CEO @yimbymelbourne // Chief @inflectionptswk // Boundless (2027, Hardie Grant) // AFR Power List 2026 // Emergent Ventures 2025 // [email protected]
Melbourne, Victoria
Joined July 2013
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Pinned Tweet
An absolute honour to be on the @FinancialReview Power List.
This is a spectacular recognition of all the fantastic work that @yimbymelbourne has done over the past four years. Thank you to everyone who has been part of that.
Jonathan O'Brien retweeted
Incredible. Endless stories about young people feeling disillusioned, dooming about not being able to even buy a house etc, and yet there is no politician of any party (afaik) that will actually do anything to reduce the boomers’ slice of the pie.
.@AbdulElSayed thinks property tax for seniors should be frozen
I think its generational warfare and that they should sell their houses if they can't afford them. He concedes I'm 'theoretically correct' but practically wrong
Our exchange
This is unserious policy design at play. $5 billion of the HAFF more or less wasted on "affordable" housing.
The Commonwealth should fix this: any future iteration of the HAFF should be allocated to social housing only, and "affordable" housing should be phased out.
So-called "affordable" housing is a rare kind of bad policy: one that only gets worse the more you look at it.
Per the Auditor-General: in Victoria, we are somehow spending more Commonwealth money on average per "affordable" dwelling, than per social dwelling.
Jonathan O'Brien retweeted
Given widespread misunderstanding, public education is needed for better housing policy.
Unfortunately, $8m a year is wasted on AHURI, which does the opposite – repeatedly misinforming the public.
@yimbymelbourne calls for reform.
jonobri.com/files/ahuri.pdf 1/3
Jonathan O'Brien retweeted
Australian academic housing research:
- Often asks bad questions
- Generally does a bad job of answering those questions
- Regularly misrepresents its own findings
For such an important topic, this is v bad!
@jonobri and @hillfolkAU reckon @AHURI_Research is a big reason why.
Bizarre reporting in the ABC, claiming that a 50/50 split of labour/labor spelling in an RBA transcript indicates that AI is taking over.
Much more likely: two different typists, or Microsoft Word defaulting to US English. These are very common things!
It's an extremely bad article. As is often the case, ABC 'analysis' is subpar. abc.net.au/news/2026-10-28/e…
Like many people outside of the US, I'm frustrated that I can't see You Can See Everything.
So I dug into the data—to get to the bottom of why so many films get to Australia so late.
Sometimes putting out a film late is strategic—Oscar contenders tend to release around when nominations are announced, to capitalise on buzz.
But mostly delayed film releases are driven by the simple fact that resources is scarce, and Australia is just one country among many!
Read the full post: mail.jonobri.com/p/film-rele…
Jonathan O'Brien retweeted
Writing an Australian crime novel set in a small town that's simultaneously coastal and rural, where everyone has a heart of gold and a dark secret. It's called... The Husband's Wife. The Stan original was filmed before I wrote the first sentence.
Jonathan O'Brien retweeted
What makes this depressing is that it theoretically met NIMBY criteria.
Aesthetic, built with local stone, provides cheap groceries during a cost-of-living crisis. All built *literally* on an empty grass field.
But, no dice. They don't actually want to build anything at all.
Jonathan O'Brien retweeted
🤨
I visited Wurster Hall at UC Berkeley today. It was designed by, and currently houses, the architecture faculty.
The UC Berkeley website notes that "Wurster is often voted Berkeley's ugliest building."
I visited because I was curious about whether it would in person seem as unattractive as it does in photos. And, in short: it does. It's gaunt, austere, and filmed in grime. On an elysian campus, it stands out for its bleak hostility. It reminds me of the German submarine base in Bordeaux.
The UC Berkeley page agrees that it was never designed to be attractive, quoting the curator of their design archives: “Wurster and his handpicked architects didn’t want anything romantic, or sentimental — they hated the idea of ‘making pretty buildings. They wanted a serious building.”
I guess we have to concede success relative to their stated goals, but it does make one wonder what it all says about architecture as a discipline.
Jonathan O'Brien retweeted
We obviously haven’t had the major jobs wipeout yet. But you read stuff like this. And you read what economics students themselves are saying about working with AI (ht @odavis_h) and it’s hard not to feel like the seismic shift is on its way.
Jonathan O'Brien retweeted
“Abandoned beaches, public health warning signs and seagulls eating human waste are now features of the popular coastline”
70 million L of untreated wastewater was released into the sea near Wellington in February after a treatment plant failure.
Far from being unexpected, five failures had occurred at the plant in the months prior. Meanwhile, multiple independent inquiries into Wellington Water since 2021 had found glaring systemic management failures and a 'focus on safety rather than effectiveness'. A few tweaks were made, but nothing substantial was done until after Government was forced to step in after the catastrophe. Why not?
