14/07/2026
Interesting. Now, can we get medium density working in the ACT? It wasn’t just planning changes the VIC Government implemented. Read the comments if you are interested in this stuff.
Greater Canberra
This week is getting weirder and weirder.
The Australian Financial Review (yes, that Financial Review, not the Victorian Labor fan club newsletter printed on recycled CFMEU stationery) is now running pieces arguing Sydney’s housing woes could be fixed by copying Jacinta Allan’s housing reforms.
Somewhere, a Herald Sun columnist just dropped a biro into a cup of instant coffee.
The argument is basically... Victoria’s townhouse code has made it easier to build medium-density housing (terraces, townhouses, low-rise apartments) by stopping councils from blocking everything that looks slightly more ambitious than a weatherboard shrine to 1973.
In the year since the changes came in, townhouse applications in Victoria reportedly jumped 46 per cent, reaching about 7000 in the year to March 2026.
Which is awkward.
Because for months we’ve been told Victoria is a failed state, Melbourne is basically Mad Max with trams, and Jacinta Allan cannot cross a room without personally creating a constitutional crisis or a debt black-hole.
And yet here we are, the AFR is suggesting other states might want to copy part of Allen's housing policy.
This is what serious housing policy looks like when it stops being pure theatre.
Less performative outrage.
More homes where people actually want to live.
Less “protect neighbourhood character”, which usually means preserving one cracked driveway, three agapanthus and the sacred right of a retired dentist to veto development.
More medium density.
More townhouses.
More terraces.
More low-rise apartments.
More options between “detached house 48 kilometres from work” and “vertical shoebox next to a lift shaft”.
The AFR piece also notes Melbourne has been relatively successful on housing affordability compared with other states. Again, not “affordable” in the sense that normal humans enjoy. More “less cooked than the others”, which in Australian housing policy counts as a certificate of excellence and possibly a commemorative lanyard.
The bigger point is: the ability to build medium-density housing without every council meeting becoming Lord of the Rings, matters.
NSW is going harder on high-density apartments. Victoria is leaning into townhouses and medium-density infill. Both approaches have trade-offs. High-rise can deliver more homes on one site but often needs land amalgamation, bigger capital, longer timelines and developer economics that look like a spreadsheet doing parkour. Townhouses are easier and faster to build, but use land less intensively.
The outrage economy will hate this. It wants housing reduced to villains and slogans. Greedy developers. Migrants. Woke councils. Labor. Bike lanes. An LGBTQI+ solar panel.
But the actual answer is messier and more useful: build more homes, in more places, with fewer artificial restrictions, while still protecting heritage that is genuinely heritage and not just a fibro box Bert Newton looked at once.
So yes, laugh at the absurdity.
The AFR praising a Jacinta Allan reform as a possible model for Sydney is one of those little political weather events where the sky briefly turns plaid.
But also maybe notice what it says.
Victoria did something serious on housing supply.
It did not fix everything.
It did not end the crisis.
But it moved the planning dial in a direction other states are now being told to examine.
And that is apparently enough to make the discourse short-circuit.
Queue the “wHeRe’S tHe $15 bIlIlIon” comments.
