NSW Premier Chris Minns Tweeted the following on Tuesday bemoaning Sydney’s deepening housing crisis:
Minns cites NSW Productivity Commission analysis released last month bemoaning that young families are abandoning Sydney because they cannot afford housing:
We can all agree that Sydney’s housing market is stuffed.
Sydney’s rental prices are by far the most expensive in Australia:
The cost of buying and paying off a home in Sydney is also extortionate, with Sydney’s median house price hitting a record high $1,595,310 at the end of 2023:
As usual, the NSW Productivity Commission and state government have framed the issue as a supply problem rather than an excess demand (net overseas migration) problem.
Net overseas migration into NSW reached a record high of 174,000 in 2022-23, accounting for the entirety of the state’s population growth:
In the decade to June 2023, NSW added 935,315 people, with net overseas migration accounting for 791,944, or 85% of this growth. Most of this expansion occurred in Sydney.
Sydney’s population is also expected to reach nine million by the 2060s, thanks to permanently high net overseas migration.
So long as Sydney’s population expands like a lab experiment through mass immigration, the city’s housing will remain undersupplied, and house prices and rents will rise. This will force more young incumbent residents out of Sydney.
But, instead of calling for lower levels of immigration, Premier Minns instead backed the federal government’s extreme immigration program, claiming more migrants were needed to build homes for migrants:
“We’re supportive of the commonwealth government’s decision to lift immigration into New South Wales, notwithstanding the fact that we’ll take, not the majority but the greatest number of inbound immigrants”, Minns said in September 2023.
“A lot of that labour coming into the state will be directed to the housing market and we need them to build houses and apartments”.
“We can’t produce enough housing for NSW’s needs. One of the reasons for that is labour shortages”.
“So the Albanese government is looking at inbound immigration, a large number of them will be directed to the construction industry.”.
“I’m hoping that that will alleviate some of the housing pressure and we can really get going with completions in NSW”, Minns said.
Earth to idiot: you don’t solve a housing (rental) shortage by adding even more demand through immigration. That is nonsensical.
The only thing preventing the housing situation in Sydney from being even worse is that significant numbers of residents are leaving Sydney, driven out by expensive housing and the city’s declining livability via unrelenting immigration.
Anyone with a shred of common sense can see that the primary solution to Sydney’s (and Australia’s) housing shortage is to limit immigration to a level that is below the capacity to provide high-quality housing and infrastructure.
Otherwise, our housing crisis will become permanent.
Chris Minns and his government should be honest about the situation, instead of gaslighting residents into believing that Sydney’s housing shortage is a supply issue.
Too much net overseas migration is the problem, and it is driving young residents out and forcing others to live in insecure housing or debt slavery.
