NAB CEO Ross McEwan has released the bank’s 2024 outlook, in which McEwan worries that “the great Australian dream of owning your own home is at risk”, amid the worst affordability in 30 years, soaring rents, and the deepening housing shortage:
“Affordability is at a 30-year low, and rental prices are rapidly increasing. That’s because we simply don’t have enough houses for our growing population, let alone enough affordable and social housing for people who need support”.
“The gap between supply and demand has increased significantly. We’re building around 50,000 homes less than we need each year”.
“All levels of government urgently need to collaborate on simpler and faster regulations, while freeing up land suitable for building”.
“There also needs to be more targeted government support for social and affordable housing and more innovative construction methods to meet supply targets, such as modular housing”.
As usual, McEwan’s so-called solutions are all of the usual supply-side tropes: relaxing planning, more taxpayer support for social housing, etc.
At the same time, CoreLogic’s head of research, Eliza Owen, has told The AFR that demand from strong migration and the worsening housing undersupply would support home prices in the coming decade.
Blind Freddy can see the reason why “the gap between supply and demand has increased significantly”. It is because the federal government has dramatically ramped up net overseas migration to extreme levels over the past 20 years:
This has driven population demand above the nation’s capacity to supply quality housing, with expensive and defective high-rise apartments becoming the norm.
The primary solution is staring everybody in the face: slash net overseas migration to a level that is below the nation’s ability to supply good quality housing and infrastructure. Then, the nation’s housing shortage would resolve itself.
But CEO’s like Ross McEwan would never state the obvious because they are busy getting rich off the endless migrant flood and the flow of new customers.
So instead, they pretend to care about housing affordability and poverty while they camp out once a year in their expensive North Face jackets and thermals in the Vinnies CEO Sleepout.
All the while, they continue to make Australia’s housing and homeless crises worse by lobbying for more immigration.
