On Tuesday night, Sky News’ Danica De Giorgio interviewed me. We discussed the latest on inflation and interest rates, the Albanese government’s housing targets, and the East Coast gas crisis.
Below are the key highlights, broken out by theme.
Albo’s 1.2 million housing target:
Australia has zero chance of meeting the Albanese government’s target to build 1.2 million homes, or 240,000 homes over five years.
The highest number of homes that Australia has ever built in a single 12 month period was 223,500 in 2017. And back then we had much lower interest rates, we had much lower materials costs – materials hadn’t increased by 40% like they have since the pandemic – and builders weren’t competing with state governments for workers with their massive infrastructure projects.
The number one solution to Australia’s housing crisis is for the federal government to cut immigration sharply to a level that is below the nation’s capacity to build housing and infrastructure.
If they don’t do that, the housing crisis is going to keep getting worse. The shortages are going to get worse. More people are going to be thrown into homelessness and group housing. It’s as simple as that.
East Coast gas crisis:
Australia’s energy transition is broken because we have engineered an artificial gas shortage on the East Coast and we have delivered some of the highest gas prices in the world.
Without gas you can’t have cheap energy because gas is the peaking fuel that is used to generate electricity.
So, whenever the wind isn’t blowing and we don’t have enough solar, we need gas as the back stop. And if you have expensive gas, you have expensive electricity.
So, the solution to Australia’s energy crisis is for the federal government to copy every other gas exporting jurisdiction in the world, including Western Australia, and to reserve gas for domestic use.
We need to ensure that gas is reserved for our use first before we export it. We need to make that gas abundant and relatively cheap.
If we do that, we will also have cheap electricity prices. And we will fix the energy crisis. That is the number one solution.
