The major parties have decided on a solution to Australia's housing crisis: build more homes. But some of the country's newest suburbs suggest it's not as straightforward as it seems.
The houses spring from the green hills row by row: sturdy and angular, brick and concrete.
Miniature bicycles and scooters are sprinkled across mown lawns and shoes piled in front of doors that gape open to the street.
But peer through the window of every fourth or fifth home and you'll find it empty — or under construction.
Suburbs like Austral and Oran Park, on the farthest frontiers of south-western Sydney, barely existed 15 years ago. Driving towards the developments, a street sign declares "Cowpasture Road", a nod to the area's former life.
Now the region is amongst the fastest growing in the country and an example of what both major party leaders see as an answer to Australia's entrenched housing dilemma.
Labor and the Coalition have hinged their election hopes on billions of dollars worth of promises they say will make it easier for first home buyers to break into the market.
While some of the more high-profile campaign pledges are focused on helping Australians saving for a deposit get over the line, both Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton have named housing supply as the crux of the issue, highlighting new development as the way forward.
In the Coalition's version, this looks like standalone family homes raised from previously undeveloped pastoral plains.
"This is the future for so many young Australians if the Coalition is elected on May 3," opposition housing spokesperson Michael Sukkar declared before a building site on Melbourne's furthest reaches earlier in the campaign.
To this end, the opposition has pledged $5 billion specifically to speed up "enabling infrastructure" like roads and sewerage for new greenfield developments, a move they say will give rise to 500,000 new homes.
Labor has a broader vision that includes urban infill closer to city centres, but they too have earmarked $1.5 billion to be administered to state and local governments to support the establishment of new suburbs.
Already these so-called greenfield developments — houses built on previously bare land, just as the name suggests — are changing the terrain of Australia's cities.
Where once residential development was concentrated around economic centres, now it's bulging outwards to an extent that the connection to city-living is tenuous at best.
Oran Park — built on the site of a former motor race track, about 50 kilometres from the Sydney CBD — was home to just 200 people in 2011. A decade later it had grown to more than 17,000 residents. By 2046, it's forecast to reach 32,000.
Next door, in Catherine Field, the population is projected explode from around 3,000 this year to more than 20,000 in two decades.
The rapid growth has come with challenges, but on a sunny day less than a fortnight out from the election, Oran Park's town centre appears ripped from a catalogue.
Two teenage girls picnic next to a breast cancer screening trailer in a park that unfurls from a newly built library, a short walk from a bustling shopping centre where you can nab a park on arrival.
Minutes away, roundabouts usher drivers into a sea of manicured gardens and four-bedders. Residents sit in their double garages, the door open to catch the breeze. Kids run around freely in playgrounds dotted between the lots, and women push strollers along the grid of footpaths. The big open sky overhead is more countryside than suburbia.
"Oran Park is, for us, a heaven," says Gaurav Bakshi, a father of two young girls who purchased his first home in the suburb two years years ago. "I have a great house, Oran Park is a great suburb, the people are absolutely delightful."
There's just one catch: in a decade, he fears his daughter will be asking to move to an apartment far away in the CBD.
Sold the promise of connectivity
Outside an early polling booth set up in Oran Park's town centre, Gaurav is frank: "What I feel is left out."
Like the politicians, he believes the solution to the housing crisis is to build more houses. And in Sydney, as he sees it, the only way to do that is to expand outwards.
His family were able to buy their home, a two-story build with a double garage, in part thanks to the First Home Buyer Scheme, introduced under Scott Morrison and expanded by Labor.
"We spent our life savings on a promise and that promise was connectivity," he says.
"The government has just left suburbs in the south-west of Sydney disconnected from the rest of the city."
A sign in the centre of Oran Park marks where a metro station is to meant to be built, but Gaurav has lost hope he'll see it completed any time soon.
"Frankly it will not be me, it will be the next generation," he says. "We pay fair share of taxes, so the federal government owes us a fair share of infrastructure funding."
This frustration over what he believes is a disconnect between what was promised and what, so far, has been delivered followed him to the ballot box. He voted Labor at the last election, but not this one.
On his charge sheet: the cost of his mortgage repayments ("Jim Chalmers was often seen smiling on some of those interest hike videos") and what he sees as the state Labor government's failure to progress the Western Sydney aerotropolis ("now it's called aerofloppylus"), located about a 15-minute drive from Oran Park.
The latter was the impetus to move to the outer edges of the city. Not only could he afford a bigger home for his two girls, he believed the promise of a "third CBD" attached to the international airport would allow him to find work closer to home.
Currently, to get to work in North Sydney, Gaurav has to drive almost 20 minutes to Campbelltown or Leppington — the two nearest pre-existing economic centres — and pray he can find a park at the train station before embarking on his more than hour-long commute.
"Chris Minns and Labor has to go, I don't see any other way," he says.
The comment highlights an enduring problem for federal governments: It doesn't matter if the states are responsible for an issue, you'll probably end up wearing some of the blame come election day.
This week, a Coalition of eight Western Sydney councils, calling themselves The Parks, issued a demand for greater federal investment in the area, citing research that found "growth areas" have 61 per cent lower access to public transport than comparable established communities.
On their list of election priorities: more funding for enabling infrastructure, a complete North-South rail link by 2026 and commitment to increasing road capacity.
A shake-up of the electoral map has shifted Oran Park and the neighbouring Catherine Field development from the safe-Labor seat of Macarthur to Hume, held by the Coalition frontbencher Angus Taylor since 2013.
The redistribution saw Hume shed a wide swathe of rural New South Wales, transforming it into an urban seat, geographically just 15 per cent of its former size.
Despite the overhaul it remains safely Liberal on 6.9 per cent, but a tighter contest is brewing in the adjacent seat of Werriwa.
With an eye on the mortgage belt, Peter Dutton chose the marginal Labor-held electorate — which takes in some of the south-west Sydney developments — as the site for his campaign launch earlier this month.
The new borderlands
Emily-Rose Barake lives down the road from Gaurav, across the road from a playground where she is sitting at golden hour watching her daughter zip around on a scooter. Next to her, a dad and his young boys play "backyard" cricket with plastic stumps.
When she moved into the development, three and a half years ago, the park was fenced off and her front window looked out onto a field where kangaroos would regularly congregate. The rare kangaroo still pops by, but the field is now another row of houses.
"This park used to be empty, and now it's heaving at this time of day," she says.
"Seeing that happen has been quite fascinating, to see it unfold.
"And then for my husband, who grew up in this area, to go from what it was for him, which was a dirt-track road. But I think he likes it, having the amenities close."
Emily-Rose moved to Australia from a country village in England and says the convenience of suburban living was a drawcard. Both she and her husband work in the area, so she's not bothered by the lack of public transport on their doorstep.
"What I don't like is the blocks are so small," she says. "It's very strange for me to be in a big house, and the neighbours right there, and then having a small backyard for the size of the house."
The road between Austral and Oran Park weaves through the old and new. One minute there's weathered cottages separated by swathes of farmland; the next a horizon of grey tiled roofs, butting up against one another.
For those outside the developments, who have lived there long before public servants labelled them "priority growth areas", the transformation has come with pros and cons.
On one hand, there's a shopping complex next door now. But on the other, there's the traffic. "It takes longer to get out of the area than it does on … the freeway," says Vic, who lives in Harrington Park, a leafy suburb to the south of Oran Park.
Even so, he agrees that new developments, like the ones springing up around him, are part of the solution, along with new apartments closer to the city. "It's not one or the other, it's no silver bullet, but it's a mixture of both," he says outside the pre-polling booth.
Lachlan, 24, recently moved back in with his parents in Cobbitty, another of the smaller, semi-rural suburbs that neighbours Oran Park. "There's less to do for young people, I think is the main thing," he says. "Library, uni, work, gym, that's about it, that's all I find myself doing."
Over in Austral, Jay, 30, gives a similar assessment, though he notes there are now a couple of food trucks that set up on Fifteenth Avenue, the suburb's main drag. There's good and bad things about every place, he shrugs.
Before January, Lachlan was living in Glebe — the exact type of inner-city, federation terrace laced suburb often held up as the antithesis of the sprawling new-build developments on the city's fringes. He still commutes there for work.
Buying his own house is out of the question at the moment. While that would be "a dream" he is also not opposed to being a lifelong renter, if there were stronger laws in place to protect tenants.
As for what's on offer at this election, he's not a fan of the Coalition's plan to let first home buyers access their super for a deposit and wishes both sides would have a serious discussion about changes to negative gearing.
The Coalition's other headline housing policy is to allow first home buyers to claim their mortgage interest on tax, but only if the home they buy is a new build.
Meanwhile, Labor has put aside $10 billion to build 100,000 new homes earmarked exclusively for first home buyers and promised to expand the First Home Buyers scheme to allow any first-time buyer to secure a property with just a 5 per cent deposit (the Coalition will also increase eligibility for the scheme, but not to the same extent).
"I don't think building more houses is inherently a bad thing, but there should be more consideration of the sustainability of the development," Lachlan says. He too mentions the yet-to-materialise metro station, as well as the "urban heat islands" that have arisen as the city has ballooned.
But he doesn't plan to stay long enough to see if the infrastructure catches up. "Just with the stage of life I'm at, the city suits me more," he says.
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