Dutton blaming migrants for housing crisis ‘undermined' Coalition at election, Andrew Bragg says

The Guardian

5 days ago

Blaming migrants for housing shortages in Australia alienated voters and badly hurt Peter Dutton's prospects at the federal election, the Coalition frontbencher Andrew Bragg has warned.
The housing crisis and record overseas migration were key issues for voters ahead of the 3 May poll. But Bragg, the shadow minister for housing and homelessness, said the Coalition paid a heavy price for misjudging the politics.
The Liberal vote collapsed, leaving Labor with 94 seats in the House of Representatives and a huge majority.
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'Someone said to me, 'if you're a migrant, you got blamed for the housing crisis. If your parent was a dual national, you could get deported.' And that wasn't a very good starting point for our campaign,' Bragg said.
'It's just not what we're wanting to achieve.'
Bragg made the comments in an interview for the Guardian's Australian Politics podcast, released on Friday.
'We're not wanting to make people feel unwelcome,' he said. 'I'm the child of a migrant myself.
'We love multicultural Australia. A lot of us do a huge amount of engagement with multicultural communities, and it's just a real shame that some of those positions were taken and that some of that engagement was really undermined.'
Bragg criticised Labor for failing to build more houses in its first three years in office, blaming red tape, a drop in housing construction rates and steep population growth for exacerbating the crisis.
Sorry your browser does not support audio - but you can download here and listen $https://audio.guim.co.uk/2025/08/07-86291-AP_ANDREW_BRAGG.mp3
He warned the federal government against intervening in the responsibilities of state and local governments on housing, suggesting commonwealth-state financial arrangements, the National Construction Code and financial incentives should be the focus.
'Ultimately, if they're going to pretend that they are the state government, and they have a planning power, then that would be a fool's errand,' he said. 'They need to focus on what they can control.'
Bragg conceded it was a mistake for the Coalition not to put forward a homelessness policy before the election, promising to do so ahead of the 2028 poll.
'The starting point here on homelessness is you need to build more houses, otherwise you fuel the crisis.
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'Right now, under this government, we have the highest level of homelessness on record. The fact that the government talk about all their housing bureaucracies doesn't actually yield any results. I mean, what matters is actually building houses.'
The housing minister, Clare O'Neil, told ABC radio on Friday Labor remained committed to its target for 1.2m new homes to be built nationally by mid-2029, despite warnings from industry and Treasury that that number could be out of reach.
'I'm doing every single thing that I can as housing minister, federally, to make sure that we meet the target or get as close to it as we can,' O'Neil said.
The federal government itself aims to build 55,000 social and affordable homes by mid-2029. About 2,000 are finished and about 28,000 are in planning or construction.
'The target will depend on lots of different things: it will depend on what state governments do,' O'Neil said.
'It will depend on what interest rates look like. But what I can tell you is that having a big, difficult target is exactly the kind of thinking that is going to need to snap us out of what is a 40-year-old problem confronting our country.'