The NSW Planning Minister, Brad Hazzard, told the Herald creating a housing agency similar to that in Victoria could help speed up delivery of new housing developments. ''The concept of a dedicated housing delivery agency has been very successfully used in Victoria and the government is looking at all options at the moment,'' he said.
''There's a great deal of talent in the SMDA and Landcom and we are looking at both organisations to see how that expertise can best be employed for the delivery of new housing opportunities.''
Mr Hazzard's remarks were in response to a plan from a developer lobby group, the Urban Development Institute of Australia, which has called for the amalgamation of the two bodies to make it easier to build houses.
UDIA has imposed a 100-day limit on several initiatives it says are needed to try to stimulate housing construction. Its plan sent to the NSW government calls for a series of moves within the next 100 days. It says NSW is ''the only state without an authority responsible for land assembly and the new organisation must assume this role''.
It wants the government to pass laws to give a new authority powers to amalgamate disparate blocks of land in parts of Sydney deemed suitable for large-scale housing and then sell these blocks to developers. Faced with historically low levels of housing construction, the former Labor government established the SMDA to identify and plan new housing developments although it has since been restricted to projects in Redfern/Waterloo and Granville.
UDIA's chief executive, Stephen Albin, said SMDA's powers are too limited and while Landcom delivers land for development it does not build the houses and that agencies elsewhere do it all.
''We have a major supply problem and we need someone independent overseeing all the government agencies to see how they perform delivering roads, electricity and water to see how we can bring houses to market,'' he said. ''One of the key impediments is getting the infrastructure agencies to talk together … the key issue here is co-ordination and assembly, and if you fix those two issues you are a fair way down the track to fixing this industry.''