Almost daily now we are reading articles and reports on the rental disaster sweeping Australia.
The latest salvo comes from The Guardian, which has labelled Australia’s rental market a “social calamity and an economic disaster”:
Kate Colvin, the national spokesperson for the Everybody’s Home campaign [says]… “Renters on modest incomes are bearing the cost of the national inflation challenge… This is both unfair and unwise. We need to urgently expand social and affordable housing”…
“The rental crisis is sending shock waves through the community, with renters hit with massive hikes having to cut back on [essentials],” Colvin says.
“This is a social calamity and an economic disaster, with the double whammy of record low vacancies and skyrocketing rents making it impossible to find an alternative, more affordable home”…
Kate Colvin is right. And yet the worst is still to come for the rental market.
The Albanese Government has committed to driving-up immigration to its highest ever level via:
- Lifting the permanent non-humanitarian migrant intake to a record high 195,000 a year;
- Turbo-charging temporary migration by:
- Expanding work rights for international students by:
- Uncapping the number of hours international students can work while studying for another year; and
- Extending the length of post-study work visas by two years.
- Committing to clear the ‘backlog’ of “nearly one million” visas awaiting approval.
- Expanding work rights for international students by:
Labor advertisement on visa ‘backlog’.
Where will the hundreds of thousands of new migrants live when there is already a chronic shortage of rental homes across Australia? In tents? Or on the streets?
The only possible outcome is even lower rental vacancies and higher rents, as well as thousands of Australians being thrown into homelessness.
The Albanese Government’s ‘Big Australia’ immigration drive will only succeed in turning the nation’s rental crisis into a catastrophe and is an inequality disaster in the making.
Instead of tackling the concocted “visa backlog”, Labor should instead fix the chronic backlogs in social housing and rental accommodation, both of which will be made so much worse by its record immigration push.
