A lawyer friend of mine who has acted on and off for large developers once told me that the really big money is Australia is made from change of land use.
Imagine, then, the vast amounts of money that will slosh about with Labor’s new policy to build 1.2 million dwellings over five years.
The Australian public will pay up to $3 billion which will to go to the states at $15,000 a dwelling. A further $500 million will go to local government for infrastructure.
It sounds all very laudable, but this housing policy will require massive and unnecessary shifts in resources that are completely against the public interest. The resources will go from the public sector to individual property developers and builders in the private sector – wasted on sterile unproductive investment.
The money is to bribe and coerce local government into trashing neighbourhoods with high-rise and to bribe and coerce state and local governments to surrender prime agricultural land to housing.
Agriculture will then further encroach on wilderness or other virgin land – adding the threat to Indigenous land. Eventually we become a net food importer. And what about the greenhouse gases generated by the construction of 1.2 million dwellings?
Why is Labor doing this? Why are the Greens also promoting high-scale construction of housing requiring massive environmental and agricultural destruction? The questions have puzzled me and others for a long time, but the answer is becoming more obvious.
Labor, the Greens, and all the economic commentators cry that increasing housing supply is the only answer to the housing and rental crisis.
For example, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said, “Supply is the key to putting downward pressure [on rent] and assisting renters”, along with a package of “sensible renters’ rights”.
Finance Minister Katy Gallagher concentrated all her comments about the housing crisis in a recent Q and A appearance on supply.
And in reasoning typical of economic commentators, one of Australia’s best economic journalists, Elizabeth Knight, wrote: “There are only two ways to solve this rental crisis – increase the amount of housing stock or increase the number of occupants living in a property.”
It goes on and on. Everyone in the business, economics and politics spheres says we must tear away planning rules to cram in more people and to tear away zoning laws to build houses willy-nilly everywhere. Supply, supply, supply, is the only solution, they say. They are utterly wrong.
The 300,000 elephants in the room each year are never mentioned. This is the demand side which is caused by upwards of 300,000 people being allowed each year to come to live in Australia. The housing and rental crisis in Australia is directly caused by too much demand, generated by ramped up immigration. The housing and rental crisis is created only by too much demand. If you turn off the demand the crisis ends. The very costly so-called supply crisis disappears.
The only sensible comments on the issue in mainstream media these days come from increasingly frustrated ordinary writers of letters to the editor and posts by members of the public of comments on increasingly maddening articles obstinately blinded or wilfully back-turned from the real cause of the so-called crisis.
You can understand the universities and the Coalition cheering on rampant immigration. The universities are happy to turn a blind eye to cheating foreigners as long as they pay once they get in. The Coalition and business since the early days of the Howard Government have beene happy to have a cheap supply to labour to suppress union power.
Howard was so obsessed by curbing union power that he was happy to ramp up immigration from about 70,000 to 250,000 a year so employers would not be held to ransom by union demands over pay and conditions.
But what of Labor and the Greens? The developments in Australian politics over the past half decade or so now provide an explanation.
Australian politics is no longer right v left or socialist v capitalist. It is now urban v rural and regional, or young v older. Labor and the Greens want to shore up their voter base and they can do that with high immigration because migrants and youth go to the cities.
It suits them to have a housing and rental crisis. That hurts the young and the urban. And the young and the urban turn to Labor and the Greens.
The three seats that the Greens won in Brisbane at the last election were among the highest youth and rental electorates in the nation.
As far as the Greens are concerned, stuff the environment, let’s crowd the inner cities so we can get more votes. Similarly with Labor: stuff the environment and the living conditions of the working class, let’s crowd the cities where we get more votes.
In short, Labor and the Greens like high immigration because in the medium term they are bringing in more Labor and Green voters. They have turned their back on the 60 to 80 per cent of voters (depending on which poll you read) who say Australia already has enough people or too many people and want immigration dialled down.
They are sick of the congestion. They are sick of the mad supply-side solutions to the housing crisis. They are sick of governments pandering to the short-term profiteering by property developers and retailers. They are sick of koala habitat being chain-sawed for housing to satisfy the growth mania. But in the present political climate are helpless in the fight against it. The dog-whistling racism of the conservative side of politics is not an answer.
With Labor’s latest so-called solution, they should be outraged that precious public money that should go to the health and education of people who already live here will be tipped into the rapacious maw of the property industry.
Australians will bitterly regret it in a decade’s time when they see the environmental and economic damage that ensues and the general decline in living standards of the many to serve the opulent living standards of the very few.
Why bring more people when we cannot educate the people already here without exorbitant fees or give them timely medical care without large gap fees or house them without so many people sleeping rough. Instructively, it did not happen in 1984-85 when Australia’s population was 15 million and our immigration program ran at 54,000.
Crispin Hull
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times and other Australian media on 22 August 2023.
Interestingly, the late Professor Henry Nix AO, whom I was privileged to know as a friend and colleague, in the 1970s estimated that on ecological principles the sustainable population of Australia was 15 million.
Spot on Crispin. The first major political party (that isn’t overtly racist / far right) to support sustainable immigration would win a large number of votes. As you point out there is no consensus from the voters supporting this radical uplift in net overseas migration and yet here we are, democracy in action.
This same issue is being raised in the UK where they thought Brexit equaled sustainable immigration. Now the conservative party is playing semantics claiming a vote for Brexit was never a vote for less immigration, instead it was nothing more than a vote for better border control.
Increasingly there is room for a new political party Australia. If Labor and the Coalition continue to ignore middle Australia we may see a Trump like candidate who voters will hold their nose and vote for anyway.
Correct. The housing “supply issue” is really a artificially boosted demand issue.
In the early nineties when The Greens were still an environmental party they recognized that the biggest threat to the environment was more and more people. They had a Zero Population Growth policy. looking on their website this appears to have been watered down to nothing.
Department of Home Affairs WebSite
Net border movements into Australia (thousands)
2016-17 246
2017-18 142
2018-19 267
2019-20 675
2020-21 199
2021-22 -85
2022-23 627 <<< July 2022 to May 2023
Thanks so much Crispin. It’s so good to hear your sane voice from time to time. I and others have been saying the same thing for years now. I joined the organisation Sustainable Population Australia in 1989 when I was working for CSIRO in Canberra. Forcing population through high immigration was an obvious no-brainer then, suiting only a cashed-up elite and ignorant political parties, and it’s even worse today. As you clearly understand, the forces lined up against a shift in this policy are formidable. I have actually come to the conclusion in recent years that the best way, if not the only way, out of this impasse of short-term, willful selfishness is to start replacing representative democracy (which has been ‘hacked’, as Al Gore has observed) with forms of empowered deliberative democracy, such as citizen assemblies. Political parties, their funders, the political class and all the interests aboard the gravy train have become THE problem. They are not an answer. I’m increasingly convinced this is right, although I have no illusions about such a transition being anything but hugely difficult and massively resisted by vested interests. But we need to start talking about it – as they are in Europe, indeed, where they are even taking small steps towards it (eg Belgium). Anyway I’m happy to discuss with you further over a coffee if you’re interested (I’m in Canberra next in early October). I’m yet to see a serious article about it in our media. In the meantime here’s a link to a Conversation article I had way back in 2016 on population growth and human wellbeing in Australia.
https://theconversation.com/why-a-population-of-say-15-million-makes-sense-for-australia-78391
The Conversation rejected my pitch for a story on deliberative democracy and citizen assemblies last year – which it normally does without seeing the story, of course. We are so far from steering a course out of this – no one is joining the dots. Keep up your great work!
Great article. Thanks. I might mention that emissions are massively increased with mass immigration. The average new house causes 50tons of emissions, plus asphalt and loss of opportunity of carbon uptake. The average migrant increases their emissions x4 on migration. Many suburbs are sites not on agricultural land but on destroyed forests, ecosystems, life support systems. It’s a truly appalling disaster for our ecosystems and climate. It’s shameful that the ALP is orchestrating this and the Greens are silent & complicit. Anti-environment. Anti-science. Just cynical vote-chasing.
Finally some one with common sense calling out what it is really about.
I am a migrant myself, and can see we are turning Australia into a third world country, where the middle class is becoming extinct.
Terrific article Crispin. Many thanks for stating the obvious once again. You’re almost a lone voice of sanity in the public sphere.
Spot on again ,mr Hull, just about everything that is not working properly any more in Aus can be attributed to high immigration (and lack of infrastructure spending.) The neoliberal philosophies pushed by the Libs for years that private enterprise will do it all better with an emasculated govt , is coming home to roost.
Before government money is spent on housing there needs to be a quick combined federal/state/territory Royal Commission into the housing construction industry. Shoddy work, company collapses leaving contractors unpaid, Unlicensed builders, warranties. Builders cancelling customer contractors when they realize they could sell it for more.At least every week there are several articles where buyers, owners and sub contractors have been ripped off. And the building companies declare bankruptcy. To bypass paying what they owe to workers and contractors, one recently gave themselves a massive payment prior to liquidating
What the governments state and federal should do is to build new or enhance more regional town/cities and to move parts of their public service their. Vic has done it with IT in Ballarat, NSW has some IT in Orange. Big cities are choking, they now lack transport, sports fields, Medical etc.
They can also add investment into new business in regional like IT, solar stuff, medical supplies (COVID). Aussie call centres and a myriad of emerging technological businesses.
Each half decent regional town could easily take in 5k residents and as long as infrastructure is added, esp water that would be enough to house 500k people. And building in regions is cheaper than cities and would provide better living quality than say spending $600 a week for one bed flat in Canberra, coupled with 40 min bumper to bumper drive to work and then have to pay $20 a day to park. The cheaper new homes should also have the highest EER as well as water tank.
It is also cheaper and safer to build proper cycling paths so regional people can get to and from work.
I know two areas that have done that Bega and the Dalmeny to Narooma cycle/walk track.
Yes, the one-eyed rhetoric stressing only supply is pointedly ignorant of demand, for which our insanely high level of immigration is almost entirely responsible. Where are the younger generation’s Bob Carrs when you need them (“Sydney is full”)? Sustainable Population Australia estimates that each new immigrant requires some $120,000 in infrastructure just to keep pace. At 300,000 pa, that’s about $36 bn pa. Which budget line will that be in October ?
Yes, Crispin,
The supply-side lie, pedalled, much as is high immigration, in a non-partisan manner by just about all the mainstream political players (save, an opportunist NLP — for as long as it suits) is of Trumpesque dimensions (even if it does not reflect at all Trump-like inclinations). It is so brazen, it adds insult to the dishonesty.
Still, Australians are getting pretty much what they deserve whether they want it or not. They keep voting in these duds!
We will only break free from this growthist madness when we hit the major parties for a six, and their insipid clones (Teals & Greens).
Keep up the great work! You are one of the very few willing to call things as they are. (Hail, too, Leith can Onselensl).