Australia planned 1.2 million homes. Not the workforce to build them.

In 2021–22, before the rate rises, housing stress was actually easing. Then the Reserve Bank moved — thirteen times in eighteen months. By 2023–24, every income quintile had crossed the 30 per cent threshold: the standard benchmark at which housing costs are considered unaffordable.

The most striking shift was not at the bottom but in the middle. Q3 and Q4 households — people with moderate to comfortable incomes, stable mortgages, families who had planned ahead — saw their stress rates nearly double in a single year. By 2023–24, more than half of all mortgage holders in the lowest three income groups were spending more than 30 cents in every dollar on housing costs.

A housing crisis this broad demanded a political response. In 2023, governments delivered one.

Building approvals across New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia fell sharply in 2023 and have been climbing since. Queensland and Western Australia are leading the recovery, driven by interstate migration. Victoria remains the single largest contributor to national housing supply.

The Housing Accord requires approximately 240,000 approvals per year — a pace not sustained since the construction peak of 2015–17. On the approval side, the machinery is moving. State governments are fast-tracking planning, federal incentives are flowing, and developers are responding.

But approvals are permission slips. Someone still has to pick up the tools.

The HomeBuilder spike has unwound. Commencements have settled at or below the pre-COVID average of around 159,000. If you stopped at the headline number, you might conclude: the pipeline has normalised.

But normalised to what? Before COVID, Australia was approving 170,000 to 220,000 new dwellings per year. The Housing Accord requires 240,000 — 30 to 40 per cent more than the norm the training system was built to serve. The old normal is no longer enough.

There is a harder problem inside this, and it cannot be fixed by cutting interest rates or announcing new targets. A trade qualification takes three to four years to complete. The commencement cohorts of 2023, 2024 and 2025 settled at or below pre-COVID levels — exactly when the Housing Accord demanded they be 30 to 40 per cent higher. These are the workers who will be qualifying in 2026, 2027 and 2028. Pre-COVID normal is no longer enough to meet post-COVID demand. That clock has already run.

The aggregate commencement figures conceal a structural problem. Not all trades are moving in the same direction — and the ones moving in the wrong direction are exactly the ones that build homes.

Electrical trades have grown 18.7 per cent per capita since 2017, pulled upward by the renewable energy transition and data centre construction. Metal fabrication is up 10.6 per cent. The economy has been training hard for the industries it prioritised.

Building trades — the carpenters, plumbers, bricklayers and concreters that residential construction depends on — have fallen 23.3 per cent per capita over the same period. The economy pulled training capacity toward the sectors it needed most. It left housing behind.

Jobs and Skills Australia has formalised what the data already showed. Bricklayers, carpenters, plumbers and plasterers are all officially classified as shortage occupations. The primary driver listed for each: long training gap. The shortage is not coming. It has been documented, classified, and named.

Oxford Economics, commissioned by BuildSkills Australia to model the workforce implications of the Housing Accord, arrives at a precise figure: 116,700 additional construction workers are needed by 2029. That is 23.8 per cent more labour than business-as-usual conditions will deliver. It is the distance between what Australia has promised and what it can currently build.

The red zone in the chart above is not a forecast. It is an accounting exercise. The apprentices who will populate the 2026–2029 workforce are the cohorts who enrolled in 2023, 2024 and 2025 — years when commencements sat at or below pre-COVID levels while housing targets had moved 30 to 40 per cent above what that baseline was designed to deliver. You cannot train a carpenter in twelve months because a government announces a target. You cannot fill a four-year pipeline by cutting interest rates.

Australia is approving more homes than at any point since 2015. The construction workforce, on current trajectories, is not ready to build them. The gap between those two facts is not a future policy problem. It is already locked in — shaped by decisions made, and training never started, years ago.