On Friday evening, I was interviewed by Sky News’ Erin Molan about last week’s Q4 national accounts release from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) alongside the worsening housing crisis.
Below are highlights from the housing discussion.
Erin Molan:
You talk about living standards, and one of the causes of that is this huge influx of people. Talk to me about immigration and housing and how Labor are failing us?
Leith van Onselen:
I’m not going to beat around the bush here. The housing market in Australia is an absolute disaster.
Domain released some rental vacancy data this week and it showed that Australia’s national rental rate fell to a record low of just 0.7% in February. That’s the lowest on record as I said, it’s tight across the board pretty much everywhere across Australia.
Source: Domain
This has been driven by population increase of nearly 680,000, according to the latest national accounts.
To make matters worse, our housing construction is collapsing. We only built about 170,000 homes last year and the latest dwelling approvals data from the ABS says we’re only going to build 163,000.
That’s 77,000 below the Albanese government’s housing target. So, we’re not even close.
The federal government is growing the population massively at the same time as construction – the supply side – is collapsing.
And I think the question everybody needs to ask the Albanese government is: why have they brought in record numbers of people into Australia without a plan to house them and also to provide infrastructure for them.
Because this is a disaster.
Erin Molan:
It’s not like they potentially didn’t see it coming or they got confused. There’s no way that not only a government but all the departments, all the people they have, all the taxpayer funded jobs that that look into all this kind of stuff, they would have known that we don’t have enough houses for the people coming in.
We don’t have enough houses for the people here. So why do they do it?
I understand the money they get from bringing more people in, but surely they couldn’t see this being anything other than a complete disaster?
Leith van Onselen:
It was absolutely deliberate. They ran the Jobs and Skills Summit in 2022 with the express purpose of ramping-up immigration. And obviously, they did it in a supply-constrained economy.
The reason is that we have high interest rates. Materials costs for building houses have gone through the roof, so builders can’t make a profit.
We also obviously have labour shortages because now builders are competing with state governments to build infrastructure for all these extra people that are coming, which means that we’ve starved the housing construction sector of workers.
As a result, we can’t build enough homes for this record volume of people, which means that we’ve got a rental crisis.
Rents are going through the roof, people have been forced to live in group housing and they’re becoming homeless.
Source: PropTrack
This is firmly on the federal government.
