The National Growth Areas Alliance provided a supplementary submission to the Inquiry into Local Government Funding and Fiscal Sustainability.
This submission addresses a major policy shift since 2024: the rollout of the National Housing Accord, which has clarified the national reliance on Growth Areas for housing supply and therefore has intensified fiscal sustainability pressures on Growth Area councils.
The Housing Accord has functioned as a stress test of funding adequacy. It has made explicit that national housing outcomes depend on councils that must fund and sequence enabling infrastructure and community facilities, while operating with revenue tools that are not calibrated to sustained high growth.
