The National Regulatory System for Community Housing registers providers in three tiers set by scale and risk, with performance requirements and regulatory intensity proportionate to tier. It is a sensible risk-based design and the same principle as aged care registration categories.

It was enacted first in New South Wales and adopted elsewhere with the exception of Victoria and Western Australia, which run separate systems.

So a provider operating nationally holds national registration plus two separate state registrations, against different codes, with different reporting cycles — for the same organisation doing the same thing.

Why this matters more now than it used to. The Housing Australia Future Fund is a Commonwealth program contracting community housing providers to deliver 40,000 social and affordable homes. Commonwealth policy actively encourages providers to grow and to operate at national scale. The registration architecture those providers sit inside was designed before that and has a hole in it covering two states.

This is the same pattern this database has now recorded in NDIS worker screening, occupational licensing, clinical credentialing and working with children checks: a national scheme with jurisdictions outside it, where the cost falls on whoever operates across borders.

The consistent finding across all five is worth stating once, here. The problem is never the existence of the standard. It is that partial national schemes impose the coordination cost of a national system and deliver the benefit of neither. A fully national scheme is efficient. Eight genuinely different state schemes are at least honest about what they are. A national scheme minus two is the worst configuration available.

Who acts: Victoria and Western Australia, to join; the Commonwealth, only through National Cabinet or by attaching conditions to housing funding — which, given it is funding these providers directly, is a lever it actually holds.