Thanks so much Dan. What a privilege to be here with all of you this morning.

And when I looked at that video this morning that stretches back over the last two and a bit years, standing in press conferences day after day, I'm reminded of how grey I've gone over that short period of time.

And if I suddenly get darker hair in the lead up to the next state election, you'll know it's completely natural. So, thank you, David.

Thank you, friends. Can I also acknowledge the traditional owners of the land, the Dharug people, and thank you all for being here this morning, and more importantly, for joining us in this Housing Now! campaign to give young people home and a future in this beautiful state, in this wonderful country.

I know many of you were there two years ago, at the first Housing Now! Conference in the grandstand at Rosehill racecourse, which I’ve always said is a fine racecourse, and has got a long future ahead of it as a racecourse, doesn’t need to change a bit, apparently.

But as we kick off today, I think it’s worth casting our minds back to that first conference and to consider how far we've come in space of two years.

Two years ago, when Housing Now! met for the first time, New South Wales was lumbering under the worst planning system in Australia, as voted by the Business Council of Australia.

And there was no prospect for reform until Paul Scully stood up and presented plans and reform ideas for the state.

Under that system for three decades, at least, we were doing six homes for every 100,000 residents per year, compared to eight homes in Victoria and nine homes per 100,000 residents per year in Queensland.

So, they weren’t just beating us on the NRL paddock, they were beating us when it comes to housing as well.

So, every year, for 30 years, we were getting outworked, outsmarted, and out built when it comes to new housing in New South Wales, and as a result, Sydney was both the 800 densest city in the world and the second most expensive after Hong Kong.

And those two things are clearly related to one another. In practice, what that meant for us was, for the first time, we weren't just losing older people to Queensland for the warmer weather, we were losing younger families in the prime of their working lives.

And that was the backdrop to the first Housing Now! Conference. That's why David brought us along together as business people, as trade unionists, as faith leaders, as concerned citizens, to say in emphatic terms, that something had to change.

And friends, I think we can say some justification that things have begun to change in New South Wales.

Soon after that first conference, we announced the Transport Oriented Development program to build 1000s of homes around 45 train stations, close to work, close to transport, close to education and close to a social life.

In the following state budget, we funded the biggest social and public housing investment in New South Wales history, $5.1 billion to build 8400 new social housing dwellings.

Now all of those dwellings will change lives, but crucially, half of those places will go to victim survivors of domestic violence.

Since that first conference, we've released a Pattern Book with $1 designs and 10 day approvals, the low and mid-rise changes and the end to no fault eviction for renters in the state.

And then last December, perhaps the biggest change so far, with the Housing Delivery Authority giving New South Wales government the power to make zoning decisions and approval decisions all at once.

Particularly when councils were dragging their feet and stopping new homes and new development in Sydney and in New South Wales.

And that was a huge change, and I'm happy to report it's already declared 91,000 potential homes of state significant.

Friends, when we set out to change the housing system, we knew that there’d be opposition.

And for as long as I've been involved in politics, there's been an unspoken consensus that serious housing reform was, at the very least, politically challenging.

And the truth is this, this movement, the Housing Now! movement, has faced opposition.

Just last month, the Minister released the government's plan to finally build the Woollahra train station with 10,000 homes around it, three kilometres from the city's CBD.

To us, we believed it was a sound planning decision, but to the Deputy Mayor of Woollahra, it was, and I quote, “old fashioned toxic masculinity.”

I'm still scratching my head there in relation to that one, but I think it means that we have to be prepared for absolutely anything.

It's still early days, and no one, I genuinely mean that, is interested in a victory lap. We know that Everest is still in front of us. It's not behind us, and we have not hit the peak at all.

But I think it's important to show the consequences of these changes.

Two years ago, before our reforms, housing construction was dropping 17% in the space of just a year. Slowly but surely, we believe it's turning around.

This year, approvals are up 15%, we've got 30% more applications in the pipeline.

Decisions are 15% quicker for councils and the state government, and 74,000 homes are now under construction. The next closest state is Victoria, at about 63,000.

None of that would have been possible without the advocacy of Housing Now!, I genuinely mean that, and we genuinely appreciate it.

Without the ideas, without the energy, without the people in this room pushing this most important of agendas.

And the honest truth is where we're at today, even with some encouraging signs around increasing approvals and applications, the honest truth is, it's not enough.

We're not there yet. We've got to keep pushing.

Which is why, two weeks ago, the planning Minister Paul Scully released what we consider landmark reforms to the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act in the state.

There's a lot going on in that Bill, a lot of important details in particular the coordination authority, cementing the HDA into law, complying development, etc, etc. I could go on and on, I’m sure Paul is going to cover it a little bit later.

But there's a concept that I wanted to speak about that's embedded in the legislation that moves across the different areas of the bill, which gets the heart of the wider reforms, and I think it's proportionality.

Doesn't really roll off the tongue, but anyway, proportionality.

What I mean by that is the current Planning Bill requires those who put in an application to consider all of the likely impacts of development, to quote, “the fullest extent possible.”

Not just to the appropriate extent, but all, all of the likely impacts, to the fullest extent possible.

It's this simple clause that's causing so much of the delay and filibustering we see that housing system, because those who are opposed to new developments in their community, can drive a truck through that principle.

At the most absurd end, it means that building a house undergoes the same fundamental assessment rules as building a new coal mine.

But more commonly, it drives the endless proliferation of consultant reports and to be frank with you, a cottage industry in that same part of the housing sector.

We heard a case of business wanting to update their existing facility on the same site they've operated on for many, many years.

They needed to submit more than 40 different reports as part of the planning assessment, running to 1000s of pages and millions of dollars. None of which resulted in any material change to the original proposal, nothing.

And I saw the two proposals as they were presented to us by the applicant, and they were virtually identical. That's after 40 different reports, scores of consultants and millions of dollars.

We heard another case of planners requiring environmental impact assessment of temporary traffic management staff, the people who hold signs to stop traffic.

And we thought that was ridiculous, so we're changing the law to make assessments proportionate to the impact of the development.

We'll take another example in the same spirit, currently, a professional certifier can tick off your proposal if it fits within a pre-defined set of rules. If you get that tick, you can reduce your approval times from 100 days to 10 days.

But if you deviate even a small amount from the rules by even a few millimetres, you have to go through a full DA process.

Assessing all – all – likely impacts to the fullest extent possible.

We think that's crazy in a city like Sydney. It's virtually not replicated in any major planning system anywhere else in the world, where blocks are rarely standard in a place like Sydney and often need small changes to fit the topography of a place like Sydney.

So, we're introducing the proportionate approach here.

Minor changes will be treated as minor changes, and they'll have a quick assessment by the local council, and if they haven’t look at it within 10 days, it will be automatically deemed approved.

Rather than the current regime, where if they don't get around to it, it's deemed refused, and you're at the back of the queue.

What that means, in actuality, is the councils will have to devote resources to stopping developments in their community, rather than where they're at, at the moment, where the national order of business means that you go to the back of the queue if you don't have to put in a complying development.

Now look, it might seem legalistic, but it's a massive sea change in how the planning system works, and we think it's going to make a big difference in the next few years.

These are serious reforms, but we're not here to celebrate legislation.

We're here to celebrate new homes. And to do that, we have to keep pushing.

We have to keep refining these rules. We have to encourage builders through the system.

But most of all, we want to cement these reforms, because the industry needs certainty over the coming decades, not the next couple of years, and certainly not just the next few months.

Housing Now! is not a partisan gathering, and I want to acknowledge Rob Stokes, who's here this morning. It's good to see you, Rob.

And there are many fine Liberal advocates for housing out there, and we want them in this coalition.

To any Liberal or National or Greens MP, who is wavering or who's on the fence about what's happening in our society, in our community, I will say this: we all understand the impulse and the desire to stop things from changing. It's a very human feeling, but the truth is, change is already happening.

We just had to close a primary school on the Northern Beaches because there weren't enough kids to populate it. That's what it means to live in a city without grandchildren.

You might have a big house on a big block a few kilometres from the city, but if your school is closing and the netball team is struggling for numbers and the football team can't get a coach, is that really the kind of community that we want to live in in a wonderful place like Sydney?

Whether we like it or not, we have to change. We have to build more homes. We have to keep young people in state, and we have to give our kids a real sense of a future in this great city.

Thanks so much everybody.