Recognising that his phoney 1.2 million housing target has zero chance of coming to fruition, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has pleaded with state governments and local councils to increase housing density in existing suburbs:
“We know that there have been supply-chain issues as a result of global inflation and as a result of the … pandemic, but we need to put our shoulder to the wheel at all levels of government, including local government, by having appropriate approvals”, Albanese told reporters in Sydney on Friday.
“Mr Albanese’s call for more development followed a report in The Australian Financial Review on Friday revealing home building will grind to its slowest pace in more than a decade in 2024 as the high cost of materials, land and finance makes it harder for developers to build dwellings profitably”, The AFR reported.
“Mr Albanese said there needed to much higher density along Parramatta Road, a 23-kilometre stretch of road in Sydney that cuts through a number of popular inner-west suburbs including Summer Hill, Leichhardt and Ashfield, which are in Mr Albanese’s electorate of Grayndler”.
Maybe Albo should have considered the housing impacts before deciding to open the immigration floodgates under the guise of Labor’s contrived “one million visa backlog”?
In September 2022, the Albanese government held the Jobs & Skills Summit with the explicit purpose of creating a fake consensus to ramp up immigration into Australia.
Labor then lifted immigration to record levels via:
- Extending post-study graduate visas by two years, in turn making student visas more attractive (decision overturned in December 2023).
- Committing $42 million and an extra 400 staff to clear the made up “one million visa backlog” and rubber stamping as many visa applications as possible.
- Raising the permanent non-humanitarian migrant intake by 30,000 to 193,000 (including Pacific Island visas), increasing the likelihood of temporary migrants gaining permanent residency.
- Raising the humanitarian migrant intake to a record high 20,000.
- Approving 66,000 “pandemic event visas” and waiting too long to close the rort down.
- Prioritising offshore visa applicants over onshore.
- Removing a requirement that international students acknowledge that they are not applying for a student visa to migrate to Australia.
- Signing migration agreements allowing Indian students and workers to live in Australia long-term.
Immigration minister Andrew Giles regularly boasted that the government had rubber-stamped record numbers of visas to clear the made-up “visa backlog”.
Below is Andrew Giles on 26 December 2022 boasting about “ramping up processing” of 4 million visa applications in just seven months and nearly halving the contrived backlog:
Below is Giles once again making the same boast in September 2023, while also complaining of housing shortages (you will notice that the backlog hadn’t shrunk any further, despite rubber stamping record numbers of visas):
The result is illustrated in the below charts on Australia’s immigration intake.
The permanent migrant intake increased to an all-time high 213,000 under the Albanese government (including the humanitarian and Pacific Island intakes):
Whereas overall net overseas migration – incorporating both net permanent and temporary intakes – soared to a record high 518,000 in 2022-23:
Now we have the pathetic Anthony Albanese pleading for more housing supply to ameliorate the shortage that he created under his government’s reckless and deliberate ramping of immigration into Australia.
Source: CoreLogic
It’s not like simply easing planning restrictions will magically solve the housing problem.
Hundreds of thousands of homes have been approved for construction but are not being built because it is not financially viable for builders to do so in an environment of high interest rates, high material costs, high builder insolvencies, and chronic labour shortages.
The only viable solution to eradicating the housing shortage is for the Albanese government to slash immigration to a level well below the nation’s capacity to supply new homes and infrastructure.
Instead, we have dishonest Albo claiming that Labor will “halve” immigration to 250,000 over two years, which is still a level that is 30,000 above the average net overseas migration experienced in the 15 years of ‘Big Australia’ migration leading up to the pandemic.
In conclusion, Labor has explicitly promised to maintain historically high net overseas migration into perpetuity while gaslighting Australia’s housing shortage is a supply issue.
With ‘friends’ like Albo’s Labor, Australians struggling to put a roof over their heads sure don’t need enemies.
