Stevens says housing credit still tight

RBA governor Glenn Stevens believes banks can further ease the availability of credit for new housing.

In his Friday appearance before the House of Representatives Economics Committee, Stevens said Australia was still not building enough new homes to ease price pressures on existing housing.

"Why that is, is a very important question," he said. "I do not have a kind of easy answer to it, but I think there is still in the banks a certain tightness of availability of credit."

"I think that is tending to ease a little bit, but there is a long way to go yet."

He said he believed the essential question in housing was how Australia could not add new homes for first-home buyers more cheaply than it currently did - a problem the RBA has wrestled with for some years. "I cannot get past that basic question," he said.