How many houses/apartments do could you build if you had say 10 billion dollars

Great question — let's run the numbers properly using the Brisbane costs we just discussed.

Using realistic all-in costs per dwelling

*Apartment land cost is shared across the whole development

So with $10 billion you could build roughly:

To put that in perspective

Brisbane currently has a shortage of somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 dwellings, depending on which report you read. So $10 billion spent wisely on apartments could theoretically wipe out Brisbane's entire housing shortage in one hit.

Queensland's entire state debt is around $130 billion. The federal government spends around $700 billion a year in total. So $10 billion is actually not an outrageous number in government budget terms — it's roughly what the federal government spends every 5 days.

Why doesn't the government just do it?

This is the really frustrating part. The money isn't the impossible barrier — the will and the model are. A few reasons it doesn't happen:

Political ideology — both major parties have largely accepted that housing is a private market and the government's role is to subsidise demand through grants and schemes rather than directly build supply. This goes back to the mass sell-off of public housing starting in the 1990s.

It would depress property prices — flooding the market with 40,000 new dwellings would cool prices. That's great for renters and first home buyers, but politically toxic for the millions of existing homeowners and investors who vote.

Construction industry capacity — even if you had the money, Australia's construction industry is already stretched. There aren't enough tradies, materials are constrained, and suddenly commissioning 40,000 dwellings would cause massive cost inflation in the building sector. You'd likely end up paying far more per dwelling than the estimates above.

Land acquisition — the government would need to buy or already own the land. Commonwealth and state governments do own significant land but getting it through planning approvals, zoning changes and community opposition takes years.

What $10 billion has actually been spent on instead

For context, the federal government's signature housing policy — the Help to Buy shared equity scheme — has a budget of around $5 billion and is projected to help roughly 40,000 people over several years. But it's a demand side measure that helps people buy existing homes, which pushes prices up rather than adding new supply.

The National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation (NH FIC) has around $10 billion in bond guarantees to support community housing — but that guarantees, not direct spending, and it moves very slowly.

The uncomfortable truth

$10 billion could make a genuinely transformational difference to housing in Brisbane or Queensland if spent directly on building apartments and social housing. The barrier isn't really money — it's political will, vested interests in keeping property prices high, and a decades long ideological retreat from government as a direct provider of housing.

Singapore is often held up as the gold standard — around 80% of Singaporeans live in government built housing. It's high quality, widely owned, and kept affordable by design. Australia made exactly the opposite policy choice and is now living with the consequences.