News.com.au posted a report yesterday (featuring yours truly) on how Sydney families are being forced-out of the city by exorbitant housing costs, caused in part by mass immigration:
Last week new data showed people living in Sydney needed to earn at least $161,858 a year to buy a house if they wanted to avoid mortgage stress…
Sarah and her friends are just one of the many Sydneysiders choosing to leave the harbourside city.
More than 18,000 people abandoned Sydney last year to live in other parts of Australia. About 40,000 headed elsewhere in NSW and 14,400 went to Melbourne.
But the population in Sydney and Melbourne is still growing because most overseas migrants chose to live in these two cities.
Around 80 per cent of the total net overseas migration went to Sydney and Melbourne, and there are calls from other states for more immigrants to be directed to other regions.
“The cost of housing in Sydney has obviously gone through the roof, it’s one of the most expensive places to live in the world. A lot of younger people especially can’t afford to live there anymore, so they’re being forced to leave,” Leith van Onselen, chief economist with MacroBusiness said.
“Secondly, liveability is being massively eroded — traffic congestion, trains, schools, hospitals, all manner of public services — and related to that it’s just become an expensive place to live, not just for housing but for day-to-day life.”
One only needs to look at the housing market to see why young locals are being forced-out of Sydney.
The cost of a dwelling in Sydney has rocketed to insane levels:
Driving the home ownership rate for those aged under-40 through the floor:
With the proportion of households thrown onto the rental market growing massively:
And more than half of lower income households in ‘rental stress’:
So basically, incumbent young Sydneysiders are being forced to move from where they grew up just so they can make way for the torrent of overseas migrants hitting the city every year via the federal government’s mass immigration program. And this torrent is expected to continue indefinitely, with the NSW Government projecting that 76,000 net overseas migrants will flood Sydney annually over the next 20 years:
If the fake left were genuine about addressing housing affordability for young Australians, as well as safeguarding the living standards of the working class, they would abandon their open borders rhetoric and argue to slash Australia’s ‘Big Australia’ immigration program to sensible and sustainable levels.
Doing so would improve income/wealth inequality and home ownership as there would be less upward pressure on house prices, as well as less economic rents flowing to the owners of capital (who benefit the most from mass immigration while ordinary residents bear the costs).
Wages growth would also improve, other things equal, as there would be less competition for jobs and workers’ bargaining power is increased, which would also help to reduce inequality.
There would also be less youth unemployment, as employers are incentivised to hire and train young workers and graduates rather than taking the easy route of importing a migrant.
Lower population growth would also lift productivity and income by decongesting cities and, over the long run, would share Australia’s fixed national endowment of resources among fewer people, also ensuring higher income per capita.
In short, reducing immigration back towards the historical average is a no-brainer for anybody concerned about inequality.
