The Australian’s Judith Sloan has done a terrific job explaining how the Albanese Government is deliberately engineering a housing crisis by running the largest and most extreme immigration program in this nation’s history.
Sloan first explains how Labor’s $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF) is woefully inadequate and won’t provide nearly enough housing to keep pace with the ballooning population.
“From the expected average annual return of $500m, the plan is to invest in a total of 6000 social and affordable dwellings each year”, Sloan says.
“At the current rate of population growth, we need at least around a quarter of a million new homes just to accommodate the extra people. It is also estimated that there are at least a half-million people on the current waiting lists for social housing”.
Sloan then runs some numbers exposing the HAFF’s inadequacy.
“At $500m each year – it’s unclear what happens if the returns are negative – it works out as just more than $83,000 a dwelling funded by HAFF each year”.
“Everyone knows you can’t get anything for that sum of money even if you exclude stand-alone houses”, argues Sloan.
Sloan then questions why the Albanese Government has ramped immigration to record levels (nearly 400,000 in 2022, with more expected in 2023) in the middle of a rental crisis?
“Just when it’s clear that the rental situation is dire and becoming worse, the federal government has facilitated a substantial surge in the number of migrants entering the country, particularly international students but other temporary entrants as well”.
“The Treasurer has tried to justify this surging migration by making the point that there was a substantial hiatus during Covid and we are only making up for the “lost” arrivals”.
“What he fails to mention is that the pandemic was also associated with a substantial stalling in the building of new accommodation that is needed to accompany strong population growth. In other words, the last thing we should do is to try to make up for these “lost” arrivals”.
“These migrants need somewhere to live and this is making the battle for accommodation even fiercer, driving up rents even further”, argues Sloan.
These are points that MB has made repeatedly.
Where will the hundreds of thousands of migrants arriving every year live when there is already an extreme shortage of homes for the existing population? On the streets? In tents? In cars?
Anthony Albanese has literally engineered a permanent housing shortage with his extreme immigration policies.
The inevitable result will be more financial and emotional strain for lower income renters and rising homelessness.
It is an inequality disaster in the making.
Anthony Albanese has strayed so far from his humble social housing upbringing it is sickening.
If he was brought up in today’s circumstances, he would face being thrown onto the streets.
