4 million homes.
Defence land.
Lottery, not auction.
Australia builds 4 million homes on former defence-force land for buyers aged 21 to 35. The land is donated by the Commonwealth, the construction is centrally managed under a single-builder model to keep unit cost down, and homes are sold through a transparent lottery system rather than auction.
The defence land released includes the Puckapunyal, Holsworthy, and Enoggera bases, freed by the consolidation of Army operations to Camp ACT (described in Part IV). Smaller defence land parcels in twenty other locations across the country are also released for housing.
Why this combination works
The combination of a large supply pulse, demand restraint through the immigration cap, and the welfare and tax changes that lift household disposable income removes the structural pressure that drove housing affordability to crisis levels through the early 2020s.
Three forces meet at the same time. Supply: 4 million new homes in a market that has been chronically under-built for two decades. Demand: the immigration cap removes 1–1.2 million net additions to the population by 2030. Disposable income: an average $18,000 increase makes the homes affordable on the same wage that previously could not service a mortgage. The price discovery that follows is the kind that ends a housing crisis rather than papers over it.
Heavy industry, federally enabled
The 4 million homes are part of a wider use of federal defence land. The same jurisdiction that releases the parcels for housing is what enables the heavy-industry build to be delivered inside the SWF window — nuclear power, mineral processing, defence manufacturing, and the other industrial projects that have historically been throttled by state-by-state planning and environmental compliance. State regulation does not apply to federal land. That fact is the whole point of consolidating both halves of the build there: housing where it can be built fast and at scale, heavy industry where it has been delayed for a generation.
The heavy-industry build is what makes the housing book settle. The homes are sold below cost as a deliberate transfer to first-time buyers aged 21 to 35; the SWF absorbs the construction-cost-to-sale-price differential as part of its 20-year deployment. The industry that goes up on the same federal land — the CANDU rollout, the processing plants, the defence-construction works — generates operating revenue and tax base from the day it opens. That revenue is part of what pays back the housing transfer across the deployment horizon.