Our building regulations need a major overhaul

How many separate approvals are required before an owner can move into a new house in Melbourne's designated urban growth area?  Twenty?  Fifty?

According to Victoria's Growth Area Authority (GAA), 540 different ticks are needed from regulators.

It's no wonder that not enough houses are being built and that completed houses cost so much.

It's miraculous that 35,000 new houses actually get built each year in Victoria.

We have lots of land and an efficient building industry so there should be plenty of new houses available on Melbourne's urban fringe at under $200,000.  This is the case in many major US cities -- even those like Dallas with booming populations.

But few houses are available in outer Melbourne even at $300,000.

Land supply regulations create an artificial shortage.  As a result, once farmland obtains regulatory ticks for home building, its value increases from less than $3000 per housing block to more than $100,000.

Part of this is the uncertain process of navigating regulatory barriers, which brings delays of up to 10 years with all the paperwork and holding costs these entail.

Levelling the land, installing pipes and wires and building local roads costs a further $60,000.  This is often increased by further regulations that require additional costs for open space and Rolls-Royce road structures.

On this developed land many builders offer completed new three-bedroom, two-bathroom houses from $120,000.

So regulations drive up the price of a house that could cost $200,000 to more than $300,000.

Last June, Planning Minister Matthew Guy established an inquiry to advise on how to improve the state's planning system and it attracted more than 500 submissions.  It was Victoria's 10th major review of planning and transport over the past decade.

Previous reviews have actually added to the regulatory thicket.

As a result, even with a sluggish economy over the past year, lot prices increased by 16 per cent.

Senior state planning bureaucrats are exploring ways of expediting regulatory approval processes and the Government has funded a ''flying squad'' of planning specialists to expedite approvals.  But such approaches can only scratch the surface.

What is needed is a drastic pruning of the regulations themselves.

To this end, the Housing Industry Association argues for exempting small lot developments from many requirements.

It is also seeking dilution of the very onerous native vegetation regulations.  These involve preservation of remnant vegetation on the misplaced contention that urban development threatens this with extinction.

The Urban Development Institute of Australia offers a 10-point plan to ease these and other onerous State Government requirements, including preventing councils from adding their own regulatory layers.

Many voices, however, want to deny developments in the outer Melbourne areas.  Some councils advocate increased planning controls.

Melton, for example, wants greater restraints on urban expansion, saying ''greenfield land is not an infinite resource'' -- maybe, but Victoria's urban footprint is only 1 per cent of the state and greenfields will never be scarce.  The council also wants to see homes that are ''environmentally sustainable'' with expensive accessibility features for the disabled.

Meanwhile, regulatory measures add wasteful costs to development and price young people out of home ownership.

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