The Planning Institute of Australia proves our point: it's the system not the supply

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PIA’s response perfectly illustrates Australia’s planning crisis

The Planning Institute of Australia’s response to YIMBY Melbourne’s research demonstrates exactly why our planning system is broken.

The PIA continues to prioritise the complexity of the system over and above the outcomes it produces.

Rather than address our core finding—that planner productivity has collapsed from 54 homes per planner in 1986 to fewer than 9 today—the PIA calls for more of the same: more planners to manage more complexity.

The PIA claims planning has become more complex, pointing to apartments replacing detached houses. But this doesn’t explain why planner productivity has collapsed six times more than construction worker productivity over the same period. If complexity was the issue, we’d see similar declines across both sectors.

In the 1960s, the planning process to build a 3-storey apartment building was just a few pages. Today, it’s in the hundreds.

The evidence the PIA ignores speaks volumes

The PIA’s response conspicuously avoids addressing our key findings:

• Permit timelines have blown out from 55 days to 371 days in Victoria
• South Australian planners deliver many more  homes per planner as their NSW counterparts
• The planning workforce has grown nine-fold while housing output per planner has crashed

Instead, the PIA deflects to approved-but-unbuilt projects—a symptom of the very system they defend. When permits take 371 days and require armies of consultants, of course projects become unviable.

PIA inadvertently proves planning demand is the real crisis

Planning is essential to correct for market failures—we do not dispute this. But the current planning system is defined by process rather than delivery. So long as planning fails to measure the outcomes of its interventions, this will never improve.

By arguing that more process can be used to justify ever-more planners, the PIA inadvertently proves our thesis. The planning system has become a self-perpetuating bureaucracy that measures success by process, not homes delivered.

South Australia’s system shows that the number of planners is not the binding constraint. If NSW planners matched their South Australian counterparts’ productivity, the state would build an additional 33,403 homes annually.