Last year, chief YIMBY Peter Tulip claimed that people wanting the government to run a lower (historical) immigration program to ease housing pressures are “misanthropes” that dislike migrants:
Peter Tulip was interviewed on Joe Walker’s podcast, where he waxed lyrical for an hour on the need to relax planning restrictions and boost supply to solve the housing affordability crisis.
The issue of immigration and its impact on the housing market was raised by an audience member. And like all YIMBY’s, Tulip skirted around the issue.
Audience Question:
We’re producing housing in Australia at a pretty decent clip compared to everybody else, according to various OECD reports. We are the top three or four consistently.
That tells me that it’s the demand side, not the supply side, relative to everywhere else in the world that is our issue.
So the question becomes, what is the right growth rate for the population? I know that we have a plan for Big Australia. But what is a fair terminal population given the constraints that we have with simple things like water?
Peter Tulip:
Immigration policy is complicated with a lot of difficult trade-offs and it’s very controversial. People have very different values driving all of that. My view is that it is a separate conversation to housing policy.
We have a democratic process for making those trade-offs and deciding those difficult issues. And whatever population outcome comes out of that, we then need to build enough houses to accommodate them…
What you do on immigration clearly changes the numbers for what you’re doing on housing. But it never changes bad arguments into good ones or good arguments into bad ones.
So, however we decide housing policy, the principles will always be the same regardless of what we’re doing on immigration.
Host Joe Walker also stated that “all the people who say we should be cutting immigration, they’re probably right”, which did not receive a response from Tulip.
Literally in the one-hour discussion on housing, Peter Tulip’s answer on immigration boiled down to: “it’s complicated”.
The reality is that Australia’s immigration policy is fundamental to housing. The growth of the population and ergo housing demand is directly proportional to the volume of immigration.
The Centre for Population projects that Australia’s population will grow to 41.2 million people by 2064-65, driven solely by net overseas migration (i.e., directly as migrants arrive by plane and via migrants giving birth).
The projected 13.6 million population increase in only 40 years will require an enormous volume of homes, infrastructure, energy, and water supplies.
Australia would need to add the equivalent of half its current housing and infrastructure stock just to keep pace with the projected population growth, let alone solve the existing shortage.
Rather than bulldozing Australia’s suburbs into high-rise shoebox apartments, the optimal solution is to slash immigration and stabilise the population.
Anybody with common sense would recognise that Australia will never solve its housing shortage so long as it continues to flood the market with migrant demand.
