By Pia Andrews and Lisa Benneto

The housing crisis in Australia is neither new nor simple, but at its core it undermines something fundamental: the idea that hard work should lead to security. When housing becomes precarious, everything else becomes more fragile. While digital and data public infrastructure cannot fundamentally solve the housing crisis, it can help remediate the systemic operational, observational and strategic challenges being faced in all levels of government, and provides a means to better coordinate and cooperate on housing policy, programs and outcomes.

Following discussions from a Housing Analytics Roundtable hosted by the Housing Analytics Lab (HAL) in November 2025, UNSW’s City Futures Research Centre commissioned a short research project on the potential value, appetite for, and practicalities of, digital public infrastructure (DPI) to support better housing outcomes in Australia. DPI can best be understood as a set of foundational digital/data systems that form the backbone of a national system that many actors can rely upon. This project involved interviews of 61 individuals from 49 organisations, including 44 Local Governments planning, executive and operational experts (including at least one from every State and Territory in Australia), 5 State Government senior executives, 8 independent or international experts, 3 construction and housing industry representatives, and 2 Federal Government housing and policy experts.

The 2026 Digital Public Infrastructure for Driving National Housing Policy Efficacy and Outcomes report identifies a critical missing capability: Shared DPI to support housing policy, delivery, monitoring and coordination across Australia’s federated system. Australia cannot effectively manage housing supply, affordability and planning reform without shared digital and data infrastructure that connects policy intent with on-the-ground delivery and expertise. This opportunity aligns directly with national housing initiatives such as the National Housing Accord target of 1.2 million homes by 2029.

The challenges

The insights and expertise about the housing crisis from Local Government was striking. The authors conducted research with Local Government planners, executive and operational staff, which highlighted three core challenges limiting housing policy effectiveness across Australia:

• Operational challenges: housing management and delivery relies on multiple disconnected systems across jurisdictions, including planning systems, development pipelines, infrastructure planning, housing programs and regulatory approvals. Local governments in particular operate over 500 different digital environments nationally, creating inconsistent reporting, data formats and planning workflows. This fragmentation makes it difficult to track housing approvals to completions, identify bottlenecks in development pipelines, monitor affordable housing delivery, or coordinate planning reform with infrastructure investment. Operational DPI would provide better tools for planning, managing, optimising and delivering well planned housing that is affordable and supports liveable and vibrant communities.
• Observational challenges: a lack of system-wide observability means Governments lack the ability to see, share, monitor or have a consistent understanding of national housing supply pipelines, occupancy rates, population needs (not just permanent population, but infrastructure needs for transient and remote communities), land availability and zoning capacity, infrastructure readiness for growth areas, and real-time affordability outcomes. Without consistent data, policy responses often rely on lagging indicators rather than predictive insights. Observational DPI would provide real-time visibility of housing supply pipelines, shared data and insights across jurisdictions, and better visibility of transient and under-represented populations for planning.
• Strategic challenges: Australia’s federated governance structure means housing policy requires coordination across Commonwealth funding and policy, State/Territory planning and regulatory systems, Local Government planning and approvals, and private sector development and finance. However, the systems enabling this coordination are institutionally siloed, with a systemic inconsistent understanding of policy settings across jurisdictions, and technologically incompatible strategic systems. Strategic DPI would improve planning and regulatory coordination, providing a common reference implementation of housing policies for shared usage, with evidence-based and test-driven policy interventions, better targeting of affordable housing investment and effective coordination between governments.

Potential DPI for Housing Solutions

The report proposes establishing a number of shared digital capabilities that enable governments, researchers and industry to better observe, monitor, coordinate, plan and deliver national housing outcomes, provided below in order of highest impact and benefit.

1. A Digital Housing Policy Twin: A shared reference implementation of housing legislation, regulation and other rules as code to consume, automate compliance, cooperative modelling, scenario testing and to monitor policy efficacy and impact.
2. Housing DEX: A shared data and analytics commons for relevant data for planning and housing with a shared high value analytics layer available to all contributors.
3. Growth and Economic Modelling Platform: A persistent platform for Local, State/Territory and Federal Governments to do growth and economic modelling.
4. Populations for Planning: A supplement dataset to the Census that represents transient and missing populations for planning, and real-time population movement.
5. BuildMe3D: a public 3D tool for designing building plans that can validate compliance checks pre-submission.
6. A National Liveability Standard: defining a clear national minimum housing liveability standard (with reference implementation), measurement framework and monitoring approach to liveability of new construction.
7. An AI Housing Sandbox: a shared set of AI platforms/ environments to test different AI, and complement solutions with technical guardrails for housing
8. Affordable materials for affordable housing: novel solutions and methods like industrial 3D printing, material recycling, modular builds, cruise ships, etc.
9. DwellingID: a national housing register with unique identifiers for stock, providing a shared and common data spine for analysis and a history of change.
10. Housing Knowledge and Innovation Hub: a website to contribute case studies, reports, solutions or ideas for improving housing outcomes for reuse and visibility.
11. Common State/Territory planning portal(s) for submitting, managing and analysing building applications, trends and patterns of behaviour in real time.
12. A National Infrastructure Register including underground/overground existing and planned infrastructure for improved planning and coordination of housing.

The full report and a short 4-page overview can be accessed via unsw.to/HAL.