If you want a textbook example of the lies pervading Australia’s housing crisis, check out the below misinformation from Sky News contributor Joe Hildebrand.
Hildebrand claimed there are “no easy solutions” to the housing supply crisis and that a lot of the new overseas migrants coming to Australia are people who build homes.
“We have to bring in people to fix skill shortages so that we can fix the housing crisis”, he said.
NSW Premier Chris Minns made similar claims late last year.
“We’re supportive of the commonwealth government’s decision to lift immigration into New South Wales”, Minns said.
“A lot of that labour coming into the state will be directed to the housing market, and we need them to build houses and apartments”.
“We can’t produce enough housing for NSW’s needs. One of the reasons for that is labour shortages”.
“So the Albanese government is looking at inbound immigration, a large number of them will be directed to the construction industry”, Minns claimed.
The above circular reasoning reminds me of the below diagram:
They argue that Australia needs to import more migrants to build houses for migrants.
It is a perpetual-motion Ponzi scheme in action.
More worryingly, neither has bothered to examine the types of migrants Australia is importing.
Data compiled by the Grattan Institute showed that a significantly smaller share of migrants work in the construction sector than their Australian-born counterparts:
“About 32% of Australian workers were foreign-born, but only about 24% of workers in building and construction were born overseas”, the Grattan Institute wrote in January.
“And very few recent migrants work in construction. Migrants who arrived in Australia less than five years ago account for just 2.8% of the construction workforce, but account for 4.4% of all workers in Australia”.
Therefore, Australia’s migration system directly contributes to Australia’s housing crisis in two ways.
First, immigration volumes are too high, overwhelming the market’s supply side.
Second, the immigration system is poorly targeted at lower-paid service jobs and does not provide the skills the economy needs.
The fact that Australia’s population has swelled by 8.2 million people (44%) this century alone, yet skills shortages are worse than ever, is empirical evidence of these facts.
Therefore, Australia’s migration system must be calibrated to a level below the nation’s ability to supply homes and infrastructure while safeguarding the natural environment (including water supplies).
We need a migration system that is much smaller in size and better targeted towards the skills we need.
Otherwise, the housing shortage will worsen, and inequality, productivity growth, and living standards will deteriorate.
