SBS might as well be a taxpayer-funded lobbyist for Big Australia immigration given the propaganda that it continuously runs on the issue.
A case in point is this article, in which SBS Punjabi sought the views of prominent immigration propagandist and managing director of the Australian Housing and Research Institute, Michael Fotheringham, to discredit the notion that record levels of immigration are driving the rental crisis.
Fotheringham instead pins the blame for the rental crisis on too little group housing:
“We are consuming more houses for the number of people we have. That is a bigger driver for shortfall in housing than migration”.
“The number of people per household is decreasing. Australia is increasingly becoming a nation of single-person or two-person residences, with more than half of households consisting of just one or two people”.
“Of course, the more people we have feeds into the imbalance but it’s a lot more complex than that”.
“If the trend continues, Australia could be short on houses for the existing population, let alone for migrants”.
Fotheringham conveniently ignores that nearly one million net overseas migrants have landed in Australia in the past two calendar years, and that this is the primary driver of the collapse in the rental vacancy rate and surge in rents.
Moreover, more Australians than ever are living in group homes:
More than 350,000 Australians are living as part of a group household according to data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) — more than ever before.
While the ABS defines group housing as a household consisting of two unrelated people where all the residents are aged 15 years or older, they’re also referred to as share houses.
Demand for this type of accommodation has skyrocketed amid an exceedingly tight rental market and affordability crisis — and it’s left people looking for alternatives.
With an ageing population, it is natural for the number of people per dwelling to shrink as there are more empty nesters. Does Fotheringham expect children to live with their parents forever?
Fotheringham also wrongly claims that most overseas migrants are foreign students living in student accommodation and, therefore, don’t compete with locals for housing:
Fotheringham said the majority of migrants are temporary migrants, most of whom are students and rely on accommodation offered by universities or other rentals.
This is a different market to the private home ownership market, he said.
This is categorically false. At least 400,000 international students have landed on the private rental market:
Australia’s biggest universities are failing to provide 80% of their foreign students with guaranteed housing, despite taking in $9bn a year in tuition fees.
Universities have built enough dorm rooms to accommodate only 40,000 students nationally – a fraction of the 205,000 international students they have enrolled to study in Australia this year, while private training colleges have failed to provide any accommodation, even though they have accepted 149,000 foreign students this year.
The failure of the $26bn international education industry to provide accommodation has meant at least 400,000 international students have been forced into a private rental market with the tightest vacancy rates on record.
Fotheringham also claims that migrants are needed to build homes for migrants:
“Australia could use targeted skilled migration in construction and allied fields to fulfil the government’s target of building 1.2 million houses over the course of five years”, Fotheringham said.
If Fotheringham had bothered to look at the migration data, he would have discovered that migrants work in construction at a substantially lower rate than Australian-born workers:
Therefore, immigration is directly worsening the housing crisis by pumping demand and not contributing to supply.
The SBS Punjabi concluded with the following argument from Fotheringham:
Fotheringham called for a “holistic approach” to deal with the housing issue, suggesting Australians open up their empty rooms for people to rent.
So, rather than reducing demand by cutting immigration to sensible and sustainable levels commensurate with the nation’s capacity to build housing and infrastructure, Fotheringham’s big solution is for Australians to live in group housing.
Clearly, SBS and the Australian Housing and Research Institute need to be defunded, since they are working against the interests of incumbent Australians.
