Treasurer’s first investor roundtable to target housing

The Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers MP has confirmed the members of his new investor roundtable, and revealed that the first meeting — set to be held in November — will focus on social and affordable housing.

The quarterly roundtables, which were first mooted by the Treasurer in August of this year, aim to bring together key players to “identify and unlock investment opportunities in national priority areas”.

Members from across the “investment community”, including leaders of some of the country’s largest banks, superannuation funds, and global asset managers are members of the roundtable.

There are 20 core participants on the roundtable, including the CEOs of the four major banks, as well as Shemara Wikramanayake, chief executive officer of Macquarie.

According to Treasury, more than $2 trillion is under management by the superannuation and institutional investors represented on the roundtable. 

States and territories will be represented by the chair of the board of Treasurers, Andrew Barr, or another state or territory Treasurer.

Additional attendees will reportedly be invited to roundtables to “bring relevant expertise to each focus area”, where appropriate.

The first meeting, set to be held next month, will consider housing — with a particular focus on:

• addressing barriers to investment within the housing sector;
• improving revenue streams and investor confidence in the project pipeline to meet risk and return preferences; and
• identifying partnership opportunities for government co‑investment.

Future roundtables — which will run once every three or four months until September 2023 — will examine topics including data and digitisation and clean energy.

Building more affordable housing in commutable distances

Speaking on Friday (7 October) at the Queensland Investment Showcase in Brisbane, Treasurer Jim Chalmers elaborated that he hoped the roundtable would help “find opportunities that deliver for the interests of investors and for the national interest” and “chart a way through the challenges that are currently preventing the scale of investment we all want to see”.

He added: “To make sure our conversations are targeted, productive and have a degree of continuity, the roundtables will have 20 core participants… and all participants have the smarts, insight, and diverse range of experiences, to make these roundtables a success.

“Importantly, none of us will be starting from scratch here when we gather to discuss housing in November but we’ll need everybody to bring something to the table — at the roundtables, and beyond them as well.”

Mr Chalmers said that he and housing minister Julie Collins MP would be drawing together representatives from industry and government, as well as from the construction sector, to establish a “mix of short and long-term actions to address the supply problems in Australia’s housing market”.

He suggested that supply would be a key target, as would raising energy efficiency standards of affordable housing.

Speaking on The Weekend Briefing podcast, Mr Chalmers added that he hoped the roundtables would help form an agreement on how many more home needed to be built “take the pressure off” both renters and home buyers.

“How do we make sure that those homes are in areas where there are jobs?,” he asked, flagging that he did not want “young people to have to commute for two hours from somewhere they can afford to live to wherever their job is”.

He said: “So, I'm trying to bring people together with Julie Collins to work out can we get superannuation to invest in affordable housing, where people need it, where people are working in a way that delivers good returns for superannuation fund members at the same time as it fixes this perennial problem that we've got?

“I understand the frustrations that people have about housing and we've got a bunch of policies already — a help-to-buy policy, a policy for social housing.. we've got all of these funds, but we need to do more than that to properly shift the needle on housing.

“Our near-term challenges are wages and inflation and skills shortages, but I think the... big issue that we've got over the next (whatever it is) five years or so is, how do we build enough houses where the jobs and opportunities are?

“We've actually got really low unemployment in this country at the moment, but we're having trouble connecting people with opportunities and housing is part of that. And that's why I'm spending a heap of my time on it.”

[Related: House price falls steady]