A Coalition plan to freeze national building standards could leave Australia with unsafe homes and higher energy bills for decades, experts have warned.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton backed a decade-long pause in changing National Construction Code at the weekend, claiming it would cut red tape and promote new construction.

The freeze is part of a broader Coalition housing policy that commits $5 billion in taxpayer money to subsidise greenfield builds for hundreds of thousands of homes.

But experts said the NCC already lags other OECD nations and that it would be dangerous to freeze standards during a crucial decade for building climate change resilience.

Western Sydney University’s Professor Sebastian Pfautsch said NCC rules were the minimum protections for Australians, many of whom could not afford to heat or cool inefficient properties.

“If climate change progresses in a high-emissions scenario, then we would be providing new homes for hundreds of thousands, probably millions of people, which are knowingly unsafe,” he said.

“They could be unfit for the conditions that we are anticipating in summers, not in 2100 but well inside the lifetime of these buildings.”

Energy efficiency blow

Economist Nicki Hutley, who has advised the government on changes to commercial building codes, said standards were rigorously set to protect Australians without undue regulation.

Hutley said pausing updates to the residential building code could leave Australians much worse off, because developers could construct homes that weren’t as energy efficient.

“Nothing is done unless it 100 per cent delivers a net benefit to society in economic terms,” Hutley said.

“Sometimes there are initial costs, but the benefits are far greater, and over time we have learning rates, which means their costs reduce when you change designs for things.

“Everybody is better off, and particularly in a cost-of-living crisis, the one thing you want to be doing is helping households reduce their energy demand.”

Freeze wouldn’t work: Experts

Dutton thinks current building standards go too far, citing contested figures from property developers that claim the NCC adds thousands to the cost of construction.

“The Coalition’s freeze will provide certainty to the industry and let builders get on with the job of building homes for Australians,” he said at the weekend.

Property developers swiftly welcomed the policy, with Housing Industry Association boss Jocelyn Martin claiming builders are being “crippled by the amount of red tape”.

But University of NSW professor Riccardo Paolini said the claims were “unfounded”.

“If you improve requirements in terms of energy efficiency, you’re not adding more controls or regulation, you’re just requiring the building to be better performing than it is now,” he said.

“It’s not more red tape, it’s the same amount of regulatory burden [as there is currently].”

Security risks

Paolini said pausing updates to the building code presented security risks, because it would lower the standard at which new properties were constructed.

That explains situations where the power grid may fail and leave households without electricity to cool or heat their homes artificially during a heatwave or cold snap.

In those cases, poorer-quality builds would be at higher risk of being unsafe for people to inhabit.

“The moment we have a disruption in energy supply, the population is incredibly exposed,” he said.

“Also, by progressively improving our build stock and using less energy for air-conditioning and heating, we are freeing a substantial amount of energy produced for industrial purposes.

“Therefore energy prices drop.”

Safer alternative

The alternative to freezing the code is to allow it to be updated under the current schedule, which is once every five years (the last update was in 2022).

Pfautsch said the NCC still lagged many other economies on requirements around energy efficiency, particularly during winter.

“We’re not even looking at double glazing in this country, whereas other OECD countries have standard triple glazing,” he said.

“We’re starting at a very, very low point already … and nobody in these lobby organisations look into the operational costs for these buildings they are delivering.

“They’re just kicking the can down the road and saying, ‘yeah we need to build cheap so you can buy it and we don’t care how much it will cost you to run this house for the next 20 years’.”

Pfautsch said the Coalition’s wider plan to focus on greenfield developments would be more expensive for taxpayers than higher-density urban apartment construction.

The opposition had no costings for the related infrastructure that will be required in newly built-out areas under its plan.

Pfautsch said research by the NSW Productivity Commission in 2023 showed greenfield developments can cost up to $72,000 more per property than cheaper alternatives.

“You need to add new roads, new water, new sewerage, new electricity – new everything,” Pfautsch said.