Stephen Koukoulas (aka “the Kouk”) has joined the conga-line of commentators calling for the federal government to cut Australia’s immigration intake. From Yahoo Finance:
There are a number of vital areas of societal well-being which are being undermined by too much of a good thing, in other words, excessive population growth.
Importantly house prices, congestion in the cities and stretched infrastructure which is slow and expensive to add to, are all being impacted negatively by too many people for the existing facilities.
There is excess demand for a given level of supply, in other words. It is simple economics at play…
The cure is to trim the immigration levels until these other areas catch up and society and the economy can be more efficient.
When one considers that at current rates of increase, Australia’s population is rising by around 1 million people every three years and the overwhelming majority of those extra Australians are immigrants who live in the cities, it is easy see how the problem is emerging… excessive population growth is a specific problem to Australia.
In the past decade, Australia’s population has increase by an average annual rate of 1.7 per cent. This compares with 1.2 per cent in New Zealand and 1.1 per cent in Canada, both of which is experiencing similar problems to Australia on housing and infrastructure even with a significantly slower rate of increase.
By way of further comparison, over that decade population growth averaged just 0.8 per cent in both the US and UK and a remarkably low 0.3 per cent in the European Union countries.
It is no coincidence, perhaps, that in many European countries, infrastructure is sound, public transport is efficient and housing markets are stable and prices are affordable. There is not the excessive demand for these goods and services from a frantic rate of population increase.
The solution to most economic problems is usually straightforward. Several years of a lower immigration intake would allow the current dwelling construction surge to catch up to the shortfall in new dwellings and would see the current infrastructure spending surge in several of the main cities to continue.
Bravo Kouk, who is about as mainstream as you can get and is also a Labor Party insider. So this contribution represents a direct challenge to the Fake Left to engage in the immigration debate in a rational manner.
