The circus act that is Australian housing policy has moved to Brisbane, which will host a three-day National Housing Conference.
Here, about 1,000 delegates will pontificate on the causes and solutions to Australia’s housing crisis, which has driven thousands into group housing and homelessness.
Michael Fotheringham- managing director of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute – will be the conference’s host.
He argues that building more houses is critical but also complicated by labour and supply shortages.
“It’s a long road to get there, it’s taken us several decades to get into the hole we’re in now, it’s going to take us 20 or 30 years to really fix the system”, Fotheringham said.
“It’s not just about the number of houses that we build, it’s also what sort of houses we build, we need more diverse housing supply in every part of the country”.
You can bet your bottom dollar that the need to lower net overseas migration from its current record levels will not be discussed, even though it is the primary driver of the housing shortage:
Indeed, Burchell Wilson – former chief economist of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry – made this exact point on Twitter, noting that the conference is “brainless, incompetent and bought-off” and there is “no mention of the easy silver bullet solution to the housing crisis on the agenda” – i.e. cutting immigration:
Presumably, this is why respected veteran analyst, Louis Christopher, was not invited to the conference. Because he has spoken out on the need to lower immigration:
Instead, delegates will wax lyrical over “supply”, rental freezes, taxes on AirBnB, and the like, while ignoring the fundamental driver of the problem: that population demand via immigration is overwhelming the nation’s ability to supply houses and infrastructure:
I will take policymakers and housing groups seriously when they grow a set and admit that the federal government’s policy of mass immigration is the primary driver of the housing crisis.
Prove to us that you are not a set of timid clowns that pretend to care while thousands of residents are steamrolled out of housing by extreme immigration levels that few Australians actually want.
The solution to Australia’s housing shortage is actually very simple: ensure that net overseas migration is run at a level that is below the nation’s capacity to supply homes and infrastructure.
Anybody with an ounce of common sense knows this. Sadly, common sense is not so common among our policy elites.
