On the ninth floor of a 1960s public housing tower in North Melbourne, a long-term tenant packs the last of her belongings into boxes. The block outside her window is one of forty-four high-rise towers the Victorian government has marked for demolition and rebuilding, and she has been told she must move out while it happens, with no guaranteed date, or guarantee, that she will move back into the same neighbourhood once the new building is finished. She is one of roughly 10,000 public housing residents across the forty-four towers whose homes now sit inside a demolition-and-construction program expected to run for decades (Homes Victoria; Parliament of Victoria, Inquiry into the Redevelopment of Melbourne's Public Housing Towers, approx.).
Her displacement is the sharpest edge of a much larger promise. In September 2023 the Victorian government released its Housing Statement, committing to 800,000 new homes over the following decade — an average of 80,000 a year, a pace the state had never sustained before (Victoria's Housing Statement — The Decade Ahead 2024–2034, Sept-2023). Two years on, the government's own reporting and an industry read of the completions data both show a widening gap between that promise and what has actually been approved, started and finished, even as the tower demolitions announced alongside the Statement remain contested and unresolved.
What the government did
Victoria's Housing Statement, released on 20 September 2023 under then-Premier Daniel Andrews, set the most ambitious housing-supply target of any Australian state: 800,000 new homes by 2034, spread across Melbourne's established suburbs, its growth areas and regional Victoria, and framed against a longer-term goal of 2.24 million homes statewide by 2051 as the population keeps growing (Victoria's Housing Statement, Sept-2023, approx.). The government signed what it called an Affordability Partnership with the Property Council of Australia, Master Builders Victoria, the Urban Development Institute of Australia, the Housing Industry Association and Super Housing Partnerships, an attempt to put industry and government behind a single public number rather than treating supply as a planning problem alone (Premier of Victoria, media release, 20-Sept-2023). Jacinta Allan succeeded Andrews as Premier in December 2023, three months after the Statement's release, and has owned its delivery record ever since.
The planning side of the Statement centres on "activity centres": established suburbs around train and tram stops, rezoned to allow more medium- and high-density housing close to existing transport, schools and jobs, rather than pushing growth further to the urban fringe. Consultation on the first ten pilot activity centres, including Broadmeadows, Chadstone, Epping, Frankston and Ringwood, began in March 2024; a further twenty-five centres were added in October 2024, with the program designed eventually to cover up to sixty activity centres and more than 300,000 homes near transport (Department of Transport and Planning, Activity Centres Program, 2024). The stated goal is to cut the typical time it takes to update planning controls for a centre from around four years to about one (Department of Transport and Planning, Activity Centres Program, 2024, approx.). Separately, and predating the Statement, the government committed to demolishing and rebuilding all forty-four of Melbourne's high-rise public housing towers, built between the 1950s and 1970s, on the grounds that they are functionally obsolete and increasingly uneconomic to maintain.
The strongest case
A government that finally named the scale of the problem and put industry on the hook for it
The government's strongest case starts with honesty about arithmetic most of its predecessors avoided. Victoria added roughly 57,000 homes a year on average between 2016 and 2021 (approx., industry analysis of ABS Building Activity data), while net overseas and interstate migration kept adding to the state's population faster than almost anywhere else in the country. An 800,000-home, decade-long target, whatever its eventual fate, is the first time a Victorian government has put a number on the shortfall that large and invited industry and the public to hold it to that number in public, rather than managing the gap quietly through longer waiting lists and rising rents.
Directing growth into activity centres near existing train and tram lines is also the more defensible planning choice, in principle, than continuing to push new estates onto Melbourne's fringe, further from jobs and services and more dependent on cars. The tower argument has real substance too: Homes Victoria told a parliamentary inquiry it would cost around $2.3 billion over 20 years just to keep the 44 towers habitable, about $17,000 per apartment per year, against roughly $2,000 for the rest of the public housing portfolio (approx.; Homes Victoria evidence to the Legal and Social Issues Committee). The government's redevelopment plan promises to roughly triple the number of people housed on the same sites, from about 10,000 residents today to as many as 30,000 once rebuilt — a genuine net gain in social housing if it is delivered as promised.
The evidence
The clearest test of delivery capacity is the Big Housing Build, the $5.3 billion, 12,949-home social and affordable housing program that predates the Housing Statement but now sits inside it. The Victorian Auditor-General's Office examined the program in its Planning Social Housing report, tabled 19 June 2024, and found that as at March 2024, Homes Victoria had started or finished 72 per cent of the planned homes, 4,049 completed and a further 5,310 under construction, and was on track to have around 80 per cent finished by 31 December 2026, with the remainder due by 2028–29, broadly within the original $5.3 billion budget despite cost pressures (VAGO, Planning Social Housing, 19-Jun-2024). That is a genuine execution success by the standard of most large public programs. But the same audit found Homes Victoria's own delivery strategy contained only two specific, measurable goals across six stated objectives, meaning even the government's flagship housing agency could not fully demonstrate, in its own paperwork, whether it was on track against most of what it had promised (VAGO, Planning Social Housing, 19-Jun-2024).
The direction of travel since the Statement was signed tells the same story from a different angle. ABS Building Activity data shows Victorian dwelling completions fell to 13,748 in the September quarter of 2025, the lowest quarterly total in eleven years, since 2014, even though the state's population has grown by around 1.2 million people, roughly 21 per cent, over that same period (approx.; ABS, Building Activity, Australia, Sept qtr 2025). Building starts fell too, from 14,105 in the June 2025 quarter to 13,415 in September (ABS, Building Activity, Australia, Sept qtr 2025). In September 2025 the Property Council of Australia, an industry body with a direct commercial interest in the target being met but a useful independent counter to government messaging, reported that the government had quietly revised its own annual target down from 80,000 homes to around 60,000 within two years of the Statement's launch, and that actual delivery was still running roughly 20,000 homes a year short of even that lower figure (approx.; Property Council of Australia, media release, Sept-2025).
Two years after promising 80,000 homes a year, the government has quietly revised its own target down to 60,000 — and on the industry's own numbers, is still missing that.
The delivery gap
None of this means the target was dishonest when it was set, or that the shortfall is entirely the government's making. Construction capacity, not political will, is the binding constraint on how fast any government can turn approvals into finished homes. Victoria's building sector was already losing capacity before the ink on the Housing Statement was dry: the collapse of Porter Davis Homes in March 2023 left roughly 1,500 Victorian and Queensland home-builds in limbo (approx.), one of several fixed-price builder insolvencies that followed a sharp rise in materials and labour costs, and the trades most needed to lift completions have sat on national skills-shortage lists throughout the period since. Interest rates that rose sharply through 2022 and 2023 also pushed more apartment-project feasibility studies into the red than in the years the original target implicitly assumed would continue.
What is fairly laid at the government's door is the gap between its own rhetoric and its own reporting. The Housing Statement was launched with a specific, headline number, 800,000 homes, 80,000 a year, used repeatedly in government messaging as the measure of success. Revising that figure down by a quarter within two years, without an equivalent public restatement of the Statement's own headline target on vic.gov.au, makes the target harder for the public to hold the government to, not easier, and it is the government's own portfolio agency that could not produce measurable goals for most of its stated objectives, on the Auditor-General's own finding. A government that sets the number is responsible for reporting against the number, not quietly moving it.
The tower transparency problem
The 44-tower demolition program raises a distinct problem: not one of pace, but of evidence. In November 2023 the Legislative Council ordered the government to produce all documents relating to the decision to demolish rather than refurbish the towers, including any cost-benefit analysis. The government produced only twelve documents and claimed executive privilege over 146 others (Legislative Council, Legal and Social Issues Committee, Inquiry into the Redevelopment of Melbourne's Public Housing Towers). The Committee's final report, tabled in late 2025, found the government had failed to demonstrate on the public record why demolition and rebuilding was chosen over refurbishing the existing towers, and called for construction to be paused until that evidence was released; the government declined to pause the program (Parliament of Victoria, Legal and Social Issues Committee, Inquiry into the Redevelopment of Melbourne's Public Housing Towers, approx. Dec-2025). Demolition of the first sites, including towers in Flemington, North Melbourne and Carlton, is under way regardless, with the Elgin Street towers expected to be fully demolished by mid-2026 (Homes Victoria, approx.).
The steelman case for demolition, that the towers are genuinely expensive to maintain and structurally due for replacement, may well be correct. But correct policy and accountable policy are not the same thing, and a government that withholds the analysis behind a multi-billion-dollar, multi-decade decision affecting 10,000 of the state's poorest residents cannot expect the public, or the tenants being relocated, to simply take its word for it. The displacement is also landing in the worst possible market: Melbourne's rental vacancy rate has sat near historic lows through the same period, meaning tenants moved out of a tower with no fixed return date are being asked to find alternative housing in a system this article has already shown is under-supplying by tens of thousands of homes a year.
The risk to the future
A credibility gap that outlasts any one government
If Victoria keeps missing its own housing target while its population keeps growing at close to the fastest rate in the country, the arithmetic behind rents and prices does not improve on its own, it compounds, the same way it has for two decades before this Statement was written. A target quietly revised down within two years, on an industry body's own reading of the government's numbers, risks becoming a template rather than an exception: each future revision makes the original 2034 goal less credible to the industry partners the government needs to keep building, and less credible to the households counting on it for relief.
The tower program carries a narrower but sharper risk. A demolition-and-rebuild program that stretches over decades, funded in stages, and contested at every step by a parliamentary committee that says it has not seen the underlying evidence, is exactly the kind of project vulnerable to cost blowouts, legal challenge and multi-year delay, during which the promised net gain in social housing does not exist, but the 10,000 residents' displacement already does. If Victoria cannot show its work on why demolition beat refurbishment, it risks losing not just this argument but public trust in the far larger 800,000-home program that depends on the same government's credibility to succeed.