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Event: Interview with Ron Wilson, 2SM
Date: 16 June 2025, 7:00am AEST
Speakers: Denita Wawn, CEO of Master Builders Australia
Topics: housing crisis; tradie shortages; productivity;
E&OE
Ron Wilson, host 2SM Breakfast: With Australia’s housing sector facing intense cost pressures and critical labour shortages, the delivery of the federal government’s ambitious 1.2 million homes target by 2029 is in serious doubt, with average input costs for a standard house reaching over $519,000 and material and labour costs continuing to surge. Industry leaders are warning urgent intervention is needed to get the sector back on track. Chief Executive of the Master Builders Australia, Denita Wawn, is on the line with me right now. Denita, good morning.
Denita Wawn, CEO Master Builders Australia: Good morning, Ron.
Ron: Look, skilled worker availability has been one of the ongoing challenges facing the whole sector. It sparked conversations about immigration and incentives for apprentices. What does the government and the industry need to do together to boost skilled worker availability?
Denita: Well, certainly we know that there is a problem decades in the making, and certainly the Albanese government delivered a number of incentives, particularly in terms of apprentice incentives for anyone in building and construction near the end of their last term. There are more recommendations from the apprentice incentive review that we’re asking to be implemented, but we also need to look more broadly. And Minister Giles commented on this the other day, more people need to be going into vocational education and training, generally. Too many people are going to university and then dropping out. We think there needs to be greater information out there. So we’ve done our bit. We’ve got our construction your career guide, and it’s been sent to all secondary schools in Australia.
Ron: There has always been a push, or for well, for decades, as you say, there’s been a push to keep our young people in universities. And then now we have all this talk about these massive HECS debts that they are racking up, and how to deal with that as well. Yet the TAFE courses are sitting right there next door. These career paths are very attractive these days.
Denita: Absolutely. Well, first and foremost, we know that there are long term career opportunities that you get paid to train, and there are also additional incentives from the government as well, and that’s a far cry from those extraordinary HECS debts that people are dealing with at the moment, which are then actually compounding their deposit gap problem when they want to go and buy a home because of the amount of debt that they have. So we strongly encourage people to look at a trade and also, of course, we need to ensure that we get more women into trade, still at really low levels, only four per cent of our trade workers are females. Yet there are huge opportunities, and that’s something that we, in conjunction with the federal government, are doing a lot of work. We’ve got a new program called Level the Site that is all about supporting, encouraging women, but more importantly, also ensuring that workplaces are safe for women to enter. There’s no doubt we’ve got, sometimes a bad reputation on site, and we’ve got to collectively work on that as well.
Ron: They’re very blokey environments. There’s no question about that. But how do you break down that culture?
Denita: Well, I think we’re seeing generational change, and there’s always been a perception by people that it’s too hard work for women, and I think we’ve seen that in different sectors and in sport, for example, with NRL and rugby union and AFL, that you can adapt and ensure that we can provide equal opportunities for women. These are fantastic paying jobs. You can be, so many tradies then turn out to be their own bosses and become new businesses. So huge opportunities, and we’ve just got to tell the story, right. But equally, we’ve got to ensure that the conditions for anyone working in the industry, male or female, are also good, so they’re looked after through their career journey.
Ron: Now, in the intro there, I was talking about these, the standard house input costs around $519,000. We saw the cost of materials like concrete increase by 20 per cent, timber by five per cent, in the one, in the past year alone. There’s just no way that builders and construction companies can absorb these increases without pushing more buyers out of the market.
Denita: Unfortunately, that’s the case. We’ve seen costs increase by over 40 per cent to build our home in the last five years. Some of that is material, some of that is labour shortages, some of it is excess regulation that is not reasonable for the consideration of what we need. We’ve got to build safe homes and good homes. Nevertheless, more and more tradies are telling us, and builders are telling us they’re spending too much time on the books and not enough time on site. So, we’ve got to get the balance right with the government. Kudos to the government, they have recognised that productivity is the key to driving economic growth for this term of government. We’ve seen a decline of nearly 20 per cent of productivity in the building industry over the last 10 years. We’ve got to reverse that and we know what the solutions are. It’s just a matter of getting on with the job and implementing them.
Ron: Well, productivity is the new catch cry of the government. In fact, we’ve got this economic summit coming up in August to look at that very topic. Now, 1.2 million homes this target by 2029, the experts we talk to say it’s simply not achievable. Are there any policy levers that you think the government could be pushing to actually get the goal back in focus?
Denita: We certainly think it’s achievable, but you’re absolutely spot on. We have to have changes in policy to achieve that. There’s issues around planning reform, both in terms of the type of applications you need, but also resourcing to get applications through the bottlenecks, the blockages there are too acute. We need more people, as we’ve just discussed, and that’s not just about apprentices. It’s about a migration system that supports skilled trade people. And we say more needs to be done in that place as well. We also need to ensure we’ve got things like tax incentives for small business to let them get on with and offset some of these extraordinary red tape costs that they are facing. And finally, I think we also need to recognise that we need a strong economy. So we need to see interest rates still down, we need inflation to still go down and so forth to ensure that we’re getting the best investment opportunity for people to invest in a new home.
Ron: Look, especially in the lead up to the last election, immigration was one of those topics that was just everywhere. But my understanding is that despite the large numbers of immigrants coming into the country, there’s almost none that are skilled in the construction trades.
Denita: That’s right, we were really disappointed that when the government announced their skilled priority pathway of anyone over $130,000 there was an exception to that, and that was trade qualified people. We said that that was unfair, that it was punishing blue collar workers, and simply was contrary to the needs that we have to make sure that we have enough people to build our homes and our hospitals and schools and our roads. So we’ll be pushing hard for the Albanese government to change those migration settings to have greater priority on trade. New Zealand, Canada and the UK all have priority pathways for trades. We don’t, and that simply has to change. We know for New South Wales, for example, they’re the worst state when it comes to falling behind on those targets. So we need to ensure we get those migration numbers right. But equally, we’ve got to stop targeting foreign investment in housing. We know when we achieve the targets that we need to have, we didn’t have all the foreign investment taxes on people buying property. We need more high rise and medium density, and that’s where a lot of foreign investment comes from.
Ron: Well, it’s a very difficult situation. Are you making any progress at all with state and federal governments on these issues?
Denita: I think we have, and I think that’s the important thing about the Accord. The Accord was an agreement in the early days of the last parliamentary term, reconfirmed in August 2023, between all levels of government plus industry, to say, things have got to change, and let’s set some targets. Governments themselves have created these expectations that we know are not, they are needed to be done. We need these homes to resolve the housing crisis, and so governments have got to be held to account with these targets. That’s what we’re doing, and we want to work constructively with all levels of government. Things are happening on the ground, but not quick enough. We now need to see real change.
Ron: Yeah. Look, we do need to see real change and sooner rather than later. Prices are just getting out of control, and I just don’t understand where it’s all going. I’m living out in the suburbs here in Sydney, and you’re talking about high rise, the high rise just seems to be coming out of the ground everywhere. Yet we are still not meeting our targets. I drove down to Bowral at the weekend just for a visit. The amount of housing that’s going down way, way beyond the, you know, the outer suburbs, there seems to be development construction everywhere, but we’re still not achieving the ends that we need.
Denita: No, we’re not. And the real concern about some of those out of suburbs, is that they’re sort of nearly stranded assets. A lot of homes that have insufficient road corridors coming out of those new suburbs.
Ron: Yes, exactly.
Denita: Some of those new suburbs are even relying on no sewage for short term. So we’ve got to get that enabling infrastructure, right. So, massive, massive issues, Ron, you’re absolutely spot on, and we need to be building and we’ve all got, instead of complaining about it in terms of the industry, the government, we know we’ve got the solutions, and we’ve just got to get that collaboration and those blockages out of the way so we can truly get on with it.
Ron: Absolutely. Alright, Denita, thank you very much for your time this morning. I appreciate it.
Media contact:
Dee Zegarac
National Director, External Affairs & Engagement
0400 493 071
dee.zegarac@masterbuilders.com.au