25 July

Part 2 on why Australia should industrialise house-building, but probably won’t. As always, it’s about status. All societies run on status. The way we currently build homes in Australia is driven by a massive growth in status and therefore influence and wealth of the house-building ‘tradie’. Look at the graph. Piggy-backing off the Australian (really US) worship of ‘small business’, a grossly inefficient way to do anything, the shift to ‘subbies’ culture made tradies very wealthy and powerful, and homes eye-wateringly expensive to build. It also made these homes low-quality, and generated a need for a hugely expensive planning and regulatory culture, to check that the homes wouldn’t just fall over. A variety of inspectors forced to go to every building site in the country, multiple times in each build, in a vain attempt to keep cowboys in check. If homes were built industrially, in quality-controlled factories, as cars and other consumer goods are, much of this would fall away. Massive economies of scale would drive prices down, and quality up. The tradies will fight that tooth and nail. Nobody surrenders status. Something has to pay for the wankpanzers and trailers.