Housing Cartels: The Legal Drug Lords of Australian Land

By The Fair Go Movement | July 2025

“We cracked down on outlaw bikie cartels—but handed the keys of our suburbs to legal land cartels in suits.”

Take a drive through the outer suburbs of any Australian city and you’ll see it: vacant paddocks wrapped in glossy real estate signage, roads to nowhere, infrastructure half-finished. Why? Because the land is owned—but not released. It’s being sat on, drip-fed to the market at a pace that maximises profit, not meets demand.

This is not a bug in the system. It is the system. A small number of developers and landowners control most of the land zoned for housing in this country. They decide when it gets released, how much it costs, and who can access it. And they do it legally—with the blessing of local councils, state governments, and a passive federal apparatus.

Land Banking 101: How the Game is Played

Land is bought cheaply when it’s unzoned. Once rezoned by government (often after lobbying), its value skyrockets overnight. But instead of being immediately developed to ease housing supply, it’s stockpiled—often for years—while prices surge. This tactic:

• Reduces competition by hoarding developable land
• Artificially inflates land prices due to "shortages"
• Maximises profit margins for large property players
• Prices out first home buyers and young families

Meanwhile, governments keep spending on new infrastructure to reach these parcels, creating a feedback loop of publicly funded private enrichment.

We’ve Legalised a Housing Cartel

If this was any other essential good—food, fuel, medicine—there’d be royal commissions and prosecutions. But in housing, we’ve allowed the very market gatekeepers to write the rules.

They fund political parties. They sit on planning boards. They advertise in newspapers and sponsor government-backed housing forums. And they get away with it—because the system enables them to.

A Fair Go Housing Fix

The Fair Go Movement proposes real reforms to break the cartel grip and restore home ownership as a right, not a luxury:

1. Anti-Hoarding Penalties: Tax or reclaim land left idle post-rezoning
2. Transparent Land Registers: Publicly track who owns developable land and when it’s released
3. Government-Led Developments: Use public land and not-for-profit builders to flood the market with affordable lots
4. Planning System Overhaul: End developer lobbying and require mandatory housing quotas on rezoned land

It’s time to treat land like the national asset it is—not a speculative poker chip. Because without land justice, there can be no housing justice.

Published by The Fair Go Movement. All rights reserved.