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News.com.au
24-04-2025
- Politics
- News.com.au
‘We've never been asked': Uncomfortable truth about immigration debate
In October 1996, Prime Minister John Howard sat down in the Sydney studio of 2UE talkback host John Laws for a lengthy discussion about the one subject on everyone's mind — immigration. A month earlier, Pauline Hanson set off a national firestorm when the newly elected Member for Oxley declared in her maiden speech to parliament that the country was 'in danger of being swamped by Asians' who 'have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate'. While her remark is shocking by today's standards, at the time, polls suggested many Australians agreed with her. Mr Howard insisted it was 'inaccurate to say that we are being swamped'. 'We will never go back in this country to having a discriminatory immigration policy based on race,' he told Laws. 'That is gone and I think it is morally, politically and economically in this country's interest that it be gone.' But the then-PM stressed he agreed 'with the reality that we need to have a debate about things like immigration', warning of the danger if 'people feel shut out of the immigration debate'. 'The greatest complaint I have from people, and it's been going on for some years, is, 'Look, we don't feel that we've ever, sort of, been consulted about the level of immigration, we don't feel that we've ever been asked, we don't feel that you lot down there have ever listened, we have this idea that you've all sort of got together and decided it's too hard for us to handle,'' he said. 'People have felt as though it's a bottled-up thing.' A few years later, Mr Howard would oversee the start of Australia's 21st century 'Big Australia' boom, culminating in record post-Covid immigration of more than one million people under Labor — and now an election fight over which party will bring the numbers back under control. For many Australians in 2025, Mr Howard's words ring even truer nearly three decades later, 'We don't feel we've ever been asked.' But as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese faces far-right hecklers on the campaign trail, and migrant communities report rising racist rhetoric, there are echoes of Mr Howard's other warning to Laws. 'In the process of taking the cork out of the bottle we've got to be absolutely certain that the ratbags and the bigots … that they get treated as they deserve to be treated, and that is with contempt,' he said. Changing face of Australia Today nearly one in three people in Australia was born overseas, the highest proportion since before Federation. More than half of the population now was either born overseas or has a parent born overseas. 'In 1901, four of Australia's top five countries of birth were in Europe and one was in Asia,' the ABS states. 'By 2021, one was in Europe and three were in Asia. China was in the top five at Federation due to the attraction of the Gold Rush and a series of internal crises in China from 1849 and 1887. The proportion of people born in China started to decline as the Gold Rush ended and the White Australia policy was enacted.' The growth of the Indian diaspora, in particular, has been explosive. Between 2013 and 2023, Australia's Indian-born population more than doubled from 378,480 to 845,800, overtaking Chinese-born residents — who went from 432,400 to 644,760 — to become the second-largest migrant community making up 3.2 per cent of the total population. 'Since 2001, the main sources of Australia's overseas born population growth have been from those born in India and China,' the ABS states. 'The growth in migrants from these countries is likely due to Australia's strong labour market and university sector as well as Australia's geographic proximity.' In the same 10-year period, the number of residents born in England fell from more than one million to 961,570, while those born in Italy — the only other country in the top 10 to decline — fell from 200,670 to 158,990 — reflecting the ageing of the post-World War II migration wave. 'Key reasons for the fall in European-born populations include moving away from a discriminatory immigration system and assisted migration programs in the 1970s and the European Union's freedom of movement laws, which have made it relatively easier and cheaper for Europeans to access the labour market across Europe,' according to the ABS. 'In addition, Europe's ageing population will lower the number of people who are likely to migrate. An ageing European-born population in Australia has also contributed to the decline in these overseas born populations. For an overseas born population to remain large, constant high levels of migrants from the home country are needed to replace deaths — this is because the children of overseas born people are counted as Australian born.' In 2023-24, the top countries for migrant arrivals were India and China, driven by record numbers of international students on temporary visas. Under the permanent migration program — which only accounts for about 40 per cent of the net overseas migration figure as most granted visas are already in the country — citizens from India, Afghanistan and Pakistan saw the strongest growth last year. Between 2021-22 and 2023-24, 115,317 Indian nationals were granted permanent visas, nearly double the 63,982 permanent migrants from China. 'White extinction anxiety' Public concerns about housing affordability and cost-of-living pressures mask a more uncomfortable reality. The rapid shift in the ethnic makeup of Australia's new arrivals means any opposition to immigration is, unavoidably, tied up in questions of race, religion and culture. 'Anti-immigration discourse has become entrenched in mainstream politics across many Western countries,' Deakin University's Samantha Schneider writes for 'We see it in the United States, since the 2024 election of Donald Trump, and in European countries where political parties such as Alternative for Germany (AfD) and France's National Rally (RN) have platformed anti-immigration policies and sentiments as central to their electoral appeals. Contemporary mainstream conservative anti-immigrant rhetoric includes the scapegoating of immigrants for high rates of youth gang crime, terrorism, and the current housing crises facing various Western countries.' These debates in Australia are 'nothing new' and have 'periodically characterised previous election cycles'. 'Many ordinary Australians are able simultaneously to feel positive about multiculturalism and migrant communities while expressing fears around the perceived impact of population growth resources, for example, in relation to housing, health care and urban amenity,' Ms Schneider writes. 'But for some extreme and radical right social movements in Australia, as elsewhere in the world, concerns around immigration are linked to resource distribution and scarcity. 'These ideas have long been weaponised to support fantasies of racial homogeneity and purity and rigid hierarchies of social value and power in society. Extreme and radical right social movements deploy anti-immigration sentiment as a central plank of their efforts to drive social polarisation, create fear and anxiety about social change, and accelerate the collapse of Australian society to usher in an exclusivist ethno-nationalist state of white Australians.' Ms Schneider said these extreme elements 'elevate the concept of an ultranationalist 'white nation' while simultaneously claiming this imagined 'nation' is under constant siege and attack from ethnic, religious and racial others, producing 'white extinction anxiety''. 'Screaming out for less' One of the most prominent voices among the new online Australian right is Jordan Knight, a former One Nation staffer turned anti-immigration influencer. Mr Knight has amassed tens of thousands of young followers across his Migration Watch social media channels. He first began speaking out on the issue for 'selfish' reasons, after seeing rents fall during Covid border closures and the subsequent resurgence of migration. 'The major concerns for me obviously are housing, homelessness is rising,' he said. 'But it's not even just homelessness, it's quality of life. If your rent is going up faster than you can afford it, you're forced into worse living situations. This is a standards-of-living issue. This brings with it all sorts of second-order consequences [for infrastructure]. If we're growing our population by 500,000 people, 700,000 people a year, but we're not growing our roads, our hospital services, we're not growing out housing market, then they're all going to be under immense strain. What we're seeing is a rapid deterioration of living standards in Australia.' Mr Knight believes immigration is a 'civilisational and existential question'. 'Why are the elites doubling down on mass immigration when most Australians, most westerners, are screaming out for less and less?' he said. 'Partly I believe it's ideological. I think the people who want more immigration are those who are so wealthy that they're typically removed from the effects of immigration. They might not see the impacts on roads, hospitals. Another part of it is people simply make money from it.' And then there's the other elephant in the room — are governments simply importing voters? A Brookings Institute study in the US last year found immigrant voters, even those who identified as socially conservative, leaned heavily Democratic. 'Labor hasn't admitted that they're bringing in migrants because migrants will vote for Labor,' Mr Knight said. 'But if you're in the Labor Party, and you're seeing that your political power will grow on the back of a high migration scheme, you're probably not going to be incentivised to stop it. [Electorates with large migrant voting blocs represent] a Balkanisation of our politics and it just shows that mass immigration really does impact democracy in Australia.' According to Mr Knight, Australians deserve a proper national debate on the role of immigration 'but our leaders aren't listening, they don't want to have that conversation'. 'Australians should [decide], but we've never had a proper discussion or debate or a referendum on its role in Australia,' he said. 'People want cultural compatibility when it comes to immigration, but that's just never discussed. The worst thing that we've ever done as a country is these technocratic leaders have treated immigration as nothing more than a spreadsheet, nothing more than just numbers and words on a page, and losing a certain selectiveness.' He sees rising tensions 'because people feel hard done by'. 'Especially if you see, for example, ongoing protests in Australian cities,' he said. 'If we see clashes between different groups on our streets [from] two countries that we actually have no idea or care about really, then Australians are going to stop and question, like, OK how is this benefiting me? My rent has gone up, my wage hasn't moved in 20 years, my town where I grew up is changing rapidly and I may have to move because it's so expensive, and I can't even take my kids into the city because there's a massive protest now. I was told immigration, multiculturalism was good for me, and actually I'm poorer, my country is less cohesive and my living standards are getting destroyed. So what in this is good for me?' What do Aussies want? Public opinion polls, when they have been conducted, have generally found Australians favour lower immigration. A 2023 survey for Nine Newspapers found 62 per cent of voters felt the intake was too high, and successive polls by The Australian Population Research Institute (TAPRI) have put the figure at 60-80 per cent. The Scanlon Foundation's long-running Mapping Social Cohesion study last year found the share of people who think immigration is too high had increased to 49 per cent, up from 41 per cent pre-Covid. But the findings suggested this was largely linked to concerns economic concerns like housing and cost-of-living, with 85 per cent agreeing 'multiculturalism has been good for Australia'. And of those who said immigration was too high, only 7 per cent said immigration was the most important problem facing Australia, compared with 48 per cent who cited economic issues and 15 per cent pointing to housing shortages and affordability. Overall just 4 per cent thought immigration was the biggest problem facing Australia. Monash University Emeritus Professor Andrew Markus, who pioneered the Scanlon Index of Social Cohesion in 2007, said it was clear from the numbers that immigration was not the 'major issue' for most Australians. 'Now the economy is tied in with immigration as well, but, top-of-mind issue? The Scanlon survey is not finding that,' he said. 'You also need to get a broader perspective, if you look at the long term … it's not unusual to get 40-45 per cent, that would probably be the normal benchmark for immigration being too high.' Prof Markus argued that whatever their views, 'for a lot of people' immigration amounted to 'so, what?' — having little real impact on their day-to-day life. 'So it's the sort of question where you're never going to get 80 per cent of people saying it's wonderful,' he said. Notably, the Scanlon Foundation survey found concerns about more than four in five (83 per cent) people were opposed to Australia rejecting migrants on the basis of their ethnicity or race, while a similar proportion (79 per cent) were opposed to rejecting on the basis of religion. '[In the 1980s there was] a majority negative view towards immigration,' said Prof Markus. 'There were a number of polls then, and that got caught up with the Asian issue, which was highly politicised, because Australia came out of the White Australia policy not much earlier than '88. Probably in real terms we didn't really move away from that policy until the late '70s with Vietnamese migration. That was probably the first major break within that. We've really moved away from that now. It's not so much about ethnicity or religion, it's much more about the economic impact.' TAPRI founder Bob Birrell has been researching public attitudes on immigration since the 1980s. His most recent poll found just 11 per cent wanted the current high numbers to continue, while overall only 27 per cent said Australia needs more people. More than three quarters believed adding more people pushes up the cost of housing. Like Prof Markus, Mr Birrell says it's unclear whether immigration is a vote changer, despite the increasing noise on the campaign trail. 'Immigration [in Australia] has not become a telling political issue as is recently the case in Britain and much of western Europe because our migration flow, though much higher than people would like, has not been accompanied by high levels of illegal migration, open community conflict or terrorism,' he said. 'In other words, people don't like the Australian migration outcomes but it's not high enough on the political attention scale to change votes.' 'They don't like diversity' In direct contrast to the Scanlon Foundation findings, TAPRI's poll uncovered significant pushback to the core tenets of Australia's non-discriminatory migration policies — a shift which Mr Birrell attributes to rising community tensions in the wake of the Israel-Gaza war. Fifty-nine per cent of respondents said selection policy 'should include a migrant's ability to fit into the Australian community', while only 28 per cent said 'religion, values and way of life should not affect selection decisions'. 'The big change is the effect of community-based opposition to Israel representing the Palestinian community and expressing their concerns in anti-Semitic language,' Mr Birrell said. 'That's frightening to people who regard themselves as one Australia. That is the priority, that we should stick together as one nation and not be breaking down into [ethnic factions]. That's very strongly held in the majority of the electorate, and the same attitudes are held by a big majority of European and English-speaking migrants as well. They're just as critical of multiculturalism as the Australian-born. They simply don't like diversity, even though they're a part of the diversity. Multiculturalism in a sense for them is dead. They aspire primarily to be Australians.' Mr Birrell said it was striking that voters were now comfortable speaking about migration in these terms. 'The upsurge in community-based agitation in relation to the Palestinian issue does seem to have created a new sense of concern,' he said. 'The majority of people were quite willing to say that they didn't agree with the fundamental core of multiculturalism, which is above all we must accept diversity regardless of people's origins.' Prof Markus disagreed. 'One of the things I look for is that indication of heightened hostility, and there isn't much evidence of that,' he said. 'It's not like the 1980s when there was a big debate about Asian immigration, and there were times when [there was a debate] about immigrations from Africa, in the 1990s and early 2000s, again we don't have that.' But he warned 'Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, those sort of issues are important'. 'Conflicts in the university environment I think are very significant,' he said. 'The level of fear that we have in sections of our Australian community, that's certainly not normative. Obviously, if you talk to people in the Jewish community, they would say that it's pretty much unprecedented.' Dr Abul Rizvi, former deputy secretary of the Immigration Department, warned any change to Australia's non-discriminatory migration program would only further threaten social cohesion. 'I guess the question would be, how would you do that?' he said. 'Trump wanted a Muslim ban, for example — is that what we're talking about? He's now said, well we're going to ban migrants from certain countries — is that what we're talking about? The definition of what you would do remains vague to me. Unless someone could sit down and say this is what I mean, it's all just wafting in the wind. I hate to use the phrase dog-whistling but that's what it seems like to me.' Dr Rizvi said America and Europe, with their low fertility rates, faced a bleak future if they 'move down that path'. 'The fact is over the next 20, 30, 40 years, the competition for young skilled migrants of any colour will keep intensifying,' he said. 'People are kidding themselves if they think it will go away. China will enter the immigration market, they'll have to. They're not going to sit back and say we're going to halve our population.'
Herald Sun
21-04-2025
- Business
- Herald Sun
‘Australian nightmare': Crisis we can't ignore
Don't miss out on the headlines from Economy. Followed categories will be added to My News. Whether you're for it or against it, it's undeniable that by virtually any metric, Australia is in the midst of an unprecedented experiment with mass immigration. The figures are striking. Between 2000 and 2023, Australia's population grew by 40 per cent — the fastest rate of any developed nation. More than 30 per cent of Australia's population in 2023 was born overseas, for the first time since 1893. For every one baby born in Australia now, four migrants arrive. And many of those babies are themselves born to migrants. The overseas-born population bottomed out at 9.8 per cent in 1947 and has been climbing steadily ever since, in almost a V-shaped recolonisation. The overseas-born population bottomed out at 9.8 per cent in 1947 and has been growing ever since. Picture: ABS In the 60 years after World War II, net overseas migration — arrivals minus departures — averaged 90,000 per year. Despite large influxes of migrants from Europe after the war, that figure only reached 150,000 twice in those six decades. When John Howard kicked off the 'Big Australia' boom in the early noughties, net overseas migration more than doubled from its historical average. But that was just a taste of what was to come. After Covid, net overseas migration skyrocketed to an eye-watering record of 536,000 people in 2022-23, dipping slightly to 446,000 in 2023-24. 'We're not against migration,' said Frank Carbone, Mayor of multicultural Fairfield in Sydney's west. 'Migration is the foundation this country has been built on — but it's always been a sensible, regulated policy. At the moment it feels like the policy under Albanese has been unregulated and uncontrolled. It's one of the biggest mistakes I've ever seen in public life.' The surge has been driven by international students, who make up the vast bulk of temporary migration numbers. A record 197,000 arrived in February alone and there are now more than 850,000 in the country. Australia's cities are bursting at the seams. Picture: Justin Lloyd The permanent migration program, currently set at 185,000 places, is a smaller contributor to net overseas migration, since 60 per cent of granted visas are already living in the country — of those, around 25,000 a year are former 'temporary' students. Today, a new migrant arrives to live in Australia every 44 seconds — that's nearly 2000 people per day, or more than four full Boeing 747s. All the while, Australia's birthrate continues to fall, now at a record low of 1.5 per woman. The birthrate fell below replacement level of 2.1 in 1976 and never recovered. With zero net overseas migration, Australia's population would be declining. But at the current rate, the country is adding nearly a Canberra every year. The federal budget forecasts another 1.8 million people over the next five years — roughly an Adelaide and a Hobart. In the next 40 years, Australia's population is officially tipped to grow by 13.5 million — another Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane — to reach 41.2 million by 2065. And that number, from the Centre for Population's 2024 Population Statement, assumes net overseas migration of only 235,000 per year. Both major parties have vowed to reduce migration in the face of growing public backlash — Labor by a bit, the Coalition by a bit more — and build more homes. Mayor Frank Carbone says 'Fairfield is full'. Picture: Richard Dobson 'Australian nightmare' As hundreds of thousands of migrants arrive every few months, more than half of them settling in Sydney and Melbourne, many young families are leaving. In Sydney, which now has the second least affordable housing in the world second only to Hong Kong, the exodus in recent years has been stark. NSW saw net overseas migration of 120,073 (202,781 arrivals and 82,708 departures) in the 12 months to September 30, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). In the same period, a net 29,505 people left NSW for other states (81,410 arrivals and 110,915 departures). Fairfield has been dubbed Australia's 'refugee capital', settling roughly half of the country's humanitarian migrants from countries including Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. 'All I can say is Fairfield's full,' said Mayor Carbone, an independent. 'There isn't an empty house, there's nothing available for anybody. Fairfield is on the outskirts — I can only imagine what it's like everywhere else.' Mr Carbone said every country 'needs a migration policy but it needs to be a sensible, sustainable policy'. 'What we've had over the past few years with more than one million people coming in has had a huge impact on the quality of life for every Australian,' he said. Fairfield has been dubbed Australia's 'refugee capital'. Picture: Fairfield City Council 'It's put pressure on housing, pressure on rents and general cost of living. Quite clearly the government has made a huge mistake, because what I see in the street is people competing for the most important things in life that we need and should all be able to have — housing, food, energy.' Mr Carbone said those necessities had grown unaffordable for working people, pensioners and 'even for those migrants who've come in and the government's just dumped at our doorstep'. 'It's quite clear with the huge increase that the government has brought in that this has put our economy out of step,' he said. 'I'm not talking about the bottom line or the GDP. It might suit Treasury to have higher numbers but it doesn't suit our community. Everyone realises we can't build enough houses to accommodate one million coming in overnight.' Growing up in Fairfield, Mr Carbone said it was a place immigrants would settle 'but it was a place of opportunity as was the whole country, where you knew if you worked hard you could build a better future and you could have home ownership'. 'They've turned the Australian dream of owning a home and raising a family into an Australian nightmare quite simply because they were more worried about the bottom line,' he said. A long rental inspection queue on the Gold Coast. Picture: Bronte Elsmore/TikTok Housing's big squeeze Labor has promised to build 1.2 million new homes by 2029, or 240,000 a year. The Coalition claims it will build 500,000 homes 'more quickly' under its plan. Labor is aiming to bring net overseas migration of 230,000 over the long-term, and is forecasting 260,000 this financial year. Opposition leader Peter Dutton vows the Coalition would slash numbers to 160,000 'straight away'. 'At the moment the forecast net overseas migration for the next five years comes to an outcome below the number of additional houses that the government has said in its plan it will build,' said Dr Abul Rizvi, former deputy secretary of the Immigration Department. 'If those two forecasts are realised we will actually have a surplus of houses. That's the crucial question.' Dr Shane Oliver, chief economist and head of investment strategy at AMP, insists tying immigration to housing capacity is 'just a statement of the obvious'. He argues solving the housing crisis will require both cutting back demand by lowering immigration, at the same time as boosting supply. 'The problem is that with immigration at one stage being above 500,000 and population growth of about 650,000, in that situation you need to build about 250,000 homes a year,' he said. Australia currently builds about 180,000 homes a year — including houses and units — 'if we're lucky', with the past few years seeing around 160,000 to 170,000 completions. Labor has promised to build 1.2 million homes by 2029. Picture: David Gray/AFP 'The highest we ever got to was about 225,000 in the unit building boom between 2015 and 2019,' Dr Oliver said. The rate of new home building since Covid has been nowhere near fast enough. In 2023-24, building approvals fell by 8.8 per cent to just 158,690 new starts, the lowest level in more than a decade. Assuming an average of 2.5 people per household, Australia had a shortfall of 62,000 homes to accommodate population growth last financial year — although this was an improvement on 2022-23, when the shortfall was 110,000. The undersupply was greatest in Western Australia where just 48 per cent of new homes needed were built, followed by the Northern Territory (56 per cent), Queensland (61 per cent), NSW (74 per cent) and Victoria (82 per cent). Only Tasmania and the ACT built enough homes to keep up. 'The government is forecasting population growth to fall over the coming years to a level at which it should be possible to construct enough new housing,' PropTrack senior economist Anne Flaherty said. 'The difficulty, however, will be making up for the deficit in new homes built in recent years. The government is focused on increasing supply, however it's not an immediate fix. Building homes where people want to live is critical but will take time.' Australia has built up a shortfall of 200,000 to 300,000 homes. Picture: Getty Images Starting from when annual net overseas migration spiked in the second half of the 2000s — without a corresponding increase in home building — Australia has built up a chronic shortage of housing that gets bigger every year. 'That led to this ongoing trend of chronically high home prices in relation to people's income,' Dr Oliver said. AMP estimates the current shortfall is between 200,000 to 300,000 dwellings. 'Basically if you get [net overseas migration] back to about 200,000, and allowing for population growth and demolitions, you're probably needing to build about 180,000 dwellings in that situation anyway,' he said. If immigration is cut back to 200,000 and 240,000 homes per year are built, 'over five years I reckon we probably would have gotten on top of the housing shortage'. 'After that point then we should calibrate the level of immigration to the capacity of the home building industry to supply homes,' he said. 'Longer term we need to try and decentralise to take pressure off our capital cities. We did start to see a mini version of that through the pandemic when working from home allowed more people to move to regional centres. That sort of stopped in its tracks when people were told to come back to the office.' AMP's Shane Oliver says tying immigration to housing is 'obvious'. Picture: Supplied Experts have warned that the signature housing policies from the major parties — Labor has proposed 5 per cent deposits for all first home buyers, the Coalition would allow accessing superannuation — would simply increase demand. 'It just makes the situation worse and pushes the price up,' said Dr Oliver. 'The only beneficiaries are old people like me. Maybe it benefits the 11 million voters who already have a house, but it's not a long-term sustainable situation. Probably the single biggest cause of social dissatisfaction in Australia is this gap between the haves and have-nots with respect to housing. You have to get it fixed.' A report from REA Group last month found rental affordability in Australia had plunged to its lowest level on record. Since the start of the Covid pandemic in March 2020, rents nationally are up 48 per cent, far outstripping income growth of 19 per cent. NSW renters face the worst affordability of any state — median advertised rents in Sydney have surged by $230 since Covid to $730 per week, or nearly $12,000 extra a year. Several studies have sought to debunk any link between international students and the rental crisis. Official data shows, however, that recent migrants, both permanent and temporary, are more likely to be renters. According to the ABS, 60 per cent of recent permanent arrivals rented in the five years to 2021, and Census data in 2021 showed 65 per cent of temporary migrants were renters. Most immigrants 'don't go into home building'. Picture: Brendon Thorne/Bloomberg via Getty Images 'More immigrants to build homes' Dr Oliver said commentators 'get tangled in knots saying we need more immigrants to build the homes' but the numbers simply didn't add up. Migrants, and particularly international students, are less likely to work in construction than most other industries. So the problem is one of both supply and demand. Migration contributes to both — but at the moment, too much from column B, too little from column A. 'Most don't go into home building,' Dr Oliver said. 'You [could] skew the visa requirements under the skilled category to give preference to people with home building skills … but most of the time we find the net impact is one that worsens the undersupply problem when immigrants arrive. I think immigration has been a very good thing for Australia, but you need to get the balance right.' Master Builders Australia (MBA) forecasts the construction industry will need an additional 130,000 workers to meet Labor's 1.2 million home target 'by the skin of its teeth'. The Housing Industry Association (HIA) puts the shortfall at 83,000 tradies. Home building times have doubled in 10 years. Picture: Brenton Edwards/NCA NewsWire Industry groups argue some of those workers will need to come through skilled migration. Unlike New Zealand, Canada and the UK, Australia has no dedicated trade visa stream. MBA has called for streamlining visa pathways, embracing mutual recognition of qualifications from overseas, lowering English-language requirements for some non-licensed trades, and offering fast-track to permanent residency. Even if demand is reduced by lowering immigration, building more homes, as both parties have promised, won't be easy. Increasing state and local red tape, labour shortages — particularly apprentices — rising materials costs and record numbers of developers going under have made it harder than ever to build new homes. Approval times have blown out, and the time it takes from approval to completion has roughly doubled compared with 10 years ago. A block of units now takes an average of 2.8 years to build, while stand-alone houses take about one year and four months, compared with seven months in 2015. The HIA says it may as well be called a 'house and tax package'. Picture: HIA The HIA, in a report last month, found half the cost of a new house and land package in Sydney was government taxes, regulatory costs and charges — to the tune of $576,000. For a new apartment that number was $346,000, or 38 per cent of the cost. Housing taxation has doubled in just five years, according to the HIA analysis, at precisely the worst time. 'It is incongruous that governments set home building targets, while at the same time tax new home building even more,' HIA chief economist Tim Reardon said. Dr Oliver said the HIA's analysis was correct. '[Tying immigration to housing capacity] does sound a bit like central planning but the problem is the housing industry has been so affected by government intervention — [it would be] just a more rational form of government intervention,' he said. 'Immigration is something that's always controlled by the government, and so is the ease with which people can build homes. It's just a statement of the obvious.' Originally published as 'Australian nightmare': Crisis we can't ignore
News.com.au
21-04-2025
- Politics
- News.com.au
‘Australian nightmare': Crisis we can't ignore
Whether you're for it or against it, it's undeniable that by virtually any metric, Australia is in the midst of an unprecedented experiment with mass immigration. The figures are striking. Between 2000 and 2023, Australia's population grew by 40 per cent — the fastest rate of any developed nation. More than 30 per cent of Australia's population in 2023 was born overseas, for the first time since 1893. For every one baby born in Australia now, four migrants arrive. And many of those babies are themselves born to migrants. The overseas-born population bottomed out at 9.8 per cent in 1947 and has been climbing steadily ever since, in almost a V-shaped recolonisation. In the 60 years after World War II, net overseas migration — arrivals minus departures — averaged 90,000 per year. Despite large influxes of migrants from Europe after the war, that figure only reached 150,000 twice in those six decades. When John Howard kicked off the 'Big Australia' boom in the early noughties, net overseas migration more than doubled from its historical average. But that was just a taste of what was to come. After Covid, net overseas migration skyrocketed to an eye-watering record of 536,000 people in 2022-23, dipping slightly to 446,000 in 2023-24. 'We're not against migration,' said Frank Carbone, Mayor of multicultural Fairfield in Sydney's west. 'Migration is the foundation this country has been built on — but it's always been a sensible, regulated policy. At the moment it feels like the policy under Albanese has been unregulated and uncontrolled. It's one of the biggest mistakes I've ever seen in public life.' The surge has been driven by international students, who make up the vast bulk of temporary migration numbers. A record 197,000 arrived in February alone and there are now more than 850,000 in the country. The permanent migration program, currently set at 185,000 places, is a smaller contributor to net overseas migration, since 60 per cent of granted visas are already living in the country — of those, around 25,000 a year are former 'temporary' students. Today, a new migrant arrives to live in Australia every 44 seconds — that's nearly 2000 people per day, or more than four full Boeing 747s. All the while, Australia's birthrate continues to fall, now at a record low of 1.5 per woman. The birthrate fell below replacement level of 2.1 in 1976 and never recovered. With zero net overseas migration, Australia's population would be declining. But at the current rate, the country is adding nearly a Canberra every year. The federal budget forecasts another 1.8 million people over the next five years — roughly an Adelaide and a Hobart. In the next 40 years, Australia's population is officially tipped to grow by 13.5 million — another Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane — to reach 41.2 million by 2065. And that number, from the Centre for Population's 2024 Population Statement, assumes net overseas migration of only 235,000 per year. Both major parties have vowed to reduce migration in the face of growing public backlash — Labor by a bit, the Coalition by a bit more — and build more homes. 'Australian nightmare' As hundreds of thousands of migrants arrive every few months, more than half of them settling in Sydney and Melbourne, many young families are leaving. In Sydney, which now has the second least affordable housing in the world second only to Hong Kong, the exodus in recent years has been stark. NSW saw net overseas migration of 120,073 (202,781 arrivals and 82,708 departures) in the 12 months to September 30, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). In the same period, a net 29,505 people left NSW for other states (81,410 arrivals and 110,915 departures). Fairfield has been dubbed Australia's 'refugee capital', settling roughly half of the country's humanitarian migrants from countries including Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. 'All I can say is Fairfield's full,' said Mayor Carbone, an independent. 'There isn't an empty house, there's nothing available for anybody. Fairfield is on the outskirts — I can only imagine what it's like everywhere else.' Mr Carbone said every country 'needs a migration policy but it needs to be a sensible, sustainable policy'. 'What we've had over the past few years with more than one million people coming in has had a huge impact on the quality of life for every Australian,' he said. 'It's put pressure on housing, pressure on rents and general cost of living. Quite clearly the government has made a huge mistake, because what I see in the street is people competing for the most important things in life that we need and should all be able to have — housing, food, energy.' Mr Carbone said those necessities had grown unaffordable for working people, pensioners and 'even for those migrants who've come in and the government's just dumped at our doorstep'. 'It's quite clear with the huge increase that the government has brought in that this has put our economy out of step,' he said. 'I'm not talking about the bottom line or the GDP. It might suit Treasury to have higher numbers but it doesn't suit our community. Everyone realises we can't build enough houses to accommodate one million coming in overnight.' Growing up in Fairfield, Mr Carbone said it was a place immigrants would settle 'but it was a place of opportunity as was the whole country, where you knew if you worked hard you could build a better future and you could have home ownership'. 'They've turned the Australian dream of owning a home and raising a family into an Australian nightmare quite simply because they were more worried about the bottom line,' he said. Housing's big squeeze Labor has promised to build 1.2 million new homes by 2029, or 240,000 a year. The Coalition claims it will build 500,000 homes 'more quickly' under its plan. Labor is aiming to bring net overseas migration of 230,000 over the long-term, and is forecasting 260,000 this financial year. Opposition leader Peter Dutton vows the Coalition would slash numbers to 160,000 'straight away'. 'At the moment the forecast net overseas migration for the next five years comes to an outcome below the number of additional houses that the government has said in its plan it will build,' said Dr Abul Rizvi, former deputy secretary of the Immigration Department. 'If those two forecasts are realised we will actually have a surplus of houses. That's the crucial question.' Dr Shane Oliver, chief economist and head of investment strategy at AMP, insists tying immigration to housing capacity is 'just a statement of the obvious'. He argues solving the housing crisis will require both cutting back demand by lowering immigration, at the same time as boosting supply. 'The problem is that with immigration at one stage being above 500,000 and population growth of about 650,000, in that situation you need to build about 250,000 homes a year,' he said. Australia currently builds about 180,000 homes a year — including houses and units — 'if we're lucky', with the past few years seeing around 160,000 to 170,000 completions. 'The highest we ever got to was about 225,000 in the unit building boom between 2015 and 2019,' Dr Oliver said. The rate of new home building since Covid has been nowhere near fast enough. In 2023-24, building approvals fell by 8.8 per cent to just 158,690 new starts, the lowest level in more than a decade. Assuming an average of 2.5 people per household, Australia had a shortfall of 62,000 homes to accommodate population growth last financial year — although this was an improvement on 2022-23, when the shortfall was 110,000. The undersupply was greatest in Western Australia where just 48 per cent of new homes needed were built, followed by the Northern Territory (56 per cent), Queensland (61 per cent), NSW (74 per cent) and Victoria (82 per cent). Only Tasmania and the ACT built enough homes to keep up. 'The government is forecasting population growth to fall over the coming years to a level at which it should be possible to construct enough new housing,' PropTrack senior economist Anne Flaherty said. 'The difficulty, however, will be making up for the deficit in new homes built in recent years. The government is focused on increasing supply, however it's not an immediate fix. Building homes where people want to live is critical but will take time.' Starting from when annual net overseas migration spiked in the second half of the 2000s — without a corresponding increase in home building — Australia has built up a chronic shortage of housing that gets bigger every year. 'That led to this ongoing trend of chronically high home prices in relation to people's income,' Dr Oliver said. AMP estimates the current shortfall is between 200,000 to 300,000 dwellings. 'Basically if you get [net overseas migration] back to about 200,000, and allowing for population growth and demolitions, you're probably needing to build about 180,000 dwellings in that situation anyway,' he said. If immigration is cut back to 200,000 and 240,000 homes per year are built, 'over five years I reckon we probably would have gotten on top of the housing shortage'. 'After that point then we should calibrate the level of immigration to the capacity of the home building industry to supply homes,' he said. 'Longer term we need to try and decentralise to take pressure off our capital cities. We did start to see a mini version of that through the pandemic when working from home allowed more people to move to regional centres. That sort of stopped in its tracks when people were told to come back to the office.' Experts have warned that the signature housing policies from the major parties — Labor has proposed 5 per cent deposits for all first home buyers, the Coalition would allow accessing superannuation — would simply increase demand. 'It just makes the situation worse and pushes the price up,' said Dr Oliver. 'The only beneficiaries are old people like me. Maybe it benefits the 11 million voters who already have a house, but it's not a long-term sustainable situation. Probably the single biggest cause of social dissatisfaction in Australia is this gap between the haves and have-nots with respect to housing. You have to get it fixed.' A report from REA Group last month found rental affordability in Australia had plunged to its lowest level on record. Since the start of the Covid pandemic in March 2020, rents nationally are up 48 per cent, far outstripping income growth of 19 per cent. NSW renters face the worst affordability of any state — median advertised rents in Sydney have surged by $230 since Covid to $730 per week, or nearly $12,000 extra a year. Several studies have sought to debunk any link between international students and the rental crisis. Official data shows, however, that recent migrants, both permanent and temporary, are more likely to be renters. According to the ABS, 60 per cent of recent permanent arrivals rented in the five years to 2021, and Census data in 2021 showed 65 per cent of temporary migrants were renters. 'More immigrants to build homes' Dr Oliver said commentators 'get tangled in knots saying we need more immigrants to build the homes' but the numbers simply didn't add up. Migrants, and particularly international students, are less likely to work in construction than most other industries. So the problem is one of both supply and demand. Migration contributes to both — but at the moment, too much from column B, too little from column A. 'Most don't go into home building,' Dr Oliver said. 'You [could] skew the visa requirements under the skilled category to give preference to people with home building skills … but most of the time we find the net impact is one that worsens the undersupply problem when immigrants arrive. I think immigration has been a very good thing for Australia, but you need to get the balance right.' Master Builders Australia (MBA) forecasts the construction industry will need an additional 130,000 workers to meet Labor's 1.2 million home target 'by the skin of its teeth'. The Housing Industry Association (HIA) puts the shortfall at 83,000 tradies. Industry groups argue some of those workers will need to come through skilled migration. Unlike New Zealand, Canada and the UK, Australia has no dedicated trade visa stream. MBA has called for streamlining visa pathways, embracing mutual recognition of qualifications from overseas, lowering English-language requirements for some non-licensed trades, and offering fast-track to permanent residency. Even if demand is reduced by lowering immigration, building more homes, as both parties have promised, won't be easy. Increasing state and local red tape, labour shortages — particularly apprentices — rising materials costs and record numbers of developers going under have made it harder than ever to build new homes. Approval times have blown out, and the time it takes from approval to completion has roughly doubled compared with 10 years ago. A block of units now takes an average of 2.8 years to build, while stand-alone houses take about one year and four months, compared with seven months in 2015. The HIA, in a report last month, found half the cost of a new house and land package in Sydney was government taxes, regulatory costs and charges — to the tune of $576,000. For a new apartment that number was $346,000, or 38 per cent of the cost. Housing taxation has doubled in just five years, according to the HIA analysis, at precisely the worst time. 'It is incongruous that governments set home building targets, while at the same time tax new home building even more,' HIA chief economist Tim Reardon said. Dr Oliver said the HIA's analysis was correct. '[Tying immigration to housing capacity] does sound a bit like central planning but the problem is the housing industry has been so affected by government intervention — [it would be] just a more rational form of government intervention,' he said. 'Immigration is something that's always controlled by the government, and so is the ease with which people can build homes. It's just a statement of the obvious.'
