Below is a brilliant guest post from MB reader Erin Rolandsen, CEO of Angelassist:
The quality of our lives is determined by the quality of the questions we ask. Today’s productivity summit will ask how to clear the backlog of 30,000 environmental approvals holding up construction. The result is embedded into the question—houses must rise, the environment must go.
The summit is performative democracy at its worst—asking the wrong questions of the wrong people. It is only inevitable that we will end up with more of the wrong results.
Around the table at the summit and at the dinner at The Lodge today are developers, union leaders, bureaucrats and politicians. And only a single token voice from the conservation movement. Ordinary Australians—the parents, renters, carers and workers who live with the consequences of these policies – are nowhere to be found.
The question on the lips of most Australians is not how we can bulldoze environmental protections faster. It is far more fundamental: why must we continue with such an excessive immigration agenda in the first place? It is that agenda—unrelenting, bipartisan and rarely debated—that drives the demand for more housing, the pressure on our infrastructure, and the erosion of our environment.
Australia’s net overseas migration reached nearly one million arrivals in 2023 and 2024 alone. To just maintain our present standard of living, we would have had to build a new city’s worth of hospitals, schools, roads, public transport, water supply, power generation and infrastructure in that time. This did not happen.
Instead, as the tools that enable productivity get weakened, GDP per capita has been in terminal decline. The nexus between extreme levels of immigration and declining productivity is rarely acknowledged in political debates about housing or productivity. Instead of naming excessive population growth as the driver, we are presented with false binaries:
- Weaken environmental protections or accept housing shortages
- Ramp up migration to fill labour gaps or watch productivity stagnate
- Keep pumping demand or risk economic decline.
In reality, both outcomes—environmental damage and housing scarcity—flow from the same political decision to grow the population faster than the nation can build, educate, transport, or care for it.
GDP rises, but per capita GDP stagnates: we are working harder, building more, but we are not better off. The “growth” we are chasing is statistical, not real.
This policy makes little sense for ordinary Australians, but perfect sense for the vested interests sitting at the summit table:
- Developers, property investors and the real estate industry thrive on unrelenting demand
- Business lobbies enjoy a larger consumer base and a steady flow of workers
- Unions see growing membership numbers
- Politicians get to boast about growth in headline GDP and increasing tax intakes without making politically unpalatable decisions, even if quality of life fails.
This is why the real questions are never asked. Population policy has become the third rail of Australian politics: touch it, and you’re accused of xenophobia or economic illiteracy. So we don’t touch it.
Instead, we hold summits where the terms of debate are stacked in advance.
When ordinary Australians are surveyed, the majority say the same thing: they want population growth slowed, infrastructure caught up, and housing made affordable. They are not anti-immigrant—they are pro-sustainability, pro-environment, and pro-liveability. Yet their views are excluded from the conversation.
At this week’s summit, there is room for the property lobby, the business lobby, and the union lobby—but not for the citizens who bear the consequences.
If we were serious about productivity and democracy, we would ask different questions:
- What level of population growth is truly sustainable?
- What would happen if we paused migration to let housing supply and services catch up?
- How can we redesign care, work, and education policy to boost productivity without relying on endless inflows of people?
These are the questions that would yield real answers, but they are not questions the summit dares to ask.
By refusing to ask the population question, governments can frame the problem as technical: too much green tape, too much red tape, too little planning reform, and too few tradies. All of these things matter. But they are secondary to the underlying driver of demand.
The truth is uncomfortable: Australia is not failing to build enough homes because of some bureaucratic glitch. We are failing because no nation can sustainably expand housing, schools, hospitals, roads, and energy systems at the breakneck pace required by our migration program. The bottlenecks are systemic.
And so the summit pretends that the solution is to relax environmental protections and push approvals faster. That is not a solution. It is a symptom of a refusal to confront the real issue.
The quality of our lives really does depend on the quality of our questions. At this week’s summit, the wrong questions will be asked to and by the wrong people, producing the wrong results.
A real productivity summit would have the courage to say: GDP is not everything. Population growth is not destiny. Sustainability matters. The environment matters. Liveability matters.
Until we ask these questions, and until ordinary Australians are in the room to demand them, our politics will remain in the performative theatre—with outcomes as pre-scripted as dinner at The Lodge.
