MacroBusiness has been vocal about Australia’s immigration-driven housing crisis for years.
The data is unmistakable. Australia’s rental affordability has collapsed to a record low, with households required to dedicate a record share of their income to secure a rental home.
Underpinning the collapse in rental affordability are surging rents, which have risen nearly 50% nationally since the beginning of the pandemic.
The surge in rents was driven, to a large extent, by the record surge in net overseas migration from late 2021, which added more than one million renters competing for housing.
Data like the type presented above has been in the public domain for several years.
However, it took a father of three, Morgan Cox, to bravely appear on ABC’s Q&A for Australians to properly acknowledge the rental crisis.
Morgan Cox is your typical hard-working Australian living on the NSW Central Coast. He works two jobs to support his partner and three children, one of whom is only 15 months old.
Cox’s household was hit with a $10,000 yearly rent increase. He cannot find another affordable rental home and faces the possibility of his family becoming homeless if rents rise further.
Wow, the gaslighting when it comes to immigration and housing is off the charts.
Check out this excellent question and the shocking responses from tonight’s Q&A program: pic.twitter.com/5rEik8gFND
— Biko Konstantinos (@BikoKonstantin1) March 10, 2025
Cox asked the Q&A panel why the government continues to run a high migration policy when there are not enough homes to accommodate the new migrants:
“I recently got a rent increase notice for an additional $180 a week, which works out to be about $10,000 a year”.
“I tried to find a cheaper place and there just aren’t any. What little is available, there’s dozens of people lined up. Lots of them are immigrants and they have plenty more money than I can possibly get”.
“I’m already working two jobs. One more rent increase and my family, my one-year-old baby, we’re facing homelessness and we’ve got nowhere to go. My family has already been forced out of Sydney for the same reasons”.
“I want to know is the government going to cut immigration to match housing availability or are we just going to keep going until every regular working Australian is homeless?”
The answers from the panel were pure gaslighting:
Federal health minister Mark Butler claimed:
- The government has “been working very hard to get migration levels, immigration levels down to something we think the country can manage”, even though Labor deliberately ramped immigration to record levels following the 2022 Jobs & Skills Summit.
- “Migration has been an important part of keeping our economy going. We also have a very tight labour market with lots of skill shortages”.
- “We need more houses, we just need to get building more houses”.
Former NSW Treasurer turned climate change alarmist and propagandist, Matt Kean, claimed:
- The issue was “more complex” than immigration, and a lack of supply was blamed instead.
- “The reality is that we need more housing supply. More supply into the system means more availability for renters, for homeowners – more choice”.
- “There’s way too much red tape and green tape that is stopping housing developments whether it’s Sydney, Melbourne or right across Australia”.
Journalist Joe Hildebrand claimed that Australia needs migrants to build homes for migrants, ignoring that very few migrants actually work in construction. Therefore, immigration adds far more to housing demand than supply.
Cox was seen shaking his head in exasperation as the panel spoke.
QandA host Patricia Karvelas asked whether there “other things you’re looking for” beyond lowering immigration, to which Cox answered, “That’s really the main one”.
“And as I understand it the government makes the laws and decides who comes in, so if you’ve got 2.5 million people coming in in a few years, surely you can say to them, ‘No, we don’t have enough houses for you’”, he said, drawing more applause from the audience.
Since appearing on Q&A, Morgan Cox’s story has appeared across Australia’s mainstream media.
Cox noted in a separate interview on Sky News that “millions of other people are in a similar situation. It’s not just the rent; it’s the electricity and the insurance… My power bills overdue”…
“It’s everything and they’re just being crushed. But the biggest thing is that one hit of rent – $10,000. Who can go to their boss and ask for an extra 10 grand”?..
“Five years ago we had an emergency and they closed the borders. They just stopped it. They just stopped everyone coming in. We don’t even need to go that hard”.
“But is this not an emergency? Some insane number of people are potentially facing homelessness in the next couple years. Is that not an emergency?”
Morgan Cox’s testimony was so important because it put a human face on Australia’s rental crisis and highlighted the damaging impacts of running an immigration program so much larger than the nation’s capacity to build housing and infrastructure.
I have spoken to Morgan on the phone and plan to do an interview podcast with him in the near future.
