The Housing Industry Association (HIA) has launched its imperatives for the Australian Federal election, which is riddled with hypocrisy and contradictions.
On the one hand, the HIA wants the federal government to abolish the permanent migrant cap and ramp up immigration:
On the other, the HIA complains there is “an insufficient supply of housing to accommodate Australia’s growing population” and that “the cost of housing in Australia is higher than it needs to be”:
Housing supply is fundamentally linked to land supply yet the supply chain for residential land in Australia remains broken.
The systemic issues arising from the zoning, subdivision and development processes across all states and territories means it continues to take more than a decade to bring unzoned land to market as shovel ready land.
The HIA also wants taxes lowered on developments and less regulation:
Australia’s tax system unfairly targets new home building and renovation work with housing remaining the second most heavily taxed sector in the Australian economy.
Research shows that the cost of a house and land package in Australia’s capital cities includes up to 50 per cent taxation… The excessive tax on new housing acts as an impediment to the supply…
Residential building work is also one of the most regulated industries in Australia…
It is hilarious that the federal government is holding a review into housing supply when the cause of any shortage is obvious: the mass immigration ‘Big Australia’ policy:
Obviously, jamming 235,000 migrants into Australia every year, as projected by the Intergenerational Report, let alone adopting the HIA’s call for an ever bigger migrant intake, will make the supply problem intractable.
Policy makers and the HIA should be honest and admit that the single biggest driver of any housing shortage is extreme immigration. Therefore, the best thing policy makers can do to ‘solve’ Australia’s housing supply problem is to ensure that immigration does not return to its manic pre-COVID level, nor is raised to the insane 235,000 annual NOM projected by the IGR nor higher levels demanded by the various business lobbies.
The first goal of public policy should be to protect the welfare of existing residents and not make a problem worse. The ‘Big Australia’ immigration policy violates this very principle.
