Earlier this month I reported that the Andrews Victorian Government had only added 74 units to the state’s public housing stock in four years, despite a 45% increase in the social housing waiting list.
Victoria also has the lowest amount of social housing in Australia, accounting for just 3% of all residences. The national average is 4.2%, which is considered poor by global standards.
Extreme immigration, combined with a lack of government investment in social and public housing, is driving the state’s housing shortage.
After adding an insane 1.5 million people this century, the May federal budget forecast that Victoria’s population will increase by an astounding 694,000 over the five years to 2026-27:
Source: 2023 federal budget
As a result, Victoria is expected to add the equivalent of 1.5 Canberra’s population in under five years, despite a lack of infrastructure and housing to sustain this growth.
Based on historical population settlement patterns, around 500,000 of this population expansion will arrive in Melbourne during those five years.
In May, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews acknowledged that a lack of housing supply for driving up rents.
“Anybody who is applying for a rental and finds that they’re one of 25 different applications or 50 even … they can tell you there’s not enough supply”, he said.
“That’s why we need to make better decisions and make them faster”.
Then this month, Andrews told Riccardo Schirru from the Italian-language community newspaper Il Globo that he wants the federal government to ramp immigration even higher, despite the acute housing shortage:
“We need to do more as a nation to recruit more of those people to come here, not just for a job, but to build a new life because we all benefit from that. So, I’ve always been a very strong supporter of more skilled migration”.
“And the new federal government have taken some important steps towards increasing the amount of permanent skilled migration, but I think they might need to do more again”.
“Prime minister Albanese knows this. I’ve spoken to him about it personally and part of it also is clearing the Visa backlog”.
“There were nearly a million Visa applications sitting in an in-tray waiting to be processed. It does take some time, but I know Andrew Giles – my good friend and another Victorian – he’s the minister for immigration, is working very hard on that”.
Thus, Andrews actively wants to make Victoria’s housing (rental) shortage even worse.
With this background in mind, Dan Andrews has turned to policy gimmicks, telling reporters on Sunday that his government is working on a housing package that is expected to allow landlords to lift rent only once every two years, and potentially impose caps on any rent increase.
Andrews’ proposed rental freeze is a distraction from the fact that his government has failed dismally to provide enough public housing, infrastructure and services for the state’s swelling population. Yet Andrews wants even more overseas migration!
Any rental freeze also risks thwarting supply, making the structural housing shortage even worse.
