There are three things you can be certain of in life: 1) death; 2) taxes; and 3) The Guardian lying about the negative impacts of excessive levels of immigration into Australia.
The Guardian is up to its old tricks again, wheeling out a bunch of academics that magically believe that ramping net overseas migration to its highest level in history – an estimated 500,000 in the past year – is not behind the surge in house prices nor rents.
Moreover, the effect of migration on housing is “unclear”:
We’ve got demographer/population geographer Aude Bernard claims Australia is merely experiencing “recuperation migration” since those who would have come to Australia when borders were shut have now finally arrived in the country. Therefore, there’s nothing to see here:
“Migration is [only] now getting close to compensating for the people who left [during the pandemic], and the people who didn’t come”, Bernard claims.
“And the people who would have come in 2020, 2021, some of them would have had children”.
“Yes, migration is high but it’s actually a bit more complicated”.
Actually, it is not complicated at all. Australia’s population growth has risen slightly above the pre-pandemic trend:
Meanwhile, the pandemic killed new home construction, causing a massive gap between housing supply and demand:
It’s basic stuff, but obviously too complex for the corrupt Guardian to acknowledge.
Next, we’ve got Professor James Raymer of the school of demography at the Australian National University, which continuously spruiks high immigration.
“If you look at the data on the kind of flows coming in, both temporary and permanent, they’re actually lower than what they were before Covid”, he said.
“So you get to this impression [that] migration is really, really high in Australia. And I would argue that while it has increased since Covid, a lot of people coming [to Australia] haven’t been here long enough to leave again”.
Yeah, okay buddy. Is that why the stock of temporary migrants in Australia (excluding visitors) is at an all-time high, way above the pre-pandemic peak:
Ben Phillips from the Australian National University says the housing market has not kept with the recent jump in migration, but did so over the previous decade.
“We’ve had very strong immigration since the late 2000s”, Phillips says.
“And by and large since then, we have really built a lot of housing”.
The second chart above says otherwise. Australia’s population growth shot up in 2005 when the federal government opened the immigration floodgates.
However, we only got a housing supply response from 2013 (mostly high-rise shoe boxes), which stalled around the time the pandemic began.
Source: CoreLogic
Let’s get real for a moment. The collapse in Australia’s rental vacancy rate and the surge in rental inflation coincides with the record surge in net overseas migration:
Almost every housing analyst agrees that the rebound in dwelling values this year in the face of record interest rate rises has been caused by the unprecedented net overseas migration.
Why does The Guardian continue to run interference and lie about the negative impacts of high levels of immigration?
The outrage over ‘media bias’ levelled at the Murdoch press should be redirected to The Guardian.
