Opinion
Is the jig finally up on mass immigration? The elite class are addicted to mass immigration, even as Australian voters reject it more and more strongly.
Not least because voters are wise enough to see what apparently eludes the university-educated elite: importing millions of foreigners during a housing crisis is sheer lunacy. It’s becoming so obvious that even Australia’s far-left taxpayer-funded Marxist propaganda unit national broadcaster is almost ready to admit it.
The record-breaking level of migration has triggered a public debate around its impact on Australia’s inflation problem and a full-blown rental crisis.
The latest data from the Bureau of Statistics show the population grew by 2.2 per cent to 26.5 million in the year to March, with net migration reaching a record 454,400 for the period, twice the amount of the decade average.
More than 500,000 people are expected to come into Australia this calendar year.
To put it into perspective, Australia is being swamped by the equivalent of the entire population of Auckland, every couple of years.
Anyone who thinks that isn’t going to drive up house prices and rents, as well as inflation, is a loon, ideologically deranged, or, most likely, both.
Former treasurer in the Howard government and outgoing Future Fund chair Peter Costello said in a recent speech that while the current pace of migration benefited the economy, it put pressure on inflation through the rental market.
The “economic benefit”, though, is nothing like we’re led to believe. At best, it boosts GDP by about 1%. Sound impressive? Not when you break it down to dollars-per-head. That “benefit” is between $150-500 per Australian, per year. That doesn’t even cover the annual rise in rents and mortgages, let alone everything else sent skyrocketing by immigration-induced inflation.
The whole thing is a colossal con job.
Australia’s inflation rebounded in the September quarter, with fuel (up 7.2 per cent), rents (up 2.2 per cent), new dwelling purchases (up 1.3 per cent) and electricity (up 4.2 per cent) contributing the most.
While the annual growth in rents was the largest since 2009, at 7.6 per cent, the ABS said it would have been worse (up 2.5 per cent) without government intervention of Commonwealth Rental Assistance.
The bureau also warned back in April that rents account for about 6 per cent of the Consumer Price Index (CPI), making it the second-largest contributor to the index.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that immigration is the sole contributor to inflation. Other deranged government policies, especially “Net Zero”, are sending prices soaring as well. But immigration is far and away the biggie.
It is an issue that has concerned the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and been central to interest rate decisions.
In April, board members discussed the difficulties rapid population growth may present in reducing inflation.
“Members noted this could put significant pressure on Australia’s existing capital stock, especially housing, which would in turn manifest in higher consumer prices.”
But the beneficiaries of this Ponzi scheme aren’t about to admit it.
Independent economist Chris Richardson […] said the more urgent issue here was to fix housing.
ABC Australia
The problem with that argument, as even this trougher admits, is that “fixing housing” is at least decades away. The simple fact is that Australia just cannot build houses at anywhere near the rate to catch up with, let alone keep up with, relentless, turbo-charged mass migration.
It also begs the question: just how much of Australia’s precious arable land do these loons want to pave over with endless, ugly suburban sprawl? Australia seems “big and empty”, until you consider that almost all of that is uninhabitable, infertile desert with some of the world’s poorest soils. Australia’s usable farmland is restricted to the coastal fringes, especially in the east — and that’s exactly where all these millions of migrants keep packing in.
This demented Ponzi scheme just cannot be allowed to go on.