On Thursday night, I gave an interview on Sky News’ Credlin show with guest host Amanda Stoker, where I explained why National Cabinet’s announcement to build 1.2 million homes over five years is pure propaganda and impossible to achieve.
I also explain why the only viable solution to Australia’s housing shortage is to lower immigration levels to sensible and sustainable levels.
The interview has no video version, but the audio is available to listen here.
Below are key quotes of mine from the interview.
“The first thing that should be pointed out is that this 1.2 million homes has never been done before. The highest figure we ever did was actually in the previous five-year period where we did one million and fifty thousand”.
“Now under this plan, Australia is somehow supposed to build 660 homes per day. That’s 240 000 homes per year. Australia has only ever exceeded 220 000 homes once in 2017”.
“So for starters, I think this target is highly unrealistic given that we’ve obviously got builders falling over left, right and centre. We’ve got higher structural costs because of the supply constraints. We’ve got higher interest rates. So that’s the first thing that needs to be said”.
“The second one gets to your point about migration. That’s the real answer here. The federal budget predicted that Australia would get 1.5 million net overseas migrants within five years. Now that’s the equivalent of the population of Adelaide in only five years”.
“Now that requires Australia to add to the housing stock net of demolitions 330 homes per day over that five-year period just to accommodate the extra migrants, let alone Australia’s natural increase”.
“So that there is really the nub of the issue. Everyone keeps banging on about it being a supply issue. The fact of the matter is it’s really a demand issue through extreme levels of immigration that we’ve never seen before”.
“I always call immigration the everything issue because it basically affects every aspect of your life. How long you spend traveling in a car stuck in traffic. Whether you can get a seat on a train. A place in a hospital. A place in a school. Whether you can find a spot at the park. What sort of home you’re living in. Do you live in a house or an apartment”.
“If you’re going to grow the population like a science experiment, everyone’s going to be forced to live in high-rise dog box apartments. Whereas their parents lived in houses. So it’s a real quality of life issue now”.
“In terms of what’s driving it, it’s pretty obvious. It’s what I call the Growth Lobby”.
“So it’s basically big business, big property and now universities. They’re effectively the parties that privatise the gains from this huge immigration while the costs are actually shunted on everyone else through lower quality of life”.
“If you lived in Sydney 20 years ago, you could drive around Sydney pretty much without paying tolls. Now because of the state governments trying to keep pace with rampant population growth, they’ve basically put toll roads everywhere to try and keep up with this growth”.
“And now basically if you drive from A to B, you you get fleeced by Transurban and that’s basically the sort of degradation in your quality of life that we’re experiencing from running these extreme levels of immigration”.
“It’s not even that good from a tax perspective. Sure it benefits the federal budget. But then it just pushes the costs onto state budgets. And that’s why we’ve seen state governments sell everything that’s not bolted on”.
“Privatising everything to get money in order to fail to build enough infrastructure to accommodate all these people that have been hosted upon them by the federal government”.
“So effectively it’s basically, you know, a win-win if you’re one of the growth lobby. But it’s a net loss for the rest of us”.
