In case you missed my latest last week 👇👇👇

In the 1980s, for the average woman, it would have taken 6 years of wages to purchase the average Brighton property. In 2025, despite radical improvements in gender pay, it would take the average woman nearly 33 years...

Two months ago, I wrote a paper for the Electoral Matters Committee. It clocked in at 23,000 words with 16 data tables, 11 graphs, 204 footnotes and 30,000 datapoints. I made the case that we should take advantage of this historic juncture to expand participation in our representative democracy.

Argh, City of Yarra under Jolly continues to hit new lows. This is just throwing the lives of our most marginalised people in the bin to chase the votes of conservative NIMBYs. www.theage.com.au/politics/vic...

I’m honoured to be featured alongside some of Australia’s biggest names in wonkdom in the summer issue of Inflection Points. My paper is the culmination of 4 years work on declining civic participation — and why other researchers into the phenomenon have a blind spot for political parties.

🚨Issue 03 | Inflection Points | OUT NOW🚨 - Flavio Menezes - Brendan Coates - Matthew Maltman - Travis Jordan

So many of Victoria's problems can be solved with one easy trick: abolish the City of Yarra.

‘All problems come back to housing’ is one of those lines which is simultaneously a Premier buck passing a problem to another level of government while being entirely, unquestionably, true

New study from Melbourne finds reducing residential speed limits from 50km/h to 30 km/h on local roads would protect cyclists from danger, make riding less stressful and get more people cycling while not causing traffic delays for cars.

First they came for Brighton and I didn't speak up because I was not rich...

Seeing trailers for some upcoming Screen Australia backed films and it’s amazing how so few Australian Stories involve cities at all. Everyone in our cities are completely devoid of stories. Our streets are narrativeless. Only the Bush has agency.

Halloween has come early for Boroondara's planners... ...they might have to approve medium-density housing! 😱 😱

It’s not just NIMBY attitudes either. This flows into how council decision making happens — whether as a result of the “paradox of empowerment” or as systemically as a result of how governance systems are designed. Renters are excluded from consultations, strategies or even the very act of voting.

What does the Nicole Kidman/Keith Urban split mean for the Sydney property market?

No, Australia does not need new cities. My new essay sets the record straight: we have a lot of cities, but we aren’t using them as well as we could be. To make our cities more successful, we have to open up a lot more land for commercial uses to enable agglomeration.

If a NSW pattern book design gets built in Melbourne before a Future Home does imma lose it

Yet again The Age is uncritically publishing a story about a research paper from The Australian Population Research Institute and whitewashing them as objective academic experts instead of a thinktank of washed-up cranks. At least this time it isn't just another anti-migrant tirade.

Banger of a Substack article by Manning Clifford, editor at large of @inflectionpoints.work. The US and UK political class is dominated by former lawyers. Beijing is full of trained engineers. Australian MPs, however, mostly used to work for other MPs, as advisers. substack.com/home/post/p-...

This report paints a very grim picture for everywhere north of the Murray River. Meanwhile here in Brisbane, we’re not even planning for the fires, floods and heatwaves we already get — let alone far more frequent and far more extreme ones.

Stonnington is claiming that their current strategy can deliver 17,000 homes *more* than the Victorian Government's housing target. However, they fail to mention that their strategy needs nearly the entirety of Stonnington to be demolished and rebuilt by 2051. Very feasible...

🎙️NEW PODCAST🎙️ How do we move the needle on reform? Hear from Brendan Coates, Michael Brennan and Katie Roberts-Hull on how policy reform happens! Listen to the podcast below 👇 [Link in next tweet]

The case against worrying about pre-transfer poverty

If you were going to read this but thought “actually I want you to cut it by a third and read it out to me”… podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/l...

Are subsidised homes for the middle class better than social housing for those at risk of homelessness? Planning academics and Yarra’s mayor seem to think so. We support the DFP’s 3% levy for Victoria’s Social Housing Growth Fund, which means more social housing for more people.

Another one of the systemic exclusion of renters from urban politics — whether it’s chronic underrepresentation in decision-making spaces, repeat studies that show that renters aren’t proactively engaged in consultations, or how local council elections make it harder for renters to even vote.

A new paper highlights that while countries like Australia have seen construction productivity fall, NZ saw a boom in the 2010s. Their secret? Zoning reform. By allowing more medium-density housing in cities like Auckland, they supercharged their construction sector

Massive shout-out to Labor for Housing for their strong advocacy on getting CRA and GST reform for public housing on the agenda. If we want more public housing, we need to change the incentives! www.theage.com.au/politics/vic...

I had a chat to @australia.theguardian.com about some troubling remarks from the Planning Minister foreshadowing abandoning the already very weak infill targets in the SEQ Regional Plan It doesn’t give me faith that they’ll listen to their own construction productivity inquiry’s own recommendations

Putting aside the damage any kind of demand-juicing policy like this has on the broader market, at a pure design level, programmes that limit the number of participants either have to rely on strong eligibility criteria (in which case, just means test) or are entirely arbitrary.

Frustrating piece. The number #1 problem regulation re: housing has absolutely *nothing* to do with building regulation or livability - it's restrictive zoning. We make it illegal to build medium to high-density housing in our cities for no good reason. www.theage.com.au/property/new...

As someone who wrote about abortion almost exclusively full time for four years I don’t say this lightly: this has prompted some truly deranged emails

I said this way back when the Building Bad stories first broke over a year ago, but it should be clear to anyone even just with a passing knowledge of pop culture that organised crime infiltration of the construction industry doesn't begin and end with the union.

The Planning Institute of Australia once again shows its hand as a lobbyist for conservative planners rather than a body seeking to improve the lives of Australians We need a planning system that focuses on outcomes, not process.

The Planning Institute of Australia's response to YIMBY Melbourne's research demonstrates exactly why our planning system is broken. We never said that there are too many planners. We said that the sector's productivity has collapsed. 👇

Anyway everyone should pay higher income tax and we should pay everyone a living public wage and subsidised housing to study whatever they want — uni, TAFE or apprenticeship.

I didn't quite grasp how much the demographic make-up of schools plays such a critical role in the life outcomes of children until now. It further iterates how planning controls that focus on preserving low-density character are tools that further inequality in Australia. bsky.app/profile/infl...

It was great chatting to @ginarush.bsky.social for today’s ABC Long Read. Our little ragtag crew at @greaterbrisbane.org have been trying to spin a new story about how our city could work. More than Sydney and Melbourne, Brisbane’s been fixated on a suburban lifestyle that’s not sustainable anymore.

Australian journalism is defined by its low expectations of its readership, and so I'm super excited by @inflectionpoints.work and the potential for a masthead that treats its audience as neither stupid or likely to switch off at the 1000th word.

A long-form publication for wonks by wonks. First issue is out tomorrow ✍️

Talking about reform is our national ritual: white papers, inquiries, op-eds, post-election promises. But too often, these calls create more process than progress. So we’re launching Inflection Points—a new platform for longform policy writing that aims to cut through.

We are also open to funding from Australian tech billionaires.

Fringe groups have recently started to push a curious line about upzoning and planning reform: they call it "empirics without a theory". They state this line as if it is a gotcha, but forget one thing: empirics is much more important than theory. bsky.app/profile/pros...

Australia's cities have extremely low densities relative to their international counterparts. The idea that this low density is impossible to overcome is silly. This type of conservative thinking is partly to blame for the housing crisis.

Planning departments aren't neutral experts—they're institutions traumatized by decades of NIMBY meetings, encoding unreasonable opposition into 'professional wisdom.' When we're forced to learn planning jargon we are playing a rigged game. 👇 open.substack.com/pub/venat/p/...

This essay gets to the heart of how the odds are institutionally stacked against saying “yes” to more homes. However, there’s an extra dimension I see in the Australian context: public servant censorship.

Imo this is why the left should embrace and articulate its version of “abundance”. there’s a version of abundance (indeed, I think the version preferred by Klein) that is basically the practical realisation of a green new deal. housing and energy for the ppl. don’t let centrist ghouls water it down

Richard stumbled upon the problem. It's illegal to build more affordable smaller homes in large swathes of our capital cities. The aim of a progressive housing agenda is to upzone our cities and invest massively in social housing.

Do NIMBYs deserve the right to veto housing? We don't think so 👇

The YIMBY vibeshift continues.