Australia’s construction industry is facing a perfect storm: enormous targets for building – 1.2 million new homes and A$230 billion worth of infrastructure over the next five years – at the same time as net migration is forecast to halve.

Without as many migrants, Australia might not have the workforce it needs to meet these targets.

Unless it does something different. Our team at the University of Technology Sydney has been examining the barriers to employing existing migrants in the construction industry, and we find they are substantial.

Migrants who arrived in Australia in the past five years account for only 2.8% of Australia’s construction workforce, but 4.4% of the entire Australian workforce.

Migrant engineers are significantly more likely than Australian-born engineers to be unemployed or underemployed – working at a more junior level than their skills and experience warrant.

Women face extra barriers

Women skilled in the trades needed face special barriers. This might be expected from an industry in which (in New South Wales at least) around half the employers have a workforce that is nearly all male and one-third employ no women at all.

Our survey of 70 Australian subcontractors found they saw significant safety, productivity and cost risks in employing migrants and refugees and groups including disengaged youth, people with a disability, ex-offenders, women and Indigenous workers.

In many cases, these perceived risks did not align with actual risks.

Our online survey of 79 refugees and migrants who had sought work in construction found that the less experience a refugee or migrant had working in construction overseas, the more likely it was they would secure a full-time job.

Education can hurt foreign jobseekers

Education counted against them as well. High school, undergraduate and masters educated migrants and refugees were more successful in securing full-time permanent work then those with doctorates and technical education.

Employers were often unwilling to recognise their qualifications and experience.

Our in-depth interviews with 16 skilled female migrants who had sought work in the NSW construction industry found their initial hopes of finding work easily and quickly turned to frustration and an acknowledgement that their qualifications and experience were not as transferable as they had thought.

Most described struggling to get shortlisted for an interview, even when they felt their skills and experience closely matched those needed.

Many complained that the formal, online, and impersonal nature of the initial shortlisting process automatically excluded them from securing interviews.

In the rare events they did secure face-to-face interviews, many complained many employers used the so-called STAR method (“situation, task, action, and result”) that required them to tell stories about situations they hadn’t been in.

All found their interviews very stressful, impersonal and intimidating.

You shouldn’t need a relative to get a job

Among the challenges facing female migrants with the skills needed by the construction industry were sexism, racism and traditional cultural expectations about their role in society.

Many felt frustrated, abandoned and under-valued after arriving in Australia. This was despite being willing to accept jobs well below their expectations, previous roles, experience and qualifications.

Those fortunate to have family and friends in the construction industry relied heavily on them to find their first jobs. However, these jobs tended to be low level, with limited career opportunities and exposure to exploitation by unscrupulous employers, labor hire companies and job agencies.

Treating foreign-born construction industry workers as well as we treat Australian-born workers and tackling the special barriers that apply to foreign-born women, ought to be an easy way to boost our construction workforce.

We have identified some of the things holding the industry back. The next step is to examine why.

The Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union (CFMEU) is in crisis. Amid the headlines and allegations of stand over tactics, thuggery and kickbacks, the construction division of the union has been placed in administration.

The peak body for unions, the Australian Council of Trade Unions, has also resolved to suspend the construction arm of the CFMEU.

Some have welcomed the union’s overhaul, and the resignation of Victorian Branch Secretary John Setka, as a good thing for women in the sector.

But in an industry notorious for its blokey culture, administrators are unlikely to be able to get big improvements for women in construction. Gender discrimination is baked into the sector’s practices and norms. It is perpetuated by a culture of denial and resistance from business, government and unions.

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Women sent packing

The construction sector is a valuable economic sector in the Australian economy and is highly political. It is also the most male-dominated employment sector in the country.

The drivers behind gender inequality in construction are multifaceted and structural. How we work in construction, what stories are told, and what behaviours are valued and revered all work to maintain gender inequality. It’s the product of a historical gender legacy.

Take work practices, for example. Construction contractors are incentivised by their public and private sector clients to deliver projects quickly. As a result, construction workers are financially incentivised to work long work hours, often over a six- or seven-day work week. On average, tradespeople and construction workers work more than 60 hours per week, exceeding the national employment standards of 38 hours per week and International Labour Organisation recommended maximum threshold of 48 hours per week.

On top of the work hours on site, my research finds workers travel long distances, in some cases three hours a day, to get to construction sites. Workers who adhere to these practices are valued. This is despite abundant evidence that these work practices harm men’s health. Construction workers experience higher-than-average levels of suicide and report poor physical and mental health and greater substance abuse.

For women, who undertake the bulk of society’s care work, fitting in care responsibilities with construction’s existing work practices is almost impossible. It sends women packing. It was one of the reasons I left the sector 12 years ago. I worked as a construction project manager for almost two decades in Australia and the Middle East.

In terms of behaviour, it’s not unusual to see aggressive behaviour on site, where swearing is the norm and punctuates sentences. When I shadowed construction workers for my research, I experienced this behaviour and pushback first-hand, not from CFMEU representatives, but from construction professions (such as project managers and supervisors).

Industrial Relations Minister Tony Burke stopped short of putting the union into administration himself. Mick Tsikas/AAP

When I politely asked to interview him, one manager raised his fist and screamed “what the fuck” at me across the open-plan office. I found in our research, he wasn’t the only man or group of men to make me feel like a stranger spoiling a good time.

When my male colleague, with whom I conducted the research, and I compared notes, we were treated differently. He was made to feel like one of the boys. He was given a nickname and men swore freely in front of him without filter. He wasn’t subjected to any pushback.

Yet both of us were exposed to the sexualisation of women. This included sexualised commentary, sexist and pornographic graffiti. Our 2018 research found a widespread tolerance of sexism and sexist behaviour in construction. The Australian Human Rights Commission’s Respect@Work report also found there is a high prevalence of sexual harassment and discrimination towards women in both trade and professional roles.

Yet despite this, the sector has moved at a glacial pace to prevent and respond to sexual harassment on construction sites.

A bigger problem than the CFMEU

There is much work to do in making the construction sector a safer and more inclusive place for all workers. For example, it’s essential that government and construction clients recognise how they procure and build projects has unintended consequences on gender equality and worker wellbeing in construction.

The construction sector needs to move to a five-day working week. Research found it resulted in better wellbeing for workers and their families.

Working conditions in the construction industry don’t offer women enough support. Shutterstock

Sounds like a simple suggestion, but there remains resistance from business groups, government and trade unions including the CFMEU. The sector needs to adopt and enforce the evidence-based Culture Standard that is focused on improving diversity, wellbeing and time for life.

There also needs to be a greater focus by the trade unions, business and government on the needs of women in construction, especially those working within small to medium size companies.

For example, moves to support tradespeople and construction workers – men and women – taking parental leave, are important. A 2024 Victorian CFMEU survey found more than 70% of members supported parental leave allowances and levies. The sector should consider a “long-service leave” type levy that supports workers on parental leave.

However, these provisions must be extended to tradeswomen navigating pregnancy too. Construction work during a time when the body is undergoing dramatic change requires more support.

For too long the trade union and business groups have shaped policy and practice around the perceived needs of their members, who are, for the most part, men. To shift gender equality in construction and make it a place where parents will encourage their daughters to pursue a career, and where women want to work and will thrive, we must focus on the needs of a future workforce: women.

Have we reached peak affordable-housing-debate in Australia? Or is it a case of that old mountaineering saying: the fog is thickest just before the summit?

As someone who has been involved in building innovation for the past decade, what strikes me about the current debate is not its height, but its flatness. By this I mean how something as complex as housing can be reduced to one or two issues of the moment. Is the key to ending our housing woes really just “supply”? And will the Albanese government’s new $A10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF) solve that problem?

Yes, this flatness is inherent to politics, but if we don’t attempt to unflatten the problem we’ll be stuck in the very public game of housing affordability “Whac-A-Mole” for quite some time. It goes something like this: release more land … ease planning restrictions … end NIMBY-ism … rent freeze … build-to-rent … early access to super … negative gearing … prefab housing … developer greed … skills shortage … gentrification … supply-chain disruption … inclusionary zoning … capital gains tax reform … industrial action … and so on and so forth.

So much froth for so little beer. So how do we build the industry’s productivity and capacity? The answer is the same as it has been in every other sector: the building industry desperately needs to innovate.

But what about the new housing fund?

The federal government says its new fund will provide A$500 million a year to build much-needed social housing. The opposition says this will fuel inflation. The Greens are demanding more direct funding of housing (at first $5 billion a year, now reduced to $2.5 billion) and a rent freeze.

Is the new fund inflationary? Yes and no.

Unless the bill is coupled with measures that increase the industry’s productivity and capacity, it will be inflationary. The industry lacks the capacity to build as many dwellings as the market needs, or the extra 30,000 social and affordable homes the government says the fund will deliver in the first five years. Remember, property prices are just off an all-time high, with construction costs up by more than 50% over the past decade.

To meet our housing targets, we need to find new ways of building more with less.

Supply is only one piece of the puzzle

The problem with seeing housing provision solely as a matter of “supply” (read “funding”) is that this accounts for only one phase of the process. It takes more than dollars to deliver a building. We must address all the phases: development, design, construction, operation and, after all that, end of life.

If we don’t do that, we won’t solve the root problems. And we risk missing opportunities ripe for innovation.

Let’s consider some innovative ideas for each of the building phases.

Development

New business and ownership models are needed. These include:

• housing-as-a-service (HaaS) – the space between short-term rental and long-term hotels, which suits mobile or itinerant populations and which AirBnB is increasingly exploiting

• co-housing – residents band together to develop housing themselves or with help from an agent, such as Nightingale or others

• build-to-rent – instead of building to sell to residents or investors, housing is retained for the purpose of renting it out, with recent federal tax changes supporting this approach

• rent-to-buy – residents have the right to buy (progressively or outright) their rental housing

• shared equity schemes – a way for buyers to own a more “affordable” fraction of the home and get a foot in the door.

Co-housing developments are increasingly common.

These alternative approaches will change the calculus of property development. Let’s not aim to centralise housing development. Rather, we should crowd-source it to as many organisations as possible.

A final area for innovation in the development phase is planning. We can use digital tools to make the planning system more transparent and efficient.

Design

Make houses more efficient. Australian houses are among the world’s largest even though households are shrinking. As the Swedish saying goes: “The cheapest square metre is the square metre you don’t build!”

Make houses more flexible and diverse. Housing could then accommodate different uses, such as home offices or sublettable units, and various family structures and sizes, including extended families.

Building the world’s largest houses strains construction capacity and adds to housing costs. Author provided

Construction

Develop new building systems and supply chains. We need faster, cheaper and higher-quality ways of building.

Modular housing – made here in Lindbäcks’ Factory in Luleå, Sweden – can cut construction times and costs. Mathew Aitchison, Author provided

In contrast to building on site from the ground up, prefabricated, modular or industrialised house-building happens in factories. These approaches could increase capacity, on top of traditional approaches.

More people, more people, more people: the industry needs a new generation with different skill sets.

Up entering Swedish and German house-building factories, it is clear these are more inclusive workplaces. A key benefit of industrialised building is it promotes greater workforce participation. These are the diverse and high-skill jobs of the future.

Operation

Improve building performance through better development, design and operation of housing. Occupants won’t be left with unaffordable “utility timebombs” with high running costs.

Make houses more durable and easy to maintain. Well-designed and well-built housing can be used for decades past current buildings’ “use-by” dates. Longer-lived buildings will help to plug the holes in the leaky bucket of housing provision.

End of life

An increased focus on decarbonisation and sustainable use of resources will enable new approaches to reusing and recycling building materials.

Re-using existing and obsolete buildings for new housing – adaptive re-use – is another way to provide more housing.

Where to from here?

Innovations like these could be applied tomorrow to help us do more with less.

A final challenge to government: as we prepare to spend billions on building housing across the country, is it too outlandish to imagine we could invest a mere 1% of those vast sums in innovation programs? Innovation can deliver the increases in building productivity and capacity that Australia so badly needs.

The Australian construction industry has long been facing a crisis of serious defects in apartment buildings. In the past, alarming incidents such as the Sydney Opal Tower evacuation and the Melbourne Lacrosse fire signaled systemic problems in construction.

The same problem persists today. One recent report shows serious defects in apartment buildings in New South Wales have more than doubled between 2021 and 2023.

As the Albanese government fast-tracks its five-year plan to build 1.2 million dwellings, this number will likely worsen.

We’ve researched the pressures the construction industry feels and how that can result in unsafe apartments, and what can be done to make housing like this better for everyone.

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Why are we in this situation?

Serious defects endanger lives, cost building and insurance firms millions of dollars, and put pressure on regulators. Typical responses involve increased regulation, but the lack of change in apartment quality shows increased regulation is not enough. Behavioral and cultural changes are needed.

We found the poor quality of apartment buildings is often the result of deeply entrenched patterns of unprofessional behavior across the industry. These often arise as professionals face pressures to cut costs in an industry notorious for its low profit margin.

We also found this pressure is exacerbated by aggressive competition, work overload, exploitation and a toxic culture.

As pressures mount, professionals’ decision-making becomes increasingly fraught. For example, many professionals we interviewed largely believe they must choose between profit and quality.

There are no simple answers to this age-old conundrum. However, our study shows a way forward.

What did we find?

Our three-year study funded by the Australian Research Council is the first in Australia to extensively investigate 12 building professions struggling to navigate and resolve this perceived dilemma.

Teams from four Australian universities conducted desktop reviews, analysed professional codes of conduct, interviewed 53 professionals and conducted six focus group discussions. After two years of analysis and model development, we published our industry technical report and presented our findings to practitioners in NSW and Queensland.

We have empirical evidence that shows profitability and quality do not have to be mutually exclusive. We have uncovered powerful, innovative but ad hoc strategies showing businesses can reconcile both.

One builder we profiled, a multinational company and a market leader in apartment construction, took a pioneering approach to this dilemma.

For many years, the company’s strategy was to build as quickly and cheaply as possible to save money. However, these savings were ultimately lost because they found they had “[…] made some money at the time, but we basically spent it all fixing things that we didn’t build that well”.

The company re-examined its business model and developed a new strategy that reconciled profitability, quality and professional behaviours.

The company analysed where the majority of their defects arose from and there were five key areas including:

• balcony waterproofing

• shower construction and waterproofing

• fire wall installations

• penetrations through fire walls

• brick masonry construction.

They then built prototypes of high quality construction for each of these typical building elements. They found their prototypes addressed defects while also integrating different technical standards.

The company then informed their clients, subcontractors and suppliers that “this is how we will build from now on”. Over time, it became apparent their strategy supported skills training while also improving long-term financial sustainability.

These prototypes are now showcased at a centre in NSW. Subcontractors, architects, engineers, designers, professional associations and other supply-chain actors regularly visit.

The company now conducts training for quality based on these prototypes and reports that since the establishment of this strategy, defects have been reduced by 85%.

Our empirical evidence shows these strategies drive quality and long-term financial sustainability.

Safer homes nationwide

This strategy does not have to be limited to a few large companies.

In our report, we provide a plan to ensure safer, more financially sustainable building practices can be rolled out across the industry. It relies on collaboration across sectors.

Best-practice companies in each state, like the one in NSW, would come under a national umbrella. Commonwealth and state governments would initiate the effort by identifying the best examples in different states. Together, they could focus on design, construction quality and on innovative materials, standards and ways to build safely and cost-effectively.

With positive role models to follow, other companies can improve. This would instil a mindset and culture of leadership, accountability and responsibility across the sector. More coherent standards would be embedded across the industry would ensure workers at all levels are no longer siloed.

Education and training organisations would progressively incorporate these new standards. Over time, the workforce would rebuild knowledge and skills that are perceived to have largely disappeared.

It’s important to ensure clients help drive this too. By mandating or incentivising companies with safer supply chains, there’s a commercial imperative to do better.

Professional associations also have a role to play. They can support these efforts further by creating resources and advocating for best practice.

Making apartments safer requires a shift in the thinking of the entire construction industry. There are inventive ways to align quality with profitability. We must challenge the assumption that they are always irreconcilable.