28 Aug 2025
It’s the garage roof collapsing after weeks of ceaseless rain. The powerlines downed by surprising snowfalls. The street trees that bloom out of season. The film of mould creeping across the leather couch. The dog stuck inside because the backyard is under water. “That’s weird,” you say. “I’ve never seen that before.”
Most news stories about climate change focus on extreme events – fires, floods, cyclones. But climate instability is also showing up in stranger, subtler ways. Global warming is making the world hotter, but it’s also creating weather-related changes that people everywhere are describing as “weird”.
Global weirding is on my mind because it shows up most clearly in our homes. As the world changes, so must the places where we live.
Last week, Housing Minister Clare O’Neil announced a pause on upgrades to the National Construction Code (NCC). The move, a response to the Economic Reform Roundtable, has been pitched as a productivity measure – a way to ease pressure on a sector that has seen housing productivity fall by 53% over three decades.
This pause isn’t as bad as it might sound. It’s more a pushback in timing. NCC 2022 – which lifted residential standards to 7-star NatHERS, among other measures – has rolled out unevenly across states and territories. Now, we need to maintain momentum because every time we strengthen the Code, we cut bills, improve comfort and create long-term value for Australians.
NCC 2025, the Housing Minister has said, will be on the agenda for building ministers from all jurisdictions to agree and finalise as planned. This commitment is a vital step forward. We are in a much better position than we were last year when the federal Opposition took a 10-year Code freeze to the election.
Instead of NCC 2028, the following round will now land in 2029, at the end of the National Housing Accord. Given some jurisdictions are still implementing NCC 2022, this pragmatic decision reflects reality.
As Property Council Chief Executive Mike Zorbas has noted: “The necessary residential code recalibration will achieve the national consistency we all know is the key to an efficient housing production pipeline that must be regularly updated to meet the advancing quality, safety and sustainability expectations of Australian families.”
Arguments against Code upgrades have been recycled for decades. In 2004, people were pushing back against five-star NatHERS. But residential buildings account for 24% of our electricity use and 10% of national emissions. It is unproductive to build homes that are inefficient to run, that fail to keep people safe and healthy, and that will need expensive retrofits later.
If productivity is the goal, let’s start with consistent standards across jurisdictions. Two decades ago the Productivity Commission pointed to national discrepancies in Code implementation as a key cost.
Optimising how we share the rules is another place to start. We can track a pizza from oven door to delivery, but we still serve up building standards in thousand-page PDFs. (And those standards are often behind a paywall).
The Albanese Government has promised to press ahead with a broad agenda of housing reforms, from policies to accelerate modern methods of construction to greater use of AI. These are all welcome steps.
Meanwhile, GBCA will keep moving in the right direction. We’ll continue to:
The climate is shifting in big ways – and we feel it first in small discomforts at home. That does feel weird. But we’re not standing still. With every rating, every forum, every policy win and every collaboration, we are building the homes of the future today.