This is slightly better than official government data, which projects WA will achieve 81 per cent of its target. Ms Harrisson is blunt when asked whether governments are doing enough on the supply side of the housing problem: “No.” “When you look at that level of crisis that people are feeling at a very practical level of affordability, and then a kind of emotional level, I think what you see is a huge gap in terms of what people then see and experience in terms of government response,” she said. “The community cares more about housing than it does anything else right now – until it sees the action of government matching that, I don’t think you’ll see these gaps close.” Amplify’s team spent the past week in Canberra talking to Federal politicians including Housing Minister Clare O’Neil. The Federal Government has a raft of measures aimed particularly at building more social and affordable housing but this takes time while its policies on the demand side have a more immediate effect. It revealed this week that 5778 people had used the five per cent deposit guarantee scheme in the first month after eligibility expanded, an almost 50 per cent increase from the same time last year. Home prices across the country increased one per cent in the same month. Treasury officials told Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg this week they didn’t model the impact of expanding the deposit guarantee scheme until July, three months after the policy was announced.