The Big Australia shills at the Grattan Institute published an article in The Guardian claiming the Albanese Government’s “housing accord could be the game-changer Australia needs”.
“Australia has not built enough housing to meet the needs of its growing population. Construction is constrained by land-use planning rules that limit development in many inner and middle-ring suburbs”, authors Brendan Coates and Joey Moloney say.
“In the long term the only way to keep rents in check is to build more housing”.
“The federal government’s plan to sign a housing accord with the states to boost supply could be the game-changer the nation needs”.
“Things will not get better unless the Albanese government puts enough money on the table to push state and territory governments to ease land-use planning rules, to enable more housing, including more high-density housing close to jobs and transport”, they say.
Focussing solely on housing supply while ignoring the federal government’s extreme immigration policy is pure cognitive dissonance and stupid in the extreme.
As noted by independent economist Tarric Brooker, “Australia builds over 50% more new homes per capita than the United States”. In fact, “it builds almost double the OECD average”:
Brooker separately noted that Australia has more construction workers per capita than most other countries:
Australia ramped up its rate of dwelling construction last decade, as illustrated clearly in the next chart:
However, this increase in construction was dwarfed by the massive lift in Australia’s population growth after the federal government opened the immigration sluice-gates in the mid-2000s.
Australia’s net overseas migration (NOM) soared from an average of 90,500 between 1991 and 2004 to an average of 219,000 between 2005 and 2019. That’s an average annual average increase in immigration of 140%.
The 2021 Intergenerational Report (IGR) projected that NOM would average 235,000 for the next 40 years, which is around 15,000 higher than the unprecedented NOM experienced in the 15 years leading up to covid:
Accordingly, the IGR projected that Australia’s population would balloon by 13.1 million (50%) by 2061, which is the equivalent of adding a combined Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane to our existing population.
Already, Australia’s NOM has rebounded far more aggressively than the IGR projected, with nearly 400,000 net migrants landing in 2022, which drove record population growth of 482,000.
The Grattan Institute can bang on all it likes about increasing housing supply.
But the reality is that Australia will never build enough homes as long as its population continues to grow like a science experiment through extreme levels of immigration.
Viewed in this light, Australia’s housing supply problem is really an excessive immigration problem. It could be solved with the stroke of a pen by simply reducing immigration back to the historical norm of below 100,000.
The least Grattan and the The Guardian can do is be honest about the issue.
