UDIA makes the following recommendations to Government:
- Government focuses its policies to address housing affordability by boosting supply and providing a certain regulatory environment for the development industry.
- The National Cities Performance Framework be closely tied to how and where future City Deals are struck, by highlighting locations where additional accommodation, liveability, productivity and future prosperity can be enhanced through alignment of planning, investment and governance between the three levels of government, the community and the private sector.
- Restart and reform the National Housing Supply Council to benchmark costs and provide leadership in planning a national housing supply strategy to address the housing affordability crisis.
- Support foreign investment that assists unlocking supply of new housing.
- Increase funding to the National Housing Infrastructure Facility to further catalyse housing supply.
- The Commonwealth to use its balance sheet to catalyse investment in public and social infrastructure using sound infrastructure prioritisation methodologies.
- Value Capture needs to consider the totality of taxes and charges and must not hurt the supply of dwellings aimed at resolving the housing affordability crisis.
- The Federal Government should work with State governments to reduce their reliance on inefficient, narrow based taxes such as stamp duty, in favour of broad based efficient taxes such as consumption and land taxes.
- The Federal Government should assist state governments with phasing out stamp duty and broadening the base of the GST, retain the current 10% rate of GST so as not to further increase the tax burden on new housing.
- Include state and local government levies in GST cost base calculations to improve the integrity of the tax system and reduce the incidence of double taxation.
- The UDIA recognises the importance of GST from residential property, however compliance measures introduced in the Federal Governments Tax Integrity Package for GST should not unfairly disrupt cashflow for the vast majority of developers that seek to comply with legislation.
- Maintain existing arrangements for negative gearing and capital gains tax.
- The Government should examine the effect of capital adequacy requirements for banks on the supply and affordability of housing, and move immediately to remedy any unintended consequences.