‘Asleep at the wheel': Ben Fordham unleashes on Anthony Albanese for torching housing targets with excessive immigration intake

Sky News AU

a day ago

Ben Fordham has blasted Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in a fiery verbal spray, accusing the government of undermining its own housing targets by allowing in record levels of migrants.
Sky News uncovered on Wednesday that the Albanese government would fail to reach it's target of constructing 1.2 million new homes over five years, with forecasts putting Australia 260,000 short by the deadline of June 2029.
The State of the Housing System 20205 report forecast the government would only build 938,000 new homes by June 2029, well short of the 1.2 million repeatedly touted by the Prime Minister.
Speaking to Sky News, Urban Development Institute of Australia President Col Dutton said that the UDIA National analysis found that Australia 'will actually undershoot the Housing Accord target by up to 400,000 homes', and that the accelerated immigration program had only made matters worse.
Fordham said the Albanese government was deceiving the Australian public if it continued to tout its promise of constructing 1.2 million homes over five years, and that the current rates of immigration were untenable.
'The Albanese government promised to build more houses, today they're building less. They promised to lower immigration, today, they're bringing in more,' Fordham said on his 2GB breakfast program.
'The PM will tell us he's bringing down the migration numbers,' referencing the government's move to limit international student arrivals and 'building as many homes as he can, but we're not seeing it'.
Fordham said Australia's housing build was "going backwards" due to the immigration surge.
He said while Australians were not ant-immigration the "speed and the size" of the government's intake had caused angst in the community.
Mr Dutton said factoring in immigration, UDIA data projections showed that the net losses in housing had ballooned to more than 1,500 every week.
'We simply can't build the houses fast enough. What we need is a sharp focus on skilled migration and coordination of housing supply policy with immigration numbers.'
He also stated that the construction industry was being strangled by a myriad of challenges including rigid regulations and red tape, approval delays and a lack of coordination between all levels of governments on environmental laws.
'Supply is being choked by development approvals processes through councils and state governments, lack of funding for enabling infrastructure to service development ready land and cumbersome environmental approval processes lacking a coordinated approach between all levels of government," he said.
ABS dwelling completion data showed that Australia had built only 166,000 homes in 2024, with 446,000 net overseas migrants entering the country that same year.
With an average of 2.5 people per household, this created a housing shortage of roughly 12,400 in 2024 alone, separate from the existing shortfall.