In every era, certain industries become so large, so politically embedded, and so culturally unexamined that their performance ceases to matter.

They are judged instead on the confidence with which they declare themselves indispensable. In contemporary Australia, that industry is property. It has woven around itself a powerful myth: that towers equal progress, population growth equals prosperity, and the private development model is synonymous with the national interest.

Strip back that myth and a stark truth emerges. The record of the property industry is not defined by a single failure but by six, each of them carrying profound consequences for the economy, the environment, and the social fabric of the country. And alongside these failures sits one extraordinary triumph: the sector’s unrivalled ability to shape political decisions, public policy, and media narratives.

The first failure is economic. Instead of building a complex, innovation-driven, decarbonising economy, Australia has slid toward the bottom of Harvard’s global Economic Complexity Index and Green Capability Index while climbing to the top tier of speculative real estate nations. Our capital markets, workforce talent, and policy energy have been dragged into the least productive activity imaginable: the exchange of land titles and approvals inside an increasingly concentrated system of private ownership. This is not national development. It is an illusion of prosperity built on a rising asset base rather than rising capability.

The second failure is housing. For a quarter of a century, the industry has insisted that private supply would deliver affordability. Rents are at record highs, mortgage stress is entrenched, and homelessness is growing in every capital city. The market delivers what maximises the developer margin-investor micro-apartments, short-term letting stock, and speculative towers. What households actually need: are secure rentals, well-designed low and mid-rise neighbourhoods, and a substantial program of public and social housing.

The third failure is environmental. The skyscraper, the emblem of modern property marketing is also among the most carbon-intensive, heat-generating, and resource-hungry forms of development ever devised. Towers trap heat, overshadow streets, and destroy canopy. Their construction relies heavily on concrete, steel, and demolition waste. Yet the industry hides behind green badges, rooftop gardens, and glossy sustainability frameworks that do little to the reality of urban warming. We are left with cities that warm faster, cost more to cool, and weaken their own climate resilience with every additional tower.

The fourth failure is liveability. Developer-led planning produces the same outcome almost everywhere: a vertical monoculture in the core and a horizontal monoculture on the fringe. Public land is privatised, heritage is compromised, neighbourhood character is sacrificed, streets are deserted and unsafe. Cities cease to be places of meaning and become engines of yield. Residents become metrics. Community becomes an afterthought.

The fifth failure is innovation and its twin, productivity. In the century that will define whether nations thrive or flounder, Australia desperately needs to develop and use green new materials, circular construction, advanced prefabrication, climate-adapted design, and a renaissance of public and cooperative housing. Yet the property sector remains structurally adverse to innovation because its business model rests not on creating value but on capturing it: rezoning uplift, rising land prices, and planning systems reshaped around private priorities. Our largest industry has become a productivity deadweight, stalling the shift to a high-value, low-carbon future. A country cannot become more competitive while such a key sector fails to innovate.

The sixth failure is the quietest but in many ways the most corrosive: population. No industry in Australia now advocates harder for sustained high population growth than property. Not primarily because of national strategy or labour force need, but because the property development model relies on a constant inflow of new demand. More people mean more pressure on housing, more rezoning, more approvals, and more profit windfalls. Demography has become a substitute for productivity. Population growth has become a substitute for innovation. The nation is being steered toward an economy that grows because people arrive, not because we create value. It is a fragile foundation for national resilience.

Against this backdrop of failure stands a single remarkable success: power. The property industry has achieved what few sectors in Australia’s history have managed. It shapes planning laws. It sets population expectations. It dominates public discourse. It funds campaigns, produces “expert commentary” for media that rarely interrogate its assumptions, and ensures that questioning its worldview is treated as extreme, eccentric or anti-progress. The most successful product of the property lobby is not buildings, but belief-the belief that its profit-model is inevitable.

Yet nothing about this trajectory is inevitable. Australia could choose a different path: one built around large-scale public and social housing, climate-adapted low and mid-rise neighbourhoods, a population strategy grounded in national interest rather than private need, a planning system insulated from capture, and an economic strategy anchored in research, science, and green industry rather than land speculation. We could build cities shaped by climate, character, and community rather than by the preferences of a single interest.

The six failures of the property industry are not destiny. They are choices-repeated, defended, and now normalised over decades. But they are choices we and our governments can refuse. And they are choices we must refuse if Australia is to reclaim the possibility of a productive, equitable, and sustainable future.