The main problem with housing affordability is that Australia is still built around the geography of the nineteenth century, with five major cities. A couple of major regional centres also exist like the Gold Coast and Newcastle, but these are exceptional. Canberra is also exceptional. About half of all Australians live within 50 km of one of five major cities. This would have worked fine in 1890 when the Australian population was a few million, but it's now outdated. It is ridiculous that in a country with a land area of 7.7 million square kilometres, half of all people are crowded into less than half of a percent of the landmass, despite Australia's cities being quite spread out by world standards.

We need to get people out of our capitals. We need more cities. More places with a ready supply of jobs. More hubs of industry and commerce. More places where people are willing to live.

We should choose some regional areas to become new cities with a population of around 100,000 to 250,000 people. We could choose an existing town, or even buy a few unproductive farms adjacent to good infrastructure (road, rail, power and water) and found new greenfield cities. Encourage companies to relocate with generous tax benefits.

Encouraging development of the north of Australia is one option. This is a more expensive option because it would require tens of billions in new infrastructure.

Any strategy for this kind of regional development needs to be a bipartisan approach. This would be a long-term project, potentially over decades. It can't be subject to the whims of partisan politics.