Opposition housing and homelessness spokesperson Senator Andrew Bragg has declared that low-income Australians should accept living in substandard homes, saying the Coalition's plan to dramatically slash the national building code would involve unavoidable "trade-offs" in housing quality.
Bragg made the remarks during a radio interview on Thursday morning, a day after announcing the Coalition would reduce the national housing code from 2,000 pages to just 80 if elected to government. When directly asked whether his proposal meant low-income earners should simply accept substandard housing, he replied: "Yes, definitely."
"It's more important to have a house than to not have a house. And so, given the affordability crisis we have in the housing system, we need to just build more houses," he said.
Coalition's building code overhaul and the 'trade-offs'
The national housing code sets minimum safety, liveability and construction standards for new homes across the country. Bragg's proposal to strip the code back to a fraction of its current size is framed by the Coalition as a way to accelerate housing construction and ease the affordability crisis gripping much of Australia.
Bragg acknowledged that pursuing that goal at speed would mean compromising on quality, describing the outcome as a deliberate "trade-off" — prioritising volume of housing stock over the standards built into current regulations.
His comments follow similar remarks from Liberal treasury spokesman Tim Wilson, who suggested on Wednesday that in some circumstances people could simply put "a jumper on in winter rather than spending huge amounts of money" on improving housing quality. Wilson also argued against a one-size-fits-all approach to energy efficiency requirements, noting that climate conditions vary significantly across states.
"There are some places in the country where you will get cold spells or hot spells for a very small amount of the year, whereas for the rest of the year, it's not necessary," Wilson said, adding that Queensland's needs differ markedly from those of Tasmania, Victoria, or Western Australia.
Advocates warn the plan protects developers, not renters
Affordable housing advocates have responded with alarm, arguing that winding back construction regulations would primarily benefit property developers rather than the people most in need of housing.
Everybody's Home spokesperson Maiy Azize said too many renters were already enduring homes that were freezing in winter, sweltering in summer, and riddled with mould and damp — conditions that would only worsen under a weaker building code.
"Building more poor-quality homes does nothing to fix that crisis. It simply gives developers another way to profit from it," Azize said, urging government investment in social housing "built to last."
Australian Council of Social Services CEO Dr Cassandra Goldie described Bragg's comments as "shocking," warning that the proposed changes would shift costs away from builders and onto households — locking low-income Australians into higher power bills for decades.
"The changes to the building code proposed by Senator Bragg would simply remove costs from the builder and move them onto the household — locking them into higher power bills for decades, deepening inequality, risking lives, leaving future generations with homes that are expensive to run," Goldie said.
Goldie added that construction of social housing should "drastically scale up" to genuinely address the crisis.
Industry offers qualified support
The Housing Industry Association welcomed Bragg's announcement in principle but offered a measured response, arguing that reducing complexity in the construction approvals system was more important than targeting any specific page count for the code.
The debate lands as housing affordability remains one of the most pressing political issues ahead of the federal election, with both major parties under pressure to demonstrate credible solutions to a shortage of supply that has driven rents and purchase prices to record highs across much of the country.
Azize and Goldie both stressed that the answer to the housing crisis lies in expanding genuinely affordable and well-built social housing — not in lowering the bar for what counts as an acceptable home for those with the least financial power to demand better.
