BUDGET 2026: WHAT THE HEADLINES MISS

It's budget season again, and like clockwork, the housing announcements have arrived already neatly packaged for the six o'clock news. A new $2 billion local infrastructure fund. An extended ban on foreign investors buying established homes through to mid-2029. Big numbers, clean lines, easy headlines.

If only Brisbane housing worked that tidily.

At Ethel + Florence we spend our days walking buyers and sellers through what's actually moving the market from New Farm to South Brisbane. So when budget week rolls in, we think it's worth a moment to separate what sounds significant from what will actually be felt at the front door.

$2 billion. Sounds large. Doesn't behave that way.

Spread the new local infrastructure fund across four years and every state and territory, and you're looking at roughly $500 million a year nationally. Strip out administration, assessment frameworks and compliance, and what reaches the ground is closer to $400 million. A single sewer upgrade can run $100 million. A serious transport project, billions. Australia needs about 240,000 new homes every year just to keep pace.

Useful around the edges? Sure. A structural change to how housing gets built in Brisbane? No.

So what does that mean for our patch?

The suburbs we work in (New Farm, Teneriffe, Newstead, Fortitude Valley, South Brisbane, the CBD) are not waiting on Canberra to discover them. The trains run. The schools are zoned. The river path is there. The cafés opened years ago. The amenity is already built, which is precisely why these pockets behave the way they do.

The bbudget doesn't change that. If anything, it underlines it. Where infrastructure funding is thin and slow, the places that already have it become more valuable, not less.

Will the foreign buyer ban shift prices around here?

Honest answer: not really.

Foreign buyers account for somewhere in the low single digits of established home sales nationally, and in the streets we walk through every week, they have rarely been the decisive bidder. The deals we see settle in 4005 are won by local buyers, returning expats, and downsizers from elsewhere in Brisbane.

What is moving prices in our community is not international wealth. It's the same stubborn local maths: not enough good homes, plenty of people who want them, and vendors in no hurry to sell into uncertainty. None of that shifts because of a press release.

Then what should buyers and sellers actually pay attention to?

The same things we've been pointing to all year.

If you're buying, the variables that genuinely matter are interest rates, your borrowing capacity, the supply pipeline in the three or four streets you'd actually live in, and your time horizon. Get those right and policy noise becomes background.

If you're selling, presentation, the right campaign window and a clear, honest read on your buyer pool will do far more for your result than anything announced on budget night. Good homes in tightly held pockets continue to attract real competition. That hasn't changed.

If you're holding, the long-term case for well-located Brisbane property remains exactly where it was last Tuesday morning. Australia is not building enough of the right homes in the right places, and this Budget doesn't materially change that picture.

The bigger point

Budgets come and go. Cycles come and go. Brisbane keeps doing what Brisbane has been quietly doing for several years now: drawing in people, supporting a serious lifestyle on a manageable scale, and rewarding owners who bought into the right streets early.

That's the conversation we'd rather be having. If any of the above raises something specific to your own plans, let's talk.