Governments have manufactured a crippling crisis that’s led to unprecedented housing pressures, a rising risk of homelessness, and the rapid death of the Great Australian Dream.
And while Anthony Albanese champions multibillion-dollar plans to build more homes and save families from financial disaster, the Prime Minister has avoided mentioning one key driver.
Immigration.
By June, an estimated 885,000 new migrants will have arrived in Australia in just two years, at a time when a critical undersupply of housing is pushing purchase prices and rents to new highs.
Leith van Onselen, co-founder of MacroBusiness and chief economist at MB Fund and MB Super, said the decision to “funnel in record amounts of people … is arguably the biggest driver of the housing crisis”.
Mr van Onselen said the pursuit of “extreme” population growth to drive the economy shows Australia is “governed by mongrels”.
“Federal governments have massively increased immigration since the mid-2000s, and that’s basically created a structural housing shortage,” he said.
“Now it’s worse than ever, with the largest number of migrants ever coming to Australia, resulting in mammoth population growth.
“There are way more people coming into the country than we can build houses for, and we’re feeling the pressure of that across the market.
“All the while, it takes you longer to drive anywhere, you can’t find a place to live, you’re spending your weekends at inspections with hundreds of other people, and if you find a place, your landlord will probably hike your rent $100 a week or so.
“This is what we’ve done. It’s madness.”
Brendan Coates is the economic policy program director at think tank The Grattan Institute and said the record migrant intake is “clearly a driver of pressure in the rental market”.
“We estimate that every 100,000 additional migrants above the long-term trend probably adds about one per cent to rental costs,” Mr Coates said.
“So certainly, the surge that we saw over the course of the last financial year through to June 2023, that’s probably adding three to four per cent to rent prices.
“Given that rents rose by 7.8 per cent over the course of last year, it’s a big driver.”
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