Written by Tim Law, Architectural scientist specialising in mould in Australian Buildings. To learn more about the author, check out Tim’s LinkedIn page.

Disclaimer: This article is a work of fiction and satire, it is not legal advice — seek your own professional counsel before acting on anything you read here. Some real companies may be referenced for context. The author used AI tools for assistance but takes full responsibility for the content. (See Preface for full disclaimer)

Dear Wonky,

I just can’t keep a straight face at the cyclone of incoherence swirling around this federal government announcement of a National Construction Code (NCC) “freeze”. If a therapist wrote this policy, they’d call it a spectacular case of cognitive dissonance.

Let’s drop the drama. This so-called 'freeze' of the NCC is no seismic shock. With NCC 2022 only just taking hold and NCC 2025 delayed, the three-year cycle is broken by bureaucracy, not by any masterstroke. The freeze apparently does not affect NCC 2025, which is in any case, likely to drift into 2026 before adoption, with the next triennial update due in 2029, happily coinciding with the end of the 'freeze'. Which means we’re simply back to business as usual: just shuffling the timeline, not truly pausing any code update. The “giant pause” narrative is just recycled excuses in a year already riddled with delays.

The Minister for Housing herself even pitched in, declaring, “We want builders on site, not filling in forms to get their approval. In the middle of a housing crisis a generation in the making, we want builders building good quality homes of the future—not figuring out how to incorporate another set of rules.” Beautiful sentiment, but it’s got all the logic of banning hammers to speed up framing. Since when was the NCC the villain jamming builders’ in-trays with paperwork?

Would you look at that, Shonky—turns out the real bottleneck isn’t a compliance clause in the NCC, it’s the bureaucratic mudslide in planning. The HIA’s own bean-counters say getting a detached home rubber-stamped on a greenfield in Victoria takes more than seven months and almost $20,000 before you so much as break ground. Call that “streamlining,” do you? In Sydney, apparently even fewer councils can hit their own stopwatch targets for higher-density builds, with average holdups pushing 173 days and some poor sods staring down 250 days just for a ticket to start.

Even the big brains at the Productivity Commission admit construction productivity’s on life support—not because the NCC’s gone feral, but because planning and local red tape choke the supply long before a brush ever touches render. The code, they say, is “sound in principle”—it’s the tangle with councils and local fiefdoms that turns budgets to mush and timetables to fairy tales.

All the grand talk of “cutting red tape” and “making housing affordable” doesn’t stack up. Scratch the surface and you’ll find no proof NCC complexity is to blame for slow approvals or rising costs. The real traffic jam is in planning, not the construction code. Anyone in the field knows the bottleneck is in planning and development approval, not certifiers holding up building permits because they are struggling with code updates. The complexity excuse simply lets politicians dodge the real, hard work of reform in the planning department completely within the Planning Ministers' portfolio. But sure, let’s just freeze the code and call ourselves reformers. Classic move: miss the point, blame the rulebook, hope nobody notices we’re building bottlenecks, not houses.

Now, layer on the supposed solution: import more skilled trades. Here’s the punchline—recent migrant workers make up barely 2.8% of new construction labour, and it can take up to two years for a foreign plumber, electrician, or bricklayer to secure their local license. Many spend thousands on tests and retraining, only to struggle with standards and local jargon. Most industry-commissioned reports admit it: skilled migration is too slow, too scattershot, and doesn’t put enough tradies immediately on the tools. Meanwhile, with every new arrival, demand grows for housing, infrastructure, schools: compounding, not relieving, the pressure.

And let’s talk about costs: every year we delay meaningful building upgrades, we pile up long-term bills. In 2019–20, the ABS reports that 11.5% of households reported major structural defects, and renters and public housing tenants bore the brunt. Waterproofing failures alone cost us billions, a tab only set to rise as defects compound in housing built to the absolute minimum, unless the minimum standard is elevated. The government’s own analysis confirms that code improvements (like those planned for NCC 2025) would save at least $3.7 billion in remediation and social costs over time.

Meantime, the government trumpets sustainability, electrification, and EV adoption, then locks in out-of-date building rules, conceding to industry and union pressure that “onerous” improvements are too much to ask. They claim to “balance” reform with supply, but in truth, the freeze is all politics: regulatory capture wrapped in the flag of housing need. Is it any wonder we’re falling short of our annual 240,000-home target by over 50,000, year after year?

Engineers Australia summed it up perfectly: we are facing a false choice between speed and quality. Regular code progress is a national imperative, not a regulatory indulgence. Freezing the NCC only locks in today’s mistakes and ensures we pay double tomorrow, once the dust settles and the defects appear.

And the cherry on this ice-cold cake? The NCC freeze is the brainchild of the so-called “brightest and best” assembled for the great Economic Roundtable. Summoned, no less, to address Australia’s housing crisis with all the gravitas of a royal commission but none of the practical sense of an apprentice on day one. Picture it: the country’s top minds in a room, and after hours of tea and taxpayer-funded biscuits, what do they deliver? Not a plan for more skills. Not faster planning approvals. Not a single, bold blueprint for building better homes. No, just a lukewarm serve of regulatory porridge masquerading as “policy innovation.”

They’ll trumpet it as “boosting productivity” and “cutting red tape,” and call it a proud achievement in making housing magically appear. Freeze the rules, call it stability, then sit back and wait for someone else to handle the thaw. If this is the best our economic A-team can muster, it’s no wonder the rest of us would rather sleep through the next government “solution.”

So here we are, Wonky: a “freeze” that’s a rounding error in the timing, trotted out as a lifeline for a workforce still playing catch-up, all so politicians can say they acted boldly in a crisis of immigration and housing of their own making. It’s heavy on theatre, light on substance, and guaranteed to saddle the next generation with the bill buried somewhere, of course, in the planning queue.

Yours in perpetual disbelief,

Dodgy Bilda

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