This is a pretty cowardly effort by Peter Hartcher:
On the day this week that we learnt Australia’s population had grown faster than at any time since 1952, when Bob Menzies was prime minister and the British were setting off their first nuclear test in Australian territory, Pauline Hanson stood up in the Senate to claim vindication.
She recalled her first parliamentary speech. In 1996, she reminded the Senate, she had “warned we were in danger of being swamped by immigration from Asia”. That, too, was something of a bombshell in Australian history.
Since that moment 28 years ago, Hanson has sought to foment racial and religious division against Muslims, Indigenous Australians, Asians … any minority would do.
…Although she’s been a near-continuous presence in Australian politics, she has remained on its fringe, the angry ghost of Australia’s racist past, summoning the spiteful spirits of its ugliest impulses.
Fortunately, the two elements of Australia’s present predicament are getting government attention.
The immigration intake surged so much because it was a two-year catch-up after a two-year border shutdown. This is why Dutton was calling for more immigrants a year and a half ago and now fretting that there are too many.
The Home Affairs Minister, Clare O’Neil, has announced that the immigration intake in the year starting on July 1 will return to “normal levels”, a net intake of about 250,000 immigrants.
This leaves the second element, which is much harder. State and federal governments are acting to increase the housing supply. The Albanese government is pursuing 17 different measures and adding some $25 billion in investment over a decade, for instance. But it won’t be enough.
Much more remains to be done. Two key crossbench senators – David Pocock and Jacqui Lambie – next week will agitate on sweeping policy reform including reviews of negative gearing and capital gains tax. It is possible to have independent senators pursuing problem-solving rather than destructive racism. Yet still more needs to be done at state and local council levels to build homes and related infrastructure.
Unless Australia fully confronts the housing shortage, this is a problem with potential to go nuclear.
There is so much wrong with this article that it is difficult to know where to start.
First, Pauline was right in the long run. Her picking on specific ethnicities, or ethnicity at all, is as stupid today as it was then. But we are “swamped” and have been since the end of the mining boom around 2012.
Second, 250k immigration is not “normal”. 100k is around the historical average. 250k is wildly beyond our capacity to cope and will sustain the labour-expansion-led growth economic model that has driven living standards lower for more than a decade.
Third, Labor is not effectively or fast enough lowering immigration. It has entirely corrupted the system via shocking labour agreements with India, and the border dam with India has been breached.
Fourth, proposals to cut negative gearing and capital gains concessions used to be a great idea to suppress house prices. But now, Albo’s immigration “swamping” is so severe that the most pressing problem is putting a roof over the heads of youth and the vulnerable at all:
Anything that cuts dwelling prices will also suppress the supply response needed to normalise rents. The RBA knows this:
Pocock and Lambie propose sending the rental shock nuclear by suppressing house prices.
Hartcher’s arguments are just another iteration of the virtue-signalling typical of media companies addicted to real estate revenues. Supply-side solutions don’t work, and delicate sensibilities prevent us from discussing what matters more: cutting demand.
After all, mass immigration’s main purpose is to drive house prices higher. It is a feature, not a bug. The media firms pretend to care, but you can be assured that they lobby for more, not less, warm bodies.
The problem today is their mate Albo has so overcooked the scam that youth and the vulnerable are being thrown into the streets.
Canberra must freeze immigration now, and for as long as it takes, to fix the housing crisis.
And if that makes Pauline Hanson happy, who gives a $%#@.
