Former Labor leader, Mark Latham, has penned a ripping op-ed in the Daily Telegraph exposing the ‘fake news’ generated by the left-leaning media to support open borders and a ‘Big Australia’:
Earlier this month the associate editor of the Huffington Post Australia, Josh Butler, told his followers on Twitter: “Don’t read the trash piece in The Australian about immigration and housing, read Eoin Blackwell who actually spoke to economists.”
Butler was referring to a column written by veteran labour market economist, Judith Sloan in The Australian. Her “trash” was actually a lesson in Economics 101: “It’s common sense that high population growth associated with immigration will cause house prices to rise because the supply of housing cannot keep up with the surge in demand”…
Using Productivity Commission research, Sloan also pointed out that the net economic benefits of Australia’s high immigration intake are “very modest” and come at the expense of a “fall in the relative wages of locals with the same skills as migrants”.
Butler and Blackwell argued a different position in their online newspaper, declaring that lower immigration would actually increase housing costs. That’s right: for the first time in the history of finance, lower demand would put upward pressure on prices.
And they even found an “economist” willing to make this case. He was Shane Garrett, representing the Canberra-based Housing Industry Association (HIA)…
On Friday I rang Garrett, asking: “Have you got any statistics to support your claim about migrant workers in the housing sector?”
He replied: “Nope, I’ve got none.” He said he had been speaking anecdotally, conceding that, “immigration adds to demand, obviously, because they have to live somewhere”.
The “trash”, the fake news, had been in the Huffington Post, not The Australian. When I contacted the Department of Immigration to find out how many migrants entered Australia to work in residential housing construction, I was told “not many”…
Last week an Essential Poll recorded a two-to-one majority in favour of reducing immigration numbers to improve housing affordability.
Why have our political leaders — Labor, Liberal and Greens — maintained a cross-party cartel in support of Big Australia?..
Big Australia has given us the worst of all worlds: flooding the labour market to hold down wages, flooding our suburbs with unsustainable growth and creating a spike in housing demand that drives up prices. In the name of the people, it must end.
Well said. Anyone doubting Mark Latham’s claims only needs to read the Productivity Commission’s (PC) recent Migrant Intake into Australia report. This report showed that 86% of immigrants lived in the major cities of Australia in 2011, whereas only 65% of the Australian-born population did:
Moreover, “of the immigrants living in capital cities in 2011, most lived in either Sydney or Melbourne, with 1.5 million residents of Sydney and 1.3 million residents of Melbourne born overseas”.
The PC also explicitly noted that:
- “High rates of immigration put upward pressure on land and housing prices in Australia’s largest cities…”, and
- “Immigration, as a major source of population growth in Australia, contributes to congestion in the major cities…”
It should, therefore, be no surprise that the two cities with the biggest housing affordability pressures – Sydney and Melbourne – are also the cities that have experienced the biggest influx of immigrants, which has pushed their populations up by a whopping 800,000 (Sydney) and 1 million (Melbourne) over the past 12 years.
And because of mass immigration, Sydney’s population is projected to grow by 87,000 people per year (1,650 people each week) to 6.4 million over the next 20-years – effectively adding another Perth to the city’s population:
Whereas Melbourne’s population is projected to balloon by 97,000 people per year (1,850 people each week) over the next 35 years to more than 8 million people:
The Turnbull Government can bang on about boosting supply all it wants (without actually doing anything). But something needs to be done to stem demand, including the deluge of new migrants inundating Sydney and Melbourne each and every year.
None of this is rocket science. So why won’t our major political parties – the Coalition, Labor and the Greens – address the problem at its source and slash immigration to sensible and sustainable levels? And why won’t our left-leaning media acknowledge the population elephant destroying housing affordability and livability in our major cities?
