Ask a nurse working night shifts at a Perth public hospital how many rental applications she has lodged in the past two months, and it is not unusual to hear a number in the twenties rather than the ones or twos a renter elsewhere might report. Group inspections in Perth's inner and middle suburbs through 2022 and 2023 regularly drew dozens of applicants queued along the footpath, competing for a single two-bedroom unit. Agents describe turning away qualified renters simply because there were too many of them for too few homes, and applicants offering months of rent in advance to jump the queue became common enough to stop making headlines. This is the sharp end of a boom the rest of the country watched with envy: Western Australia's resources sector roared back harder than any other part of the national economy, and Perth could not build homes fast enough to house the people it pulled in.
The numbers behind that queue are as stark as the anecdotes. Perth's rental vacancy rate — the share of listings sitting empty at any one time — fell to roughly 0.6 per cent at its low point in 2023, among the tightest rental markets recorded in any Australian capital in decades (REIWA / SQM Research, 2023, approx.). A vacancy rate under one per cent leaves a renter almost no real choice: whatever comes up, however unsuitable, gets taken within days. Perth's median house price rose by somewhere in the order of 50 to 70 per cent between the depths of the 2020 downturn and 2025 (approx.), turning what had been one of Australia's most affordable big-city property markets into one of its least affordable relative to local wages. None of this was inevitable — it is the collision of a resources boom the state government did not create with a housing shortage it was, at least in part, responsible for closing.
What the government did
Western Australia entered the 2020s with a housing market still recovering from the previous mining downturn, when a decade of falling exploration investment after the 2012-13 peak had left construction activity subdued and prices flat or falling for years. The Cook government inherited both that legacy and a housing strategy first published by its predecessor: the WA Housing Strategy 2020-2030, released by the McGowan government in 2020 and paired with a Social Housing Economic Recovery Package of roughly $319 million to keep the construction industry employed through the pandemic while adding to the public housing stock (WA Department of Communities, 2020, approx.). Roger Cook became Premier in June 2023 and continued and expanded that program rather than replacing it.
Under Cook, the social housing investment grew substantially, funded in large part by the iron ore royalty revenue examined elsewhere on this site: successive Budgets committed several billion dollars cumulatively to building and acquiring several thousand additional social homes, alongside upgrading the existing stock (WA Budget Papers, 2023-24 and 2024-25, approx.). On private supply, the government leaned on land release and planning reform: an Action Plan for Planning Reform, from 2023, set targets to cut assessment timeframes and expanded Development Assessment Panels to take routine approvals out of individual councils' hands (WA Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage, 2023, approx.). It also used tax settings to pull private capital into rental supply — a land tax concession for new build-to-rent developments and a reduced foreign-owner surcharge — aimed at institutional investors who had shown little historical interest in WA. On demand, it extended stamp duty concessions for off-the-plan apartments and kept Keystart, the state's own low-deposit, shared-equity-style home loan scheme, open to a wider band of buyers than the equivalent federal schemes allow.
The strongest case
A boom nobody in Cabinet ordered, met with the largest housing build in the state's history
The government's defence, at its strongest, begins with what it did not cause. Perth's population surge through 2022-2024 rode on the same LNG and iron ore investment cycle covered elsewhere on this site — projects approved and financed federally and by private miners, not by the state Cabinet — plus a wave of interstate arrivals chasing WA's comparatively low unemployment rate, which sat below 4 per cent through most of this period (ABS Labour Force, Western Australia, approx.). A state government cannot switch off a commodity boom, and cooling WA's economy to slow its housing market would have meant deliberately forgoing the jobs and royalty revenue that fund the social housing response described above.
Measured against that inherited pressure, the response has genuine scale. The social housing investment under Cook is, in cumulative dollar terms, among the largest in WA's history, and the government reported reaching some interim delivery targets ahead of schedule (WA Department of Communities progress reporting, approx.). Planning reform, build-to-rent land tax concessions and an expanded Keystart eligibility band are not cosmetic — each addresses a distinct blockage, from approval delays to a thin institutional rental sector to the deposit hurdle facing first-home buyers. And the construction bottleneck examined below is, in real part, a workforce problem: WA's residential trades compete directly with LNG and iron ore projects paying fly-in fly-out wages a metropolitan builder cannot match — a structural feature of the WA economy no state housing policy alone resolves quickly.
The evidence
The scale of WA's population surge is not contested. ABS data show Western Australia recorded the fastest population growth of any state in 2023, expanding by roughly 3.3 per cent over the year — nearly double the national average — driven by strong net overseas migration and the largest net interstate migration gain of any state, as workers moved from the eastern states chasing resources-sector jobs and lower unemployment (ABS National, State and Territory Population, 2023, approx.). Perth absorbed most of that growth, adding somewhere in the order of 50,000 to 60,000 people a year through the peak of the cycle (approx.).
Housing supply did not move at anything like that pace. ABS Building Activity data for WA show annual dwelling completions running at roughly 17,000 to 20,000 homes a year through the early-to-mid 2020s, only modestly above levels recorded during the state's previous, much slower-growing decade (approx.). At an average household size of about 2.5 people (ABS Census 2021, approx.), a population gain of 55,000 implies underlying demand for roughly 22,000 additional dwellings a year from growth alone — before ageing-stock replacement, short-term-rental conversions, or new households forming among people already in Perth. Completions at the lower end of the range did not clear even that narrower estimate in several years measured.
The price and rental data show the result of that gap. REIWA and Landgate settlement records put Perth's median house price at roughly $520,000 at the end of 2020; by 2025 that figure had risen to somewhere near $780,000 to $800,000 (approx.) — a cumulative rise of roughly 50 to 70 per cent in under five years, among the fastest of any Australian capital over that window (REIWA Market Update; CoreLogic Home Value Index, approx.). Rents moved the same way: REIWA's median rent series shows Perth weekly rents rising by double-digit percentages in successive years through 2022 and 2023, among the steepest annual increases recorded in any capital city over that period (approx.).
The waitlist for social housing is the clearest sign supply has not kept pace with need at the bottom of the market. The Department of Communities' own published figures show more than 20,000 applicants waiting for public and community housing in WA by 2024, up from a considerably smaller base only a few years earlier, despite the record social housing investment described above (WA Department of Communities, Housing Register data, 2024, approx.). Average waiting times for a priority listing stretched to roughly a year or more in the metropolitan area (approx.), and considerably longer for a standard listing — examined in full in this site's dedicated coverage of WA homelessness and social housing.
The construction bottleneck
Even where money, land and approvals were not the constraint, the physical capacity to build homes was. Western Australia's construction workforce is small relative to the state's landmass and thinly spread across a residential sector competing for the same tradespeople as the largest resource construction projects in the country — LNG expansions on the Burrup Peninsula and iron ore replacement mines in the Pilbara among them. Fly-in fly-out wages on those projects routinely exceed what a residential builder can pay a qualified carpenter, electrician or plumber in metropolitan Perth, and the pull is strongest exactly when both sectors are hiring at once — precisely the period this article covers (Master Builders WA; Housing Industry Association, approx.).
The residential building industry's own financial stress compounded the labour shortage. A wave of fixed-price contracts signed before 2022, when material costs and trade wages then rose sharply, left several WA builders unable to complete contracts at a profit; a number entered administration through 2022 and 2023, echoing a pattern seen in other states (ASIC insolvency statistics; Master Builders WA, approx.). Every failed builder leaves half-finished homes and displaced apprentices behind, slowing the pipeline for months even after a replacement builder is found.
A vacancy rate under one per cent means whatever comes up, however unsuitable, gets taken within days.
Government data on approvals versus completions makes the bottleneck visible. Dwelling approvals in WA rose noticeably faster than completions through this period, meaning a growing number of approved projects sat in a queue for finance, materials or labour rather than reaching a certificate of occupancy (ABS Building Activity, Western Australia, approx.) — evidence that land release and planning speed, the levers the government leaned on hardest, were not the binding constraint for much of the cycle. Some of the government's own social housing targets were affected by the same bottleneck, with delays and cost increases attributable to the trade shortages and materials costs affecting the private market too (WA Auditor-General; Department of Communities, approx.).
The critique
Separate what the Cook government inherited from what it chose, and the fairness this site applies cuts in both directions. The resources boom, the pandemic-era migration collapse and rebound, and a decade-old shortfall in trades apprenticeships predating this government are fairly described as inherited pressures no minister created. Harder to describe as mere inheritance is the pace of the response relative to the demand it was watching build in real time. WA Treasury's own forecasts through 2022 and 2023 tracked the migration surge as it happened (WA Budget Papers, Economic and Fiscal Outlook, approx.); a government running a Budget in structural surplus, driven by the royalty windfall this site covers elsewhere, had more fiscal room than most states to move earlier and harder on supply, and instead expanded the social housing program in stages rather than front-loading it against a population shock that was already visible.
The construction-workforce problem is not simply bad luck the government happened to encounter. The same resources projects driving population growth into Perth were also drawing tradespeople away from home-building, and it is the state government that approves, and in some cases supports through infrastructure spending, those same resource projects. A government managing both sides of that trade-off — welcoming investment that draws workers north and west, while needing those workers' labour to build the homes that investment's own workforce needs — bears some responsibility for not building a residential-trades training pipeline sized to both demands at once.
The social-housing waitlist growing even as the government's own investment grew is the clearest number against its account. A housing program can genuinely be the largest in the state's history and still fall behind if demand grows faster — and on the waitlist figures available, that is what happened. Land release and planning-approval speed, the levers the government leaned on hardest and most visibly, addressed a real but, on the approvals-versus-completions data, not the binding constraint; the construction-capacity bottleneck received comparatively less direct intervention — no equivalent large-scale, publicly funded apprenticeship or trade-migration push for residential building — even though it was the more persistent obstacle through the cycle's second half.
The risk to the future
A resources state that cannot house the workers its own boom needs
If Perth's rents and prices keep rising faster than incomes, the risk is not confined to renters priced out of the inner suburbs. Nurses, teachers, police officers and aged-care workers — the essential workforce the state itself employs and regulates — increasingly cannot afford to live near the jobs the government needs filled, a pressure already visible in recruitment and retention data for the health and education systems examined elsewhere on this site. A resources economy that cannot house its own essential workforce risks importing the fly-in fly-out model built for remote mine sites into the state capital itself, hollowing out the live-nearby workforce a functioning city depends on.
The fiscal cushion behind the government's housing response is also cyclical, not permanent. Iron ore royalties funding much of the social housing build are tied to a commodity price the state does not control; a sustained price fall would tighten the same Budget paying for social housing delivery, precisely when the waitlist this article documents would need it most. Unless WA lifts residential construction capacity — trades, not just land and approvals — independently of the resources cycle's own demand for the same workers, the state risks a housing shortfall that outlasts the boom that caused it.