Since the Covid-19 pandemic days, most Western World countries have experienced severe housing shortages and Australia, and the Clarence River regions have not been exceptions to this problem.
At Federal level, it has been estimated that the country as a whole needs 1.3 million new houses and units, possibly rising to 1.7 million by next year.
Regional Australia, on the other hand, needs new homes to be built at an annual rate of 16,700 during each of the next 20 years, barring increased immigration or another flood of ‘sea changers’ from over-populated cities.
As we all know only too well, Yamba in particular is suffering a heavy burden created by a lack of affordable housing. In spite of having over 700 estimated Air BnB’s within our suburban borders, we simply do not have sufficient affordable accommodation for those younger townsfolk currently living here or wishing to do so.
All one has to do is to talk to some of Yamba’s small business owners and they will lament that they cannot get younger staff members to help them keep their business doors open due to the dire lack of affordable places to rent or buy.
In New South Wales as a whole, the State is currently hoping to build 377,000 homes over the next five years. That works out at 75,000 new homes a year or 1,450 a week — or an incredible 290 a day during a five-day working week.
To experts I have consulted, such a target is a mammoth and physical impossibility. They rightly say that such a five-year plan hardly provides sufficient time for builders to gear up for the task in terms of having sufficient duly trained and experienced tradespeople on hand.
In Yamba, we are already ultra-short of tradespeople to undertake lesser home maintenance work, let alone building homes in great haste and at an unbelievable pace.
With an extremely scarce building labour force, are we intending to urgently attract more young men and women to study the necessary apprenticeship courses at TAFE which can take between three and four years before they graduate with the necessary skills?
It would appear to me and my informants that the State Government needs to let the building industry into the secret of how it intends to construct so many residential buildings in record time. Young school-leavers also need to be made aware of the “big build” and be given incentives to seek the necessary qualifications for the job.
We also need to know whether the Federal Government has an extensive specialised immigration programme in hand to attract many more skilled housebuilders from overseas countries with the necessary building standards similar to our own.
As one of my informants suggested to me, a good way to overcome the housing problem would be to establish a construction authority and plan on the lines of the very successful post-WWll Snowy Mountain Scheme or the very efficient Darwin Reconstruction Authority after its cyclonic event.
From what this writer and others can see at present, we on the Clarence have an urgent need to boost housing production here with total communal co-operation between all State and local government instrumentalities together with the building industry, without allowing political protectionism to get in the way — as it so often does.
All sectors of government, corporate life and civil society have vital roles to play in advancing new solutions to our Australia-wide chronic shortage of safe and affordable housing.
Our Clarence Valley Council and the private sector also possibly need to get closer together on matters of housing policy, building registration cost structures and more liberal and cost-effective building technical standards to meet local conditions.
In considering the construction of urgent accommodation for our workers, we may also need to be more innovative. In Norway, as an example, they are constructing new much-needed homes out of 100 per cent recycled plastics. Why can’t we do that here?