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Melbourne’s sprawling fringe housing estates are growing faster now than in 2014 when a just-elected Andrews government was urged to do major planning reform to house a burgeoning population in established suburbs.
“To meet population growth pressures, outer suburbs need better access to jobs and services, and inner suburbs need more housing,” senior officials told the nascent Labor administration in confidential cabinet briefs obtained by this masthead, dated December 2014.
More than eleven years later, the Allan government is falling well short of its target of 70 per cent of new housing in existing neighbourhoods, with ABS figures revealing that just half of home building approvals have been in inner and middle areas since Labor’s landmark housing statement in 2023.
While Victoria is currently delivering more new homes than any state or territory, they are not where the government wants, or can afford, them to be.
Through a rarely used provision of the Freedom of Information Act, The Age has obtained 800 pages of cabinet briefs and submissions from the weeks after Labor’s upset election victory in November in 2014.
They capture the behind-the-scenes deliberations of the young administration and the high-level, confidential advice it received in its first days in office.
The documents are prescient given the current housing crisis and widening political focus on population growth and immigration. Under the cover of cabinet confidentiality, the senior bureaucrats acknowledge the economic and social benefits of population growth but are forthright about their concerns.
“The population of the state is growing at 110,000 people per year, placing significant pressure on both services and infrastructure,” says then public service head Andrew Tongue, in a personal brief to Premier-elect Daniel Andrews.
In the government-wide brief to the incoming government known as the “red book”, senior officials repeatedly highlight population pressure on housing supply and location, health, schools and transport, “as well as land use in peri-urban areas and the environment”.
Labor finally made a priority of planning and housing in 2023 with its controversial housing statement centred on relaxing planning controls and fast-tracking approvals to boost infill development.
But the proportion of new housing in established neighbourhoods was higher in the years 2014 to 2023 (56 percent) than in the two years to December 2025 (50 percent).
Leading property researcher with Quantify Strategic Insights, Angie Zigomanis, said Victoria’s housing delivery was moving in the “opposite direction” to that intended by the government and “remains concentrated in growth areas, where land is abundant, infrastructure is pre-planned, and delivery systems operate predictably”.
He said infill housing was “constrained by fragmented land ownership, rising construction and land costs, complex design standards, and outdated infrastructure networks”.
The 2014 documents included a forecast that more than 1.6 million new dwellings would be needed across the metropolitan region by 2051, or just over 43,000 homes a year.
Eleven years later, the government’s 2025 Plan for Victoria updated the figure to more than 1.78 million dwellings for greater Melbourne, more than 65,000 a year.
While Andrews’ 2023 housing statement included a target of 800,000 new homes across the state over the ensuing decade, housing starts have fallen well short of the ten-year target.
Senior bureaucrats in 2014 called for an “update” of the planning system to facilitate more and more diverse housing, greater density in established suburbs, better use of surplus government land for housing, and for more “social and affordable housing in urban renewal areas”.
They remind Labor of its “commitment” to pilot inclusionary zoning – a policy requiring developers to include a proportion of social or affordable housing as a condition of approval of larger housing projects – on surplus government sites.
However, not a single dwelling had been delivered through the government’s inclusionary zoning pilot by the time Andrews launched the housing statement amid a housing crisis in 2023.
In response to questions from The Age, a government spokesperson said: “From delivering more homes near trains and trams to fast-tracking townhouses and mid-rise apartments, investing billions in social housing and unlocking land in our growth areas – we have constantly looked at ways we can boost housing supply”.
The 2014 briefings also implicitly criticise the outgoing Baillieu-Napthine Coalition government for its focus on protecting Melbourne’s established suburbs from housing development, pushing growth into the urban fringe.
Premier Jacinta Allan has slammed current Coalition leader Jess Wilson’s planning policies for doing the same.
“While we’re cutting red tape to deliver more homes right across the state, Jess Wilson’s Liberals are choosing to block housing and lock young Victorians out.”
The government also highlighted that Labor was delivering what it says is the biggest pipeline of infrastructure in the state’s history to help plan for growth over the long term.
Planning Institute Victorian president Pat Fensham said the Andrews-Allan government had been “tardy” in making planning and housing a priority.
“Melbourne has long been like a factory for greenfield housing,” Fensham said. “That has helped keep housing prices down but at considerable cost in terms of infrastructure and for communities a long way from jobs and services.”
He said that while the state had a plan to direct more housing to established suburbs, “the necessary coordination and implementation arrangements across government were not taken sufficiently seriously, nor prioritised”.
“Had the implementation of the plan been more of a priority we would have been better placed to deal with the housing crisis we now face,” he said.
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