Sharri Markson interviewed me on Tuesday night for Sky News, during which I spoke about the escalating rental crisis affecting Australia as a result of the federal government’s record-breaking immigration.
Below are key highlights from the interview.
Edited Transcript:
Sharri Markson:
We’ve spoken about the impact of immigration on housing at the start of the show, I spoke about this story in The Courier mail today where families where the parents have full-time jobs are now sleeping rough in Steven Miles, the Queensland Premier’s own electorate.
You know, this is a serious housing and rental crisis in Queensland. Do you think this is a direct result of the high immigration numbers?
Leith van Osnelen:
It’s not just a Queensland issue, it’s a national disaster.
Domain released some rental vacancy data this week which showed that the rental vacancy rates collapsed at just 0.7% nationally and it’s about the same Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.
Source: Domain
It is disastrously low and this has basically pushed heaps of people into group housing and also into homelessness.
Now the worrying thing about this is that actual housing construction has collapsed to around a decade low. We only built about 170,000 homes last year the latest dwelling approvals data, which was released this week, showed that we’ve only approved 163,000 homes.
That’s 77,000 below the Albanese government’s housing target. So it’s nowhere close.
It’s obviously occurring at the same time as the federal government’s ramping up immigration to record levels.
We had 626,000 population growth last year off immigration of nearly 520,000.
So, what they’ve basically done is they have ramped up housing demand without worrying about where people are going to live. And this has obviously driven the rental vacancy rate to record lows, and it’s pushed rents through the moon. It’s driving people into homelessness and shared housing.
This is a housing disaster that we have on our hands. And it has been brought to you by the federal government, which has decided to flood the nation with people without worrying about where they will live.
