The NSW Planning Minister, Brad Hazzard, told the Herald creating
a housing agency similar to that in Victoria could help speed up
delivery of new housing developments. ”The concept of a dedicated
housing delivery agency has been very successfully used in Victoria and
the government is looking at all options at the moment,” he said.

”There’s a great deal of talent in the SMDA and Landcom and we are
looking at both organisations to see how that expertise can best be
employed for the delivery of new housing opportunities.”

Mr Hazzard’s remarks were in response to a plan from a developer lobby
group, the Urban Development Institute of Australia, which has called
for the amalgamation of the two bodies to make it easier to build
houses.

UDIA has imposed a 100-day limit on several initiatives it says are
needed to try to stimulate housing construction. Its plan sent to the
NSW government calls for a series of moves within the next 100 days. It
says NSW is ”the only state without an authority responsible for land
assembly and the new organisation must assume this role”.

It wants the government to pass laws to give a new authority powers to
amalgamate disparate blocks of land in parts of Sydney deemed suitable
for large-scale housing and then sell these blocks to developers. Faced
with historically low levels of housing construction, the former Labor
government established the SMDA to identify and plan new housing
developments although it has since been restricted to projects in
Redfern/Waterloo and Granville.

UDIA’s chief executive, Stephen Albin, said SMDA’s powers are too
limited and while Landcom delivers land for development it does not
build the houses and that agencies elsewhere do it all.

”We have a major supply problem and we need someone independent
overseeing all the government agencies to see how they perform
delivering roads, electricity and water to see how we can bring houses
to market,” he said. ”One of the key impediments is getting the
infrastructure agencies to talk together … the key issue here is
co-ordination and assembly, and if you fix those two issues you are a
fair way down the track to fixing this industry.”