The HDA is the most important natural experiment in Australian planning right now, and this database should treat it as evidence rather than as an announcement.

It was created in December 2024, made permanent, and by mid-2026 had built a pipeline of about 150,000 potential homes across 484 declared proposals. It sat on 137 proposals at a single meeting on 23 June 2026. Its conversion is where the interesting data is: of those 484 declarations, 74 development applications had been lodged (around 26,000 homes) and 14 projects had final approval (around 2,500 homes).

Read carefully, that is a finding rather than a criticism. Declaration is not approval. A declaration moves a project from one queue into another queue, and the second queue then has to do the assessment work that the first queue would have done. The gap between 150,000 homes declared and 2,500 homes approved is the measure of how much of the delay was ever in the choice of pathway as opposed to the assessment itself.

The other structural fact worth recording: entry is by ministerial declaration on the recommendation of a panel, not by meeting published criteria. A proponent cannot know in advance whether they qualify, cannot appeal exclusion, and the declaration is discretionary. A pathway that is fast because a minister selected you into it is a different kind of institution from a pathway that is fast because you met a published standard, even where the elapsed time is identical. See Enter the fast pathway by meeting published criteria, not by being selected into it.