Andrew Bolt last night entered the housing affordability debate, questioning why politicians on both sides are ignoring the role of excessive immigration in pushing-up home prices and shutting younger Australians out of the housing market:
Bolt: “Politicians on both sides are dodging one of the real reasons that house prices in the cities are going through the roof. And the Prime Minister today dodged it too.
Malcolm Turnbull: “It’s very clear what the cause is [of unaffordable housing]: we simply have not been building enough dwellings. You have failure to meet demand year after year and you get the consequences”.
Bolt: “No. The real problem is not that there aren’t enough houses. It is that every year, there are even more people wanting one. The real problem is immigration. For more than a decade now, we have been bringing in massive numbers of immigrants… [it’s] historically high. Those are all people who need a home to rent or to buy. And many are competing with Australians for homes in exactly the areas – the city areas – that are seeing prices explode. As the Treasurer today admitted when questioned”.
Scott Morrison: “When immigrants have come to major cities all around the world, they have tended to congregate around inner city areas. That has been one of the most established settlement practices for a millennia”.
Bolt: “So given that, why does the government keep bringing in hundreds of thousands of people a year driving-up the demand for houses and sending prices high? Well, Morrison today claimed because it makes us richer”.
Scott Morrison: “Our population growth has also been one of the critical factors that has underpinned our economic growth for the last 25 years”.
Bolt: “Now, having more people does make the country richer as a whole – we make more stuff, etc. But that wealth then has to be divided among more of us. And when you do that, you get…[less] wealth per person”… That wealth has been dropping very fast the very time that immigration has been ramped-up… Add the other costs of mass immigration – the crowded roads, hospitals, public transport… the question then becomes why are we importing so many people? And will Scott Morrison fix that?”
It’s hard to disagree with Bolt’s reasoning.
Since John Howard initially opened the immigration floodgates in 2003, Australia’s population has grown at nearly 2.5 times the OECD average (see next chart).
Sydney’s population is also projected to rise by 85,000 people per year to 6.4 million over the next 20-years – effectively adding another Perth to the city’s population:
Melbourne’s population is projected to balloon by nearly 75% over the next 35 years to more than 8 million people:
With the flood of new migrants projected to inundate Sydney and Melbourne, housing affordability will obviously remain under immense pressure.
None of this is rocket science. So why are the three major political parties – the Coalition, Labor and the Greens – ignoring the population elephant?
