1 April 2025 – Building 4.0 Cooperative Research Centre CEO Prof. Mathew Aitchison today called for urgent action to stand up a national building research and development corporation (RDC) to arrest declining productivity in the sector, a key contributor to higher costs and supply shortages.

At the National Housing Solutions Summit in Melbourne this week, Prof. Aitchison said that Australia needs a two-speed plan of attack that produces practical short-term solutions laddering up to a long-term master plan to solve housing supply challenges.

Prof. Aitchison said: “We can’t keep expecting a different outcome from the same piecemeal approach to innovation in the building sector. The building and construction industry contributes around 13% of GDP and has no central body that develops policy and strategy to drive innovation. Agriculture, which generates 3% of GDP, has 15 RDCs such as Meat & Livestock Australia and Australian Wool Innovation, which connect industry, policymakers and research institutes. It is a proven approach to delivering sector wide innovation that has maintained the international competitiveness of these industries for decades.”

Australia has a national housing target of 1.2 million well-located new homes by 30 June 2029. To get there we will need a sector that is dynamic, innovative and internationally best practice. We either start looking across the building sector as a whole or risk falling further behind.