August 13th, 2026

The Cheapest Housing Reform Is the One We Already Have

Example of a home with an accessible path and step free entry threshold.

Andrew Bragg's National Press Club pitch to cut the National Construction Code from over 2,000 pages to roughly 80 has landed with the usual applause line: red tape is why houses cost so much, so cut the red tape and houses get cheaper. He named his targets specifically. Ramps, hobless shower flooring and reinforced bathroom walls would become “optional extras” under his Basic Australian Standard. Everything else, in his words, is what makes it “illegal to build a cheap house in Australia.”

For close to three decades, first as a clinician and now as an access consultant, I've been assessing buildings against exactly these provisions, so I want to be precise about what's actually being proposed to disappear. It isn't red tape. It's the Livable Housing Design Standard, the silver-level minimum that came into the NCC in 2022 after more than a decade of advocacy, industry consultation and a formal regulatory impact process, and the case for it was never weak, it's simply been forgotten in a housing affordability debate that's currently allergic to nuance.











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​Examining the 1 per cent build cost figure
Money is the entire premise of Bragg's speech, so it's worth starting there. The Commonwealth's own decision Regulation Impact Statement for the 2022 changes put the cost of building these features in at around 1 per cent of total build cost, already a modest figure, and one that starts to look inflated once you look at it item by item.

A path to the front door is required in every house regardless of what the code specifies, generally without handrails or kerb rails as you'd see in other building classes. NCC Volume Two's H8D2(2) already exempts the compliant 1:14 gradient where the site itself is steeper than that, so the clause is setting a maximum grade on a path that was always going to be built, not introducing a new element to the house. Where the site is genuinely too steep, the requirement falls away entirely.

A wider door. The Standard calls for an 820mm clear opening, which in practice means specifying an 870mm leaf rather than an 820mm one. Both sit in every door manufacturer's standard range, and both get delivered, hung and painted by the same trades on the same day. The difference in cost is a negligible one, in the tens of dollars. Whatever marginal cost sits with the wider door leaf is then also offset by not having to frame and line more wall around a narrower opening.

A step-free threshold. It's genuinely unclear this is even a net cost, since removing a step and a raised sill can be simpler to detail than building one. The only real addition, a channel drain where the threshold meets hard paving, is a trade item builders already price on plenty of jobs with no accessibility requirement at all. Flush sliding and bi-fold doors onto a patio or alfresco area, a mainstay of project home design for well over a decade, have used the same drainage detail all along, driven by indoor-outdoor living trends rather than any accessibility standard, and a covered, level landing at an entry door isn't a 2022 invention either, builders have kept water off entry doors for as long as we've built houses with doors.

Similarly, you don't see many prefab hobs installed any more. Hobless showers have become the standard, a shift driven by wet-room aesthetics well before it was introduced as a compliance measure. In practice, it has been rare in a new home, or even a renovation, for there not to be at least one hobless shower already provided somewhere in the home, which is all the standard actually requires.

A 1000mm corridor. The Standard's clear-width requirement for hallways and passageways is 1000mm, which isn't a novel imposition on the industry so much as a codification of what competent designers were already drawing. In close to two decades assessing new housing, I can't recall a mainstream new project home with a ground-floor corridor under 1000mm wide.

Wall reinforcement. This is a minimum 12mm structural-grade plywood, or 25mm timber noggings, fixed into a stud cavity that's already open during first fix, and generally built substantially from offcuts. Calling this a driver of housing costs doesn't survive contact with a building site.

Taken together, the honest picture isn't that the Standard adds 1 per cent to a build, it's that a meaningful share of what it requires was already standard, or near-standard, practice in a competently built home, with the marginal cost of formalising it close to negligible. If anything, the current Silver-level provisions are less generous and less flexible than good practice already called for, not the gold-plating Bragg describes.

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The $20,000 retrofit figure doesn't reflect the real cost
The other half of Bragg's case, that removing the mandate protects buyers from unnecessary cost, only works if the alternative is genuinely cheap, and it isn't. The government's own regulatory impact modelling put the average retrofit cost at roughly $20,000, a figure that, in my experience assessing these jobs, is optimistic to the point of being almost decorative.

A realistic retrofit scope involves widening something like ten internal doorways and entry, potentially widening a hallway (which usually means relocating framed walls and services, and sometimes structural walls), and reconfiguring a bathroom to take a step-free shower recess and proper circulation space around the pan. That's a full trade sequence of demolition, replumbing, retiling, new joinery, new doors and frames, and project management, and on a typical suburban home the scope realistically runs well into six figures, closer to $120,000 than $20,000. Twenty thousand dollars might cover a few widened doorways and a set of grab rails, provided there are noggings to fix them to, but it doesn't cover retrofitting a home that was never designed to be adaptable in the first place.

That gap is the actual trade-off Bragg is proposing, saving close to nothing on the build while shifting a six-figure liability onto whoever lives in the house once their needs change, at the exact moment they're least able to absorb it.


None of this is advanced building science
The broader point worth making is that none of these items represents technical difficulty. A level threshold is a detailing decision made before the slab is poured, a hobless shower recess is a waterproofing detail well within standard trade capability, and wall reinforcement is generally some timber offcuts. None of it requires new trades, new materials, or design capability the industry doesn't already use daily, which makes this closer to the standard version of building a house in 2026 than a bespoke accessible variant of it.

Framing these items as gold-plating, alongside a genuinely oversized 2,000-page code, is a category error, and one that tends to persuade precisely because most people never have to think about how their bathroom is built until they can't get into it.


What the housing debate keeps skipping
What gets lost when this becomes a page-count argument is that disability isn't only something that happens to someone else, later. Plenty of people are living with it now, including many born with it, and struggling against housing stock that was never built for them, while for most of the rest of us it's a trajectory we'll eventually pass through, usually via age, often via a health event that arrives without warning. The Livable Housing Design Standard was never really about a minority of homes for a minority of people, it was about building ordinary housing that doesn't fail the person living in it, whether that person needed it from day one or only came to need it later.

That has direct consequences for several things governments claim to care about, and some things that matter regardless of what governments claim:

Staying in place. A step-free entry and a usable bathroom can often be the difference between someone ageing in their own home and being forced into residential aged care, at enormous cost to both them and the system, years earlier than necessary.

Housing security. People with disability already face one of the thinnest slices of the rental and purchase market, because so little existing stock is genuinely usable, and modifying an unsuitable property is a six-figure undertaking most households simply can't fund. Stripping accessibility out of new supply shrinks that already-thin slice further, at exactly the point governments are trying to grow overall supply.

Long-term public cost. Every dollar spent avoiding a six-figure retrofit is also a dollar not spent on hospital bed-block from a discharge with nowhere accessible to go, on premature aged care admission, or on the home modification funding that public and NDIS budgets ultimately absorb anyway. Cutting the Standard doesn't remove that cost, it simply moves it onto a different ledger and hands the much larger bill to someone with fewer options.

Discrimination by design. Building a home that can't be entered, used or adapted for someone with a disability isn't a neutral omission, it's exclusion built into the housing stock at the one point it would have cost almost nothing to avoid. It also strips away something more basic, the ability to move through your own home without needing someone else's help or permission.

Social isolation. A home that can't be entered by a wheelchair or walking aid user, or even a parent with a pram, doesn't just exclude the person who lives there, it excludes everyone who might visit them, and it excludes them from visiting everyone else in turn. Inaccessible housing stock quietly narrows the social network of people with disability from both directions at once.


What actually needs cutting
​I'm not defending a 2,000-page code as some untouchable artefact, there's real room to simplify the NCC, and plenty of practitioners in this industry would say so. But the test for what gets cut should be whether it adds cost without adding outcome, not whether it's easy to hold up in a speech as evidence of overreach, and ramps, hobless showers and wall reinforcement fail that test badly. They cost almost nothing to include and an enormous amount to omit, just not to the person signing off on the code.

If the Coalition wants to make housing genuinely cheaper to build, there's no shortage of actual candidates. This isn't one of them.


​George Xinos is the Principal Accessibility Consultant at Functional Access Solutions.


SBS News, “Opposition to promise migration cuts as frontbencher refuses to confirm figure,” reporting Senator Andrew Bragg's National Press Club address, August 2026.
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Australian Building Codes Board, Livable Housing Design Standard 2022 (v1.3), 15 November 2023. Available at: abcb.gov.au/resource/standard/livable-housing-design-standard.

Queensland Department of Housing and Public Works, “Livable Housing Design Standard,” citing the Proposal to include minimum accessibility standards for housing in the National Construction Code decision Regulation Impact Statement.

Housing Industry Association, “Correction to the ABCB Livable Housing Design Standard,” 21 November 2023: hia.com.au/resources-and-advice/building-it-right/building-codes/articles/correction-to-the-abcb-livable-housing-design-standards-ramp-regulations