A leading property developer is warning permanently imposing tariffs of more than 70 per cent on Chinese aluminium windows to protect niche Australian manufacturers could conservatively add almost $9000 to the cost of a typical new home.
Paul Lazzarotto, a director of the Lazzcorp Property Group, has written to the Federal Government’s renamed anti-dumping body, arguing these punitive tariffs could spark a 24.4 per cent rise in window and door costs on an average, approved new house build of $517,430, based on Australian Bureau of Statistics data.
“Increases of that order, at a time of acute pressure on housing affordability, are a matter of serious and widely shared concern,” he said in his submission to the Australian Trade Remedies Commission.
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Mr Lazzarotto, whose group builds apartments in Melbourne, calculated the default tariff of up to 73.3 per cent on Chinese aluminium windows and door could conservatively add $6300 to $8800 to the cost of building a new three or four-bedroom house, based on windows and doors making up 5-7 per cent of total construction costs.
“A charge of up to 73.3 per cent on a product that goes into every new home makes homes dearer to build and adds to price pressure at precisely the moment both objectives are under strain,” he said.
“In my view, measures of this severity are fundamentally at odds with those national objectives and cannot be reconciled with them.”
Urban Taskforce Australia chief executive Tom Forrest said the punitive tariffs were being applied even though Australia only manufactures aluminium windows for freestanding houses but not multi-storey buildings like apartments, commercial office blocks and retirement villages.
“It’s so offensive in so many different ways,” he told The Nightly.
“It’s a great irony that the builders of new homes, of new commercial buildings, of new employment centres, of new retail facilities, are getting hit with a tariff to protect Australian industry when the Australian industry doesn’t have the capacity to produce those products.”
Mr Forrest, who lobbies on behalf of residential and commercial builders, said the tariffs were being slapped across all kinds of Chinese aluminium window products to protect a small number of local manufacturers who specialise in windows for brand new houses on greenfield sites.
“We accept that there may have been some impact from Chinese product on that particular niche market but why slap a tariff right across the board? That just seems ludicrous,” he said.
“This is almost a counterproductive blow to the objectives of the Government to boost housing supply and improve affordability.”
Since October 16, provisional tariffs of up to 70 per cent have been applied to Chinese aluminium, following complaints from Sydney-based window manufacturer Ventora Group Pty Ltd and the Australian Glass and Window Association.
Industry and Innovation Minister Tim Ayres is next month due to make a decision on whether to keep those tariffs, which are allowed under World Trade Organisation rules to prevent dumping where a flood of cheap imports, sold at below cost price, could potentially kill a local manufacturing industry.
Meanwhile, the Albanese Government has delivered less than 2200 new social and affordable homes over two years despite having a target of building 40,000 new social and affordable homes over five years, a parliamentary committee has heard.
Ben Rimmer, Treasury’s director-general of the housing group, made the confirmation to a Senate economics committee hearing on Tuesday when asked about the $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund’s June 2029 target by the Coalition’s housing frontbencher Andrew Bragg.
“There is inevitably some risk about getting the target. We are fully intent on delivering the Government’s commitment of 40,000 by June 2029 but no public servant, no official, one one can give you a hundred per cent rolled gold commitment that the target will be hit,” Mr Rimmer said.
But the senior executive bureaucrat declined to give a yes or no answer on whether that target would be delivered, as part of a signature policy Prime Minister Anthony Albanese took to the 2022 Federal election.
“We don’t know whether there’s going to be some emerging crisis in construction materials in 2028, no public servant can foresee the future,” Mr Rimmer said.
Mr Rimmer noted the Housing Australia Future Fund “involves quite high and aggressive timelines” after confirming 2199 new units had been built, as of Tuesday, since the scheme started in July 2024.
That is just 27.5 per cent of the 8000 annual average needed to be on track to build 40,000 new social housing units.
“Senator, this is a large and complex program. It’s a construction program. Every construction program in the history of human experience has involved risk and uncertainty,” Mr Rimmer said.
