According to KPMG urban economist, Terry Rawnsley, all of the beds in student and worker accommodation that were emptied during the pandemic have now been filled.
This means that a new bed needs to be built for every additional person that is being brought into Australia.
Around 80% of the extra 500,000 residents that arrived in Australia in 2022 have been funnelled into the private housing market.
“All the free beds are now taken”, Rawnsley, said. There’s no more spare capacity. Every additional person we’re bringing into Australia needs to have a new bed built for them”.
“Rawnsley said about 20% of new arrivals had moved into existing non-private dwellings. Empty student accommodation was being filled while working holidaymakers were returning to employer-provided housing”, The SMH reports.
“The number of people living in traditional housing had climbed by 393,000 over the past year but was just 5% above its pre-COVID level”.
Rawnsley also argues that more affordable housing is needed for migrants if Australia is to remain an attractive destination.
“While demand for workers remains solid, the lack of housing will be a constraint to attracting key workers into Australia”, he said.
Meanwhile, Housing Industry Association (HIA) senior economist, Tom Devitt, has called for more immigration to build homes for migrants:
“Shortages of skilled labour have constrained the home building industry for much of the past 20 years. We need to look at ways to boost the housing sector’s capacity to ensure we are able to meet the Australian Government’s recently announced housing targets”.
“Skilled migration will not only help us meet our housing demands. It will also help mitigate the effects of Australia’s ageing population on economic growth, productivity and living standards”.
Clearly, Australia is stuck in a cycle of needing more people to service the people who immigrated last week. That is, classic ‘tail wagging the dog’ ponzi economics.
What is the point of importing loads of people into Australia simply to build housing and infrastructure to ‘catch up’ on shortages created from previous immigration? How does this benefit incumbent Australian residents? It is nonsensical.
Australia built record volumes of homes last decade (albeit a lot of poorly-built high-rise), yet this was swamped by record volumes of population growth (driven by immigration) from 2005:
Is it totally insane to repeat the same mistake by importing more migrants to fix a housing shortage caused by too much immigration:
Australians will simply be forced to pay more to live in a high-rise shoe box rather than a detached house, while developers make out like bandits.
Australia’s rental vacancy rate is already near a record low and capital city rents are soaring at a double-digit rate.
Importing hundreds of thousands of migrants each year will exacerbate the problems and ensure that Australia suffers permanent housing shortages.
Mass immigration-led development is a giant ponzi scheme designed to enrich the property cartel at the expense of ordinary Australians.
