A government target with no independent measurement is a slogan. This one has measurement, published quarterly by an independent council, against a series the government does not control.

The March 2026 report gives national movement since the Accord began -- approvals and commencements each up 17 per cent, 219,000 homes completed over five quarters, construction 0.9 per cent cheaper in real terms and 10 per cent faster -- and then does the harder thing. For every state and territory it publishes the share of the Accord target approved and built to date, and an expected completion date: September 2029 for Victoria and Western Australia, September 2030 for Queensland and South Australia, June 2031 for New South Wales, and September 2033 for Tasmania.

Against a target of June 2029, that table says plainly that most of the country will be late and one jurisdiction will be four years late. It is published as a table on a public web page, sourced to ABS building activity and approvals data the Council does not control.

The register records this as a win precisely because the news is bad. The common objection to any transparency proposal is that no government will fund reporting that embarrasses it. Here one did, quarterly, against its own signature housing commitment.

The remaining weakness is format rather than substance: quarterly PDFs, where the underlying ABS building activity series is itself machine-readable. Publishing the Council's assembled series as data would let anyone reproduce the forecast rather than accept it.

That is a small ask by the standards of this register, and it is the only one this entry makes.

Opened and read on 2026-09-03, and the entry's figures were wrong.

It previously cited 331,903 commencements against 420,000 needed, and a forecast of end-2030. Neither number appears in the Council's March 2026 reporting; both came from news coverage of it. What the Council actually publishes is 219,000 completions over five quarters and a per-jurisdiction expected completion date.

The correction improves the entry. Per-state completion dates are a stronger disclosure than a single national slippage figure, because they identify which jurisdictions are behind rather than averaging them together -- and Tasmania at September 2033 is the kind of number a government would prefer aggregated away.