ABC’s Business Editor, Ian Verrender, has pulled the mask-off one of the key drivers of Sydney’s and Melbourne’s housing affordability woes, arguing that the federal government is maintaining turbo-charged immigration levels as a ploy to support the politico housing complex:
Every layer of government has become addicted to the great Australian dream, which in the past 40 years has transformed from owning your own patch of dirt to making a motza from property.
The Federal Government needs rising property prices to maintain a stable economy while state and local governments feed off the enormous fees and taxes it generates.
Since the latest boom began in late 2012… state and local governments have seen property revenues rise by 65 per cent…
The building boom, particularly in the eastern capitals of Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne has been unprecedented, much of it in high rise apartments.
Cranes dot the skies above our eastern capitals like never before. In fact, Sydney — which accounts for half the cranes across the nation — alone has the equivalent of 80 per cent of the cranes across all of North America.
Melbourne has a little less than half that of Sydney. In both cities, cranes for residential construction at last have begun to decline.
Instead there has been a dramatic pick-up in crane use for commercial and infrastructure use, as governments belatedly attempt to provide infrastructure to service the huge growth in population.Therein lies the key as to why our property prices keep rising.
While our politicians bicker and argue about border control and handfuls of refugees, Australia quietly has run one of the biggest immigration programs of any developed nation.
Our population has been growing at around 1.6 per cent per annum, second only to New Zealand and well above the OECD average of 0.7 per cent.
…our large and growing intake has been used to give the impression that our economy has been travelling better than it appears.
While we are about to run up 27 years of uninterrupted economic growth on a national basis, as individuals, many of us are worse off.Wages growth is stagnant because, for all the claims of job creation, we’re barely standing still if you take the new arrivals into account.
When it comes to property prices, population growth has been every federal government’s secret weapon.
For years, we’ve been told our skyrocketing housing costs has been a supply problem. Instead, there has been a deliberate effort to keep piling on the demand, just to maintain the illusion of economic growth and to keep the real estate sales clicking over.
It’s nice to hear a commentator from the left acknowledge the elephant in the room. Usually they blame everything but the massive increase of immigration into Sydney and Melbourne for both city’s housing woes:
Despite the obvious correlation between high migrant inflows and property value increases, especially over the past seven years:
Governments and commentators can bang on about boosting supply all they want, but it won’t amount to much unless they address the sheer volume of people flooding Sydney and Melbourne each year, thus adding continually to demand.
