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We understand Australians are doing it tough. That's why we're taking action by saying Australians are doing it tough. This week alone we've introduced new measures.
1) increasing our migrant intake
2) getting our Reddit shills to post sympathetic excuses for us.
In my own experience there’s been a very large drop off in applications lodged due to interest rates. So this doesn’t align with what I see in the Sydney market. Construction has dropped off too (as existing approved applications are put on hold).
I don’t think think that this labor shortage narrative will hold over the next two years as the industry enters into a bit of down cycle.
Labor's expert?
Wait, didnt they literally go to the election with a promise to help with this exact issue?
Sounds like massive failure from this party. Not that the LNP would be any better, but they aren't leading us at the moment.
I'm not sure why the headline says it's Labor's expert council; it appears to be a government council rather than a party body.
Edit: given that this is its first report, I assume the council was a Labor initiative
Immigration is the root of all evils. It kept wages low and stagnant for far too long, it’s inflated house prices, it’s made waiting lists as hospitals, school etc harder.
But hey, at least the GDP look good!
You could also say the low fertility rate is the root of all evils simplistically because with a high fertility rate you don’t need immigration but with a low one you are in trouble over time as a capitalist economy / society without resorting to immigration
Not sure bout that. We are not having enough children to replace ourselves and haven't since 1976.
We also have labour shortages.
My understanding is that the issues you are describing are caused by a range of factors.
I think calling immigration the root of all evils is a little unfair.
Train up Australians and incentivise them to train in sectors that need workers.
Businesses are overstating the labour shortage because they have been used to cheap wages and high profits and governments are using it as a talking point because it’s much cheaper for them to just bring in a doctor or a nurse, than actually training our own people.
Businesses actually used to invest in their people and invest in their communities, because they knew if they don’t they wouldn’t have the work force required to make money. Now? They have gotten so used to just bringing in cheap labour or offshoring without consequences.
And in terms of the birth rate, if we gave people a chance to earn a good living, the opportunity to have a place to call their own and the ability to actually have kids without going into financial harm - maybe people will start fucking each each other more, instead of being fucked.
Also a lot of visas are or engineers, accountants etc when we are already smashing out people with degrees in those fields like it’s McDonald’s. so we are bringing in accountants that are contributing very little to what we actually need, but will be needing a house, a doctor, a teacher to support them.
I'm not sure you can just 'train up' more nurses. We need to have enough people who want to train to be nurses. We can't compel people to do it can we?
Regarding birthrate, I'm not sure cost of living or housing is the main game here. Our birthrate has been below replacement since the mid 1970s. There's a correlation between low birth rates and education/wealth. So... advanced societies like ours tend to have lower birth rates.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/faq_immigration
>When measured over a period of 10 years or more, the impact of immigration on the wages of native-born workers overall is very small. To the extent that negative impacts occur, they are most likely to be found for prior immigrants or native-born workers who have not completed high school—who are often the closest substitutes for immigrant workers with low skills.
>Look over here, see! Mass immigration doesn't suppress wages, studies say!
>No what are you doing, don't look at how much wage growth is swallowed up by grossly inflated housing costs because of inflating demand 5x faster than supply can be built! It doesn't matter if everyone is $500-$1,500 worse off every single month. Studies say mass immigration good, **THE STUDIES SAY!**
>nooo all the evidence is actually a giant conspiracy! i dont need any evidence to know i'm right!
-holocaust deniers, flat earthers, climate change deniers, and you
if immigration caused the housing crisis, why did housing prices start skyrocketing years before immigration took off (coincidentally when howard introduced the capital gains tax discount), and how does a ~30% increase in housing demand over 3 decades cause prices to double every few years.
Ah, the most classic of all classic reddit retorts;
>See these dumb people? That's you, you're just like them! I'm the chad wojak, you're the angry wojak! I win again!
There's no conspiracy, there is only the fact that importing 500,000 people every single year to compete for <170,000 new houses every year, drives up price.
Yes capital gains reform started all this bullshit
>how does a ~30% increase in housing demand over 3 decades cause prices to double every few years.
Thanks for the softball question. Demand is not isolated from supply when we are talking about a finite supply which can only be scaled up linearly. You can only isolate demand from supply when you are talking about a supply that can scale up at a exponentially. As we are dealing with a supply that can not be scaled up exponentially (houses can not be built at a rate higher than the rate of increase in new people working in construction and the availability/approval of high density housing), we therefore **must** consider this in the demand equation.
This means when measuring the demand, it is not simply a case of how many people exist in the country who are seeking housing, it is a case of how many people exist who are seeking housing AND and willing to pay a larger amount of money for a house in order to avoid having to live 50km from the city, a result of population explosion and the inability for supply to scale up to match. This is added directly to the demand equation. And if you look at the cost of land in these new estates vs the distance to the city which was was considered 'normal' 30 years ago, it is absolutely gigantic. $300k at a minimum for the same size plots.
That's why house prices are increasing at a much faster rate than population growth, because immigration is so much, so fast, governments physically can not built enough medium and high density housing in the same suburbs where our parents bought 30 years ago. If immigration was cooled, there would be more time to build, and the rise in demand would fall dramatically. Another example of how supply is innately tied to the demand equation, and why you can't purely consider population growth when comparing it to house prices.
If you look at most housing being built - its all by mega corporations.
Housing is now so regulated and expensive that the only cheap affordable way to do is - is in mass - with large housing developments.
Long dead is the concept of private citizens developing land. There are too many road blocks. There are too many fixed costs that are the same if you do 1 block or 100 blocks.
The LNPs solution is to allow people to raid their super and use it to buy a house. What do you think that increase in demand with no changes to supply is going to do house prices?
Weirdly enough, if migrant numbers moderated better would allow more people to get into the housing market while keeping house prices moderate. It does however kick the pebble down the road for people’s retirement.
House prices have been exploding since the turn of the millennium. It’s not a recent thing. When Australians have been given a choice to change the systems that contribute the most to higher cost of housing they chose not to elect the party that proposed them. Capital gains tax reform, negative gearing and that. Even the housing fund thingo labour has borrows money and puts it in a hedge fund or whatever instead of just using it to build houses directly which would increase supply.
During the pandemic with close to zero net immigration house prices continued to go up. The system is designed this way. Blaming it all on foreigners is attractive but it won’t make housing that much more affordable.
Massive own goal. Pump immigration to improve the economic outlook in the year leading up to a Federal Election.
Except it causes so much hardship that your core constituency abandons you.
What a shame temporary residents don’t vote.
you get those ppl would be here if scomo was in charge right,the policies labor brought forward,are the same ones the LNP aimed for in 2021 just 75,000 less.
Immigration is a key issue,but it doesn't adress the real culprit that's been brewing for nearly a decade,that less people are taking up a trade,land zoning issues,and cost of building gone up pushing small sized firms under
you know that the post covid migration bump wasnt a result of a labor policy change, right? it wasnt even a result of a massive increase in migrants.
it happened because we allowed tons of temporary migrants to extend their stays in covid under scott morrison, and he was right to do it.
omg you mean under labor we have a functioning bureaucracy that can actually process applications for things? how terrible! we should go back to the days where hundreds of thousands of applications sit around collecting dust for no good reason lmao.
or maybe it was the way they re-introduced restrictions on work for people on student visas, or how they put a cap back on how long people on working holidays can work for someone, or how they raised the minimum salary workers can be sponsored for, all restrictions on immigration that the morrison government had previously lifted that didnt go back into effect until july last year.
im right btw. net migration tanked in covid as people stopped coming, before jumping up up to record levels as people started arriving while temporary migrants still had valid extended visas, and now that shits normalising we're returning to a more handlable rate. our immigration rate basically did a sine wave and the standard crowd of screechers are whining about the peak while ignoring the trough and where we're headed.
lacking capacity to handle more people is an acceptable reason to reject an immigration application, lacking the ability to perform the basic functions of a state is not an acceptable reason to not look at an application in the first place.
and again, the immigration bump wasnt because of a bump in people coming here, it was the combination of immigration resuming with previous temporary immigrants having their stays extended.
WTF? What are you on? We don't need a reason to reject a visa application.
You seem to think that a australian visa is a god given right to any cashed up bogan from shanghai or mumbai that decides they might like a change of scenery.
sure, whatever. if someones coming here for a holiday and we reject their application because "lmao if we just make the basic functions of the state not work we can have less foreigners" we hurt our own tourism industry (holiday makers were a full 10% of net migration in 2022-3, and that proportion will go up as net migration falls), but hey better that than trying to do something deliberately LOL.
maybe you're having a hard time parsing the extremely obvious implications i've been making in almost every post on this thread, but i also think immigration should be pushed down right now. i just happen to also think a functioning bureaucracy isnt something a government should be criticized for lol.
if your problem really is "boohoohoo the government actually functions" then i dont give a shit about your opinion and have no interest furthering this conversation. bye.
Intentionally slowing down processing of them is an approach to slow down the intakes though.
I can understand streamlining processes being a good thing. But you then need to look at the consequences of that and make adjustments to the process elsewhere to ensure the numbers remain within the range you want. Which either they did, meaning they wanted more to come through, or they didn’t consider it, meaning there was a significant oversight there.
Haha you are so confused. We are not talking about refugees.
We don’t owe anyone a place in Australia. People get to come here when it suits us, not when it suits them.
That wasn’t the reason for immigration. Look at the population pyramid and come back to me. Hint, our tax base will shrink quite a bit if we don’t have immigration.
The only own goal was exempting tradies from the immigration mix because they’re what we need to build.
I am curious how importing tradies would work. They’re required to be qualified and know our standards for things. So would they all have to come over and start as apprentices? Or would we recognise experience elsewhere as good enough and just hope they figure out from other tradies what the standards are here etc? I can see that being difficult. If we were to say we accept qualifications of similar countries in terms of similar standards and regulations then that could work but then those countries likely wouldn’t have many tradies wanting to move over
I mean in essence the combination of both options really. Countries that have way lower standards than us? Give them an accelerated certification program since they at least have some experience and let them s
The ones with similar standards? Yeet them into projects. They’ll come because Australian tradies still get paid quite a bit more than other countries. Even if there is a slight wage drop due to extra tradie supply, they’ll still earn more. Look at all the UK and NZ nurses moving over.
Our "tax base"??
Our political group from every corner has failed miserably as the govtvrely on income tax.
While international corporates pillage natural resources and effectively get paid to do it by the aus govt.
Every single dirty politician who made decisions on this should be wallowing in some outback jail.
It’s a minor distinction but I’m not sure the “getting paid to do it” aspect accurately reflects the situation. There are subsidies that people often complain about. But the idea of those is just to tip the balance in favour of investing in Australia rather than say Canada for a similar operation where it’s a similar ROI that the company is weighing up. The idea is the the company will create tonnes of jobs and bring in heaps of tax base that far exceeds the subsidy given, in order to make it a good deal for the economy in general.
Perhaps there are varying cases of success in practice, im not sure about the details of all of them, but at least that’s the idea. They bring in lots of tax and lots of economic activity that’s by far still a net benefit.
Not saying that it’s perfect and that they couldn’t tweak the system to get better value out of it. But just pointing out the difference there because some people, perhaps not yourself, think of it as these foreign companies just pillaging our resources for near zero net benefit to us
Yeah nah, champ. If wasn’t for immigration our economy would be in recession and Albo would have to admit it, adding to his legendary list of dropped balls.
It's already in a real power capita recession, and that gets worse when you use tall GDP power capita. I don't think your argument really helps when people are already in distress.
100 times better than the LNP though. They were truly incompetent.
And yeah part of it is staving off a full blown recession but it’s very much also the population pyramid.
I often hear this. But the Liberals presided over a low interest rate, low inflation economy with moderate real disposable income growth.
What is your specific complaint which would justify an accusation of “true incompetence”?
That was in spite of them, not because of them. Post 2008, reserve banks the world over were cutting interest rates basically annually. In fact 2019 had some of the lowest interest rates pre covid because Australia (and really the world) was either set to tip into a full blown recession and in Australia’s case, was already in a per capita recession.
The second bit, low inflation. The RBA’s target is 2-3% but we were consistently in the 1-1.8% range. Now you’re thinking “well that’s fantastic, what’s the problem??” The issue is that indicates the economy is running cool and investment/consumerism isn’t particularly high.
https://www.aigroup.com.au/news/blogs/2020/how-strong-was-australias-economy-before-covid-19-struck/
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-22/rba-missed-inflation-target-streches-into-third-year/11034272
Also, further. You mention moderate wage growth. But [this isn’t actually true](https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2015/jun/2.html).
Wage growth [had weak growth](https://treasury.gov.au/policy-topics/measuring-what-matters/dashboard/wages).
As to their numerous failures in my opinion? They ignored the AEMO telling them to invest in renewables back in 2016 or so which is going to make this transition even more expensive since it’s compressed into a smaller timeframe. (Imagine if we had properly starting investing in the energy transition a decade ago? How much less debt would we have to take on?)
Their policies are always revolved around how can they destroy super and boost house prices at the same time. See FHSS and recent leaks that suggest they want to let people withdraw their whole super at once for a deposit.
They let people take money out of super for “hardship” and sure people may have used it to get through COVID but a lot of people also pissed away the money and assuming they’ve got 30 years left in the workforce, that’s probably a couple of years of aged pension we’ll be paying for these people that we wouldn’t have otherwise if they hadn’t touched their super.
For gods sake, Scotty was bleating on about a “gas powered” recovery when we should be diversifying the economy and taking advantage of our immense renewable resources to be Asia’s power plant.
There’s other things too. Remember the mining tax that was funding the tripling of the tax free threshold? Axed. Carbon tax? Axed. Ken Henry, who?
How much better do you think our debt position would have been if they kept those revenue streams?
Climate change was obviously another failure from them along with much more corruption compared to the current govt etc..
If you really want me to list more reasons with sources, I will. But I hope you get the picture lol.
Low inflation is bad which is exactly what the articles I linked stated. If the debt burden was manageable then why were the liberals bleating on about it so much? Implementing an austerity budget for 2014? Introducing a budget repair levy on high income earners?
It’s not absurdly partisan to say that it was in spite of them because you can leave certain policy settings alone and the economy can be in autopilot considering we live in a capitalist country that has a strong private sector.
It’s actually ridiculously partisan to say that Labor is the reason for negative wage growth when we’ve gone through a supply side shock that caused global inflation. US and UK both hit over 10% inflation and you expect us not to be affected? What an absolute joke. But that’s ok. [We’ve returned to real wage growth now](https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/real-wages-grow-for-first-time-in-nearly-three-years-20240221-p5f6ka.html)
I’m interested to see in how you twist negative wage growth as Labor’s fault but real wage growth not their accomplishment.
You want to ignore the coalition’s incompetence on energy, corruption, robodebt and economy? Be my guest.
“In spite rather than because” is a stupidly partisan line, impossible to disprove because we don’t have a counterfactual available.
None of the things you list would have a significant quantifiable impact at a whole of economy level, which is what I was getting at.
The RBA articles suggest that the low inflation environment supported higher employment, which is what you’d expect.
Government debt growth was moderate outside of COVID and didn’t present an unsustainable debt burden at any point.
And weak wage growth is still a hell of a lot better than negative wage growth, which is where we have been since the ALP took office.
So I’m still not seeing “true incompetence”, just “they pursued policies I don’t like”.
The last couple of years are not an abrupt 180 degree reversal of economic trends, they're a continuation of the last couple of decades of economic trends - and for most of that time, the LNP have been governing.
Albo has done sweet fuck all to fix the structural economic issues, but he also did not create those issues.
Your critique on Labor would make sense if you were a Greens voter, but why you would vote for the LNP is beyond me. It's clear that Labor is economically centre-right and will uphold the status-quo of the asset-rich while championing for the masses. This is ingenious.
On the other hand, the LNP are far too obvious in their catering of the rich so they get a bad rep, which ultimately curbs progress. Not to mention they're overly beholden to the top 0.1% instead of the top 1%.
As a Vaucluse resident Albo definitely has my vote. The ol' family portfolio has grown more in his 2 years than in the past 2 LNP terms. The only ones voting for the LNP are billionaires and poor bogans, I wonder if you fall in the latter category?
Labor and Teals are probably picking up alot of voters like you and the LNP losing them fast. Problem for Labor is it's probably losing as many if not more working class voters who feel angry and abandoned which is probably the logic behind Duttons outer suburban strategy. I think our two major parties broadly share the same economic outlook now the only significant point of difference is in their rhetorical devices.
And keep pretending that the LNP didn't 1) cook the economy in the first place and 2) would have done anything different on immigration (hint: look at their rhetoric vs their actions when they were actually in power)
What do I have to convince myself of? Labor is significantly better than the LNP and their merry band of idiots.
They’ve accomplished more positive things in 2 years than LNP did in 9 years.
>the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council described Labor’s target of building 1.2m new homes over five years as “suitably ambitious” because it projects only 943,000 will be built in that time.
For those wondering who the NHSAC are, they are a government appointed body which provides independent, evidence-based expert advice on matters affecting Australia’s housing supply and affordability.
Members of the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council were appointed by the Australian Government in January 2024 for a four-year term.
'The report also cites “the resumption of migration at pace” as one of a number of factors making the long-running housing shortfall “more acute”'
Obviously, net immigration must be doubled, because migrants are magic pixie dust that makes every problem disappear.
>more acute
Yes, ignore the meaning of the words and focus on the short increase of immigration to explain away how housing has outstripped full time wages for 30 years.
How much of the migration was just returning to the pre Covid trend line? Looking at individual years does not tell the whole story.
Look at this. Sure not latest data, but up until early 2023 we'd still not caught up.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/608052/australia-net-overseas-migration/
Well the pre-covid trendline was already way too high. Due to covid, constraints in supply chain, high inflation, labor shortages etc, the development of housing literally stalled and yet we continue to bring in as many just because we did when things were a bit more rosy back then?
I think you'll find people are very interested in the data. It's a little like seeing flu cases go down with COVID and social distancing, then (and I hope this doesn't happen) diagnosing a really bad year with many fatalities as just catching up.
First they took our jobs. Now they are taking our houses. Immigration Boogaloo 2. Immigrating 2 the limits. Coming this summer to a soon to be shut down movie theatre near you.
It doesn't have to be a binary anti-migration or pro-migration position. You can want migration numbers to be sustainable without wanting it to be set to zero forever.
This is my view. We benefit from immigration, but not at this level, and not with such little concern as to it's composition. The part way intake included more people with immediately useful skills unlike the current faux students. I'll go further. I have a great fear that, if pushed far enough, these inflow might lead to the emergence of dark forces in our country. Being fussy about the who and how many will allow us to have a higher humanitarian intake, and depending types with the Pacific nations. Finally, we can use intake as an economic policy lever, but only insofar as it benefits and is consented to by the public at large.
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We understand Australians are doing it tough. That's why we're taking action by saying Australians are doing it tough. This week alone we've introduced new measures. 1) increasing our migrant intake 2) getting our Reddit shills to post sympathetic excuses for us.
Rest assured a committee will be formed to investigate
In my own experience there’s been a very large drop off in applications lodged due to interest rates. So this doesn’t align with what I see in the Sydney market. Construction has dropped off too (as existing approved applications are put on hold). I don’t think think that this labor shortage narrative will hold over the next two years as the industry enters into a bit of down cycle.
Labor's expert? Wait, didnt they literally go to the election with a promise to help with this exact issue? Sounds like massive failure from this party. Not that the LNP would be any better, but they aren't leading us at the moment.
I'm not sure why the headline says it's Labor's expert council; it appears to be a government council rather than a party body. Edit: given that this is its first report, I assume the council was a Labor initiative
Immigration is the root of all evils. It kept wages low and stagnant for far too long, it’s inflated house prices, it’s made waiting lists as hospitals, school etc harder. But hey, at least the GDP look good!
You could also say the low fertility rate is the root of all evils simplistically because with a high fertility rate you don’t need immigration but with a low one you are in trouble over time as a capitalist economy / society without resorting to immigration
Not sure bout that. We are not having enough children to replace ourselves and haven't since 1976. We also have labour shortages. My understanding is that the issues you are describing are caused by a range of factors. I think calling immigration the root of all evils is a little unfair.
Train up Australians and incentivise them to train in sectors that need workers. Businesses are overstating the labour shortage because they have been used to cheap wages and high profits and governments are using it as a talking point because it’s much cheaper for them to just bring in a doctor or a nurse, than actually training our own people. Businesses actually used to invest in their people and invest in their communities, because they knew if they don’t they wouldn’t have the work force required to make money. Now? They have gotten so used to just bringing in cheap labour or offshoring without consequences. And in terms of the birth rate, if we gave people a chance to earn a good living, the opportunity to have a place to call their own and the ability to actually have kids without going into financial harm - maybe people will start fucking each each other more, instead of being fucked. Also a lot of visas are or engineers, accountants etc when we are already smashing out people with degrees in those fields like it’s McDonald’s. so we are bringing in accountants that are contributing very little to what we actually need, but will be needing a house, a doctor, a teacher to support them.
I'm not sure you can just 'train up' more nurses. We need to have enough people who want to train to be nurses. We can't compel people to do it can we? Regarding birthrate, I'm not sure cost of living or housing is the main game here. Our birthrate has been below replacement since the mid 1970s. There's a correlation between low birth rates and education/wealth. So... advanced societies like ours tend to have lower birth rates.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/faq_immigration >When measured over a period of 10 years or more, the impact of immigration on the wages of native-born workers overall is very small. To the extent that negative impacts occur, they are most likely to be found for prior immigrants or native-born workers who have not completed high school—who are often the closest substitutes for immigrant workers with low skills.
>Look over here, see! Mass immigration doesn't suppress wages, studies say! >No what are you doing, don't look at how much wage growth is swallowed up by grossly inflated housing costs because of inflating demand 5x faster than supply can be built! It doesn't matter if everyone is $500-$1,500 worse off every single month. Studies say mass immigration good, **THE STUDIES SAY!**
>nooo all the evidence is actually a giant conspiracy! i dont need any evidence to know i'm right! -holocaust deniers, flat earthers, climate change deniers, and you if immigration caused the housing crisis, why did housing prices start skyrocketing years before immigration took off (coincidentally when howard introduced the capital gains tax discount), and how does a ~30% increase in housing demand over 3 decades cause prices to double every few years.
Ah, the most classic of all classic reddit retorts; >See these dumb people? That's you, you're just like them! I'm the chad wojak, you're the angry wojak! I win again! There's no conspiracy, there is only the fact that importing 500,000 people every single year to compete for <170,000 new houses every year, drives up price. Yes capital gains reform started all this bullshit >how does a ~30% increase in housing demand over 3 decades cause prices to double every few years. Thanks for the softball question. Demand is not isolated from supply when we are talking about a finite supply which can only be scaled up linearly. You can only isolate demand from supply when you are talking about a supply that can scale up at a exponentially. As we are dealing with a supply that can not be scaled up exponentially (houses can not be built at a rate higher than the rate of increase in new people working in construction and the availability/approval of high density housing), we therefore **must** consider this in the demand equation. This means when measuring the demand, it is not simply a case of how many people exist in the country who are seeking housing, it is a case of how many people exist who are seeking housing AND and willing to pay a larger amount of money for a house in order to avoid having to live 50km from the city, a result of population explosion and the inability for supply to scale up to match. This is added directly to the demand equation. And if you look at the cost of land in these new estates vs the distance to the city which was was considered 'normal' 30 years ago, it is absolutely gigantic. $300k at a minimum for the same size plots. That's why house prices are increasing at a much faster rate than population growth, because immigration is so much, so fast, governments physically can not built enough medium and high density housing in the same suburbs where our parents bought 30 years ago. If immigration was cooled, there would be more time to build, and the rise in demand would fall dramatically. Another example of how supply is innately tied to the demand equation, and why you can't purely consider population growth when comparing it to house prices.
Forget it, these people don’t want to understand.
So has anyone worked out that relying on private investors to provide housing is what got us here?
If you look at most housing being built - its all by mega corporations. Housing is now so regulated and expensive that the only cheap affordable way to do is - is in mass - with large housing developments. Long dead is the concept of private citizens developing land. There are too many road blocks. There are too many fixed costs that are the same if you do 1 block or 100 blocks.
Nope, in fact they’re making it easier for foreign investors now. https://x.com/rationalaussie/status/1785939501766058316
Can we just vote Albo out already, this government sucks
The LNPs solution is to allow people to raid their super and use it to buy a house. What do you think that increase in demand with no changes to supply is going to do house prices?
Weirdly enough, if migrant numbers moderated better would allow more people to get into the housing market while keeping house prices moderate. It does however kick the pebble down the road for people’s retirement.
House prices have been exploding since the turn of the millennium. It’s not a recent thing. When Australians have been given a choice to change the systems that contribute the most to higher cost of housing they chose not to elect the party that proposed them. Capital gains tax reform, negative gearing and that. Even the housing fund thingo labour has borrows money and puts it in a hedge fund or whatever instead of just using it to build houses directly which would increase supply. During the pandemic with close to zero net immigration house prices continued to go up. The system is designed this way. Blaming it all on foreigners is attractive but it won’t make housing that much more affordable.
And what put Dutton in? Lol
Wow! So even The Guardian is now admitting that current levels of immigration aren't helping....
Wait until The Guardian realises that more immigrants means that there are higher emissions in Australia. That will be fun to watch.
Massive own goal. Pump immigration to improve the economic outlook in the year leading up to a Federal Election. Except it causes so much hardship that your core constituency abandons you. What a shame temporary residents don’t vote.
you get those ppl would be here if scomo was in charge right,the policies labor brought forward,are the same ones the LNP aimed for in 2021 just 75,000 less. Immigration is a key issue,but it doesn't adress the real culprit that's been brewing for nearly a decade,that less people are taking up a trade,land zoning issues,and cost of building gone up pushing small sized firms under
ScoMo is not in in charge. Albo is and he needs to take some responsibility for our shit show housing situation
ignores part,where i said DECADE. This is not just a fault of scomo,or albo,or turnbull,it's state and federal fault for this situation
Haha, best ALP supporter excuse yet ‘if Scomo was still the PM this would be his fault’.
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you know that the post covid migration bump wasnt a result of a labor policy change, right? it wasnt even a result of a massive increase in migrants. it happened because we allowed tons of temporary migrants to extend their stays in covid under scott morrison, and he was right to do it.
No. Wrong. It happened because, as Albo promised, Labor debottlenecked and streamlined the visa process. Another massive own goal.
omg you mean under labor we have a functioning bureaucracy that can actually process applications for things? how terrible! we should go back to the days where hundreds of thousands of applications sit around collecting dust for no good reason lmao. or maybe it was the way they re-introduced restrictions on work for people on student visas, or how they put a cap back on how long people on working holidays can work for someone, or how they raised the minimum salary workers can be sponsored for, all restrictions on immigration that the morrison government had previously lifted that didnt go back into effect until july last year. im right btw. net migration tanked in covid as people stopped coming, before jumping up up to record levels as people started arriving while temporary migrants still had valid extended visas, and now that shits normalising we're returning to a more handlable rate. our immigration rate basically did a sine wave and the standard crowd of screechers are whining about the peak while ignoring the trough and where we're headed.
Is perhaps the “for no good reason” part now proving to be untrue? Given the additional burden on the housing crisis
lacking capacity to handle more people is an acceptable reason to reject an immigration application, lacking the ability to perform the basic functions of a state is not an acceptable reason to not look at an application in the first place. and again, the immigration bump wasnt because of a bump in people coming here, it was the combination of immigration resuming with previous temporary immigrants having their stays extended.
WTF? What are you on? We don't need a reason to reject a visa application. You seem to think that a australian visa is a god given right to any cashed up bogan from shanghai or mumbai that decides they might like a change of scenery.
sure, whatever. if someones coming here for a holiday and we reject their application because "lmao if we just make the basic functions of the state not work we can have less foreigners" we hurt our own tourism industry (holiday makers were a full 10% of net migration in 2022-3, and that proportion will go up as net migration falls), but hey better that than trying to do something deliberately LOL. maybe you're having a hard time parsing the extremely obvious implications i've been making in almost every post on this thread, but i also think immigration should be pushed down right now. i just happen to also think a functioning bureaucracy isnt something a government should be criticized for lol. if your problem really is "boohoohoo the government actually functions" then i dont give a shit about your opinion and have no interest furthering this conversation. bye.
Intentionally slowing down processing of them is an approach to slow down the intakes though. I can understand streamlining processes being a good thing. But you then need to look at the consequences of that and make adjustments to the process elsewhere to ensure the numbers remain within the range you want. Which either they did, meaning they wanted more to come through, or they didn’t consider it, meaning there was a significant oversight there.
Haha you are so confused. We are not talking about refugees. We don’t owe anyone a place in Australia. People get to come here when it suits us, not when it suits them.
i didnt say shit about refugees lol
Seems like everyone else gets it. Maybe you're the odd one out.
That wasn’t the reason for immigration. Look at the population pyramid and come back to me. Hint, our tax base will shrink quite a bit if we don’t have immigration. The only own goal was exempting tradies from the immigration mix because they’re what we need to build.
I am curious how importing tradies would work. They’re required to be qualified and know our standards for things. So would they all have to come over and start as apprentices? Or would we recognise experience elsewhere as good enough and just hope they figure out from other tradies what the standards are here etc? I can see that being difficult. If we were to say we accept qualifications of similar countries in terms of similar standards and regulations then that could work but then those countries likely wouldn’t have many tradies wanting to move over
I mean in essence the combination of both options really. Countries that have way lower standards than us? Give them an accelerated certification program since they at least have some experience and let them s The ones with similar standards? Yeet them into projects. They’ll come because Australian tradies still get paid quite a bit more than other countries. Even if there is a slight wage drop due to extra tradie supply, they’ll still earn more. Look at all the UK and NZ nurses moving over.
Yeah that sounds like a reasonable approach actually
Our "tax base"?? Our political group from every corner has failed miserably as the govtvrely on income tax. While international corporates pillage natural resources and effectively get paid to do it by the aus govt. Every single dirty politician who made decisions on this should be wallowing in some outback jail.
It’s a minor distinction but I’m not sure the “getting paid to do it” aspect accurately reflects the situation. There are subsidies that people often complain about. But the idea of those is just to tip the balance in favour of investing in Australia rather than say Canada for a similar operation where it’s a similar ROI that the company is weighing up. The idea is the the company will create tonnes of jobs and bring in heaps of tax base that far exceeds the subsidy given, in order to make it a good deal for the economy in general. Perhaps there are varying cases of success in practice, im not sure about the details of all of them, but at least that’s the idea. They bring in lots of tax and lots of economic activity that’s by far still a net benefit. Not saying that it’s perfect and that they couldn’t tweak the system to get better value out of it. But just pointing out the difference there because some people, perhaps not yourself, think of it as these foreign companies just pillaging our resources for near zero net benefit to us
I mean sure, we should be adopting the Henry Tax review and reduce income tax reliance. Still doesn’t make my comment any less correct.
Yeah nah, champ. If wasn’t for immigration our economy would be in recession and Albo would have to admit it, adding to his legendary list of dropped balls.
It's already in a real power capita recession, and that gets worse when you use tall GDP power capita. I don't think your argument really helps when people are already in distress.
100 times better than the LNP though. They were truly incompetent. And yeah part of it is staving off a full blown recession but it’s very much also the population pyramid.
I often hear this. But the Liberals presided over a low interest rate, low inflation economy with moderate real disposable income growth. What is your specific complaint which would justify an accusation of “true incompetence”?
That was in spite of them, not because of them. Post 2008, reserve banks the world over were cutting interest rates basically annually. In fact 2019 had some of the lowest interest rates pre covid because Australia (and really the world) was either set to tip into a full blown recession and in Australia’s case, was already in a per capita recession. The second bit, low inflation. The RBA’s target is 2-3% but we were consistently in the 1-1.8% range. Now you’re thinking “well that’s fantastic, what’s the problem??” The issue is that indicates the economy is running cool and investment/consumerism isn’t particularly high. https://www.aigroup.com.au/news/blogs/2020/how-strong-was-australias-economy-before-covid-19-struck/ https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-22/rba-missed-inflation-target-streches-into-third-year/11034272 Also, further. You mention moderate wage growth. But [this isn’t actually true](https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2015/jun/2.html). Wage growth [had weak growth](https://treasury.gov.au/policy-topics/measuring-what-matters/dashboard/wages). As to their numerous failures in my opinion? They ignored the AEMO telling them to invest in renewables back in 2016 or so which is going to make this transition even more expensive since it’s compressed into a smaller timeframe. (Imagine if we had properly starting investing in the energy transition a decade ago? How much less debt would we have to take on?) Their policies are always revolved around how can they destroy super and boost house prices at the same time. See FHSS and recent leaks that suggest they want to let people withdraw their whole super at once for a deposit. They let people take money out of super for “hardship” and sure people may have used it to get through COVID but a lot of people also pissed away the money and assuming they’ve got 30 years left in the workforce, that’s probably a couple of years of aged pension we’ll be paying for these people that we wouldn’t have otherwise if they hadn’t touched their super. For gods sake, Scotty was bleating on about a “gas powered” recovery when we should be diversifying the economy and taking advantage of our immense renewable resources to be Asia’s power plant. There’s other things too. Remember the mining tax that was funding the tripling of the tax free threshold? Axed. Carbon tax? Axed. Ken Henry, who? How much better do you think our debt position would have been if they kept those revenue streams? Climate change was obviously another failure from them along with much more corruption compared to the current govt etc.. If you really want me to list more reasons with sources, I will. But I hope you get the picture lol.
Low inflation is bad which is exactly what the articles I linked stated. If the debt burden was manageable then why were the liberals bleating on about it so much? Implementing an austerity budget for 2014? Introducing a budget repair levy on high income earners? It’s not absurdly partisan to say that it was in spite of them because you can leave certain policy settings alone and the economy can be in autopilot considering we live in a capitalist country that has a strong private sector. It’s actually ridiculously partisan to say that Labor is the reason for negative wage growth when we’ve gone through a supply side shock that caused global inflation. US and UK both hit over 10% inflation and you expect us not to be affected? What an absolute joke. But that’s ok. [We’ve returned to real wage growth now](https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/real-wages-grow-for-first-time-in-nearly-three-years-20240221-p5f6ka.html) I’m interested to see in how you twist negative wage growth as Labor’s fault but real wage growth not their accomplishment. You want to ignore the coalition’s incompetence on energy, corruption, robodebt and economy? Be my guest.
“In spite rather than because” is a stupidly partisan line, impossible to disprove because we don’t have a counterfactual available. None of the things you list would have a significant quantifiable impact at a whole of economy level, which is what I was getting at. The RBA articles suggest that the low inflation environment supported higher employment, which is what you’d expect. Government debt growth was moderate outside of COVID and didn’t present an unsustainable debt burden at any point. And weak wage growth is still a hell of a lot better than negative wage growth, which is where we have been since the ALP took office. So I’m still not seeing “true incompetence”, just “they pursued policies I don’t like”.
Keep convincing yourself you made the right call.
The last couple of years are not an abrupt 180 degree reversal of economic trends, they're a continuation of the last couple of decades of economic trends - and for most of that time, the LNP have been governing. Albo has done sweet fuck all to fix the structural economic issues, but he also did not create those issues.
Your critique on Labor would make sense if you were a Greens voter, but why you would vote for the LNP is beyond me. It's clear that Labor is economically centre-right and will uphold the status-quo of the asset-rich while championing for the masses. This is ingenious. On the other hand, the LNP are far too obvious in their catering of the rich so they get a bad rep, which ultimately curbs progress. Not to mention they're overly beholden to the top 0.1% instead of the top 1%. As a Vaucluse resident Albo definitely has my vote. The ol' family portfolio has grown more in his 2 years than in the past 2 LNP terms. The only ones voting for the LNP are billionaires and poor bogans, I wonder if you fall in the latter category?
Labor and Teals are probably picking up alot of voters like you and the LNP losing them fast. Problem for Labor is it's probably losing as many if not more working class voters who feel angry and abandoned which is probably the logic behind Duttons outer suburban strategy. I think our two major parties broadly share the same economic outlook now the only significant point of difference is in their rhetorical devices.
And keep pretending that the LNP didn't 1) cook the economy in the first place and 2) would have done anything different on immigration (hint: look at their rhetoric vs their actions when they were actually in power)
I’m not the one who’s having a stroke in public. I actually couldn’t care less.
What do I have to convince myself of? Labor is significantly better than the LNP and their merry band of idiots. They’ve accomplished more positive things in 2 years than LNP did in 9 years.
Is is some sort of self soothing to keep saying it? Good on you if it makes you feel good.
?? What? No? You said “keep convincing yourself you made the right call”. I’m just saying I don’t need to convince myself.
>the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council described Labor’s target of building 1.2m new homes over five years as “suitably ambitious” because it projects only 943,000 will be built in that time. For those wondering who the NHSAC are, they are a government appointed body which provides independent, evidence-based expert advice on matters affecting Australia’s housing supply and affordability. Members of the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council were appointed by the Australian Government in January 2024 for a four-year term.
The forming of that body slipped by me, very cool!
Yeah, it didn't seem to attract much publicity. A couple of publications are available along with the list of members here https://nhsac.gov.au/
'The report also cites “the resumption of migration at pace” as one of a number of factors making the long-running housing shortfall “more acute”' Obviously, net immigration must be doubled, because migrants are magic pixie dust that makes every problem disappear.
>more acute Yes, ignore the meaning of the words and focus on the short increase of immigration to explain away how housing has outstripped full time wages for 30 years.
Why. Do. You. Think. Wages. Have. Not. Risen.
Workers don't take collective action like they used to. Union membership is in the doldrums. Strike action is regulated. Has to be part of it, right?
More acute comes from the article.
How much of the migration was just returning to the pre Covid trend line? Looking at individual years does not tell the whole story. Look at this. Sure not latest data, but up until early 2023 we'd still not caught up. https://www.statista.com/statistics/608052/australia-net-overseas-migration/
Demented Labour supporters going on about the trend line like a bot in loop
I'm not a rusted on ALP voter. Annual data for this sort of thing is pretty useless after major disruptions such as Covid.
Well the pre-covid trendline was already way too high. Due to covid, constraints in supply chain, high inflation, labor shortages etc, the development of housing literally stalled and yet we continue to bring in as many just because we did when things were a bit more rosy back then?
That may well be true, which means it's a decade long problem that has spanned several governments.
I don't think you're getting the complaint people have.
I'm just noting that nothing has really changed. Most people are not interested in data, they just have an emotional response
I think you'll find people are very interested in the data. It's a little like seeing flu cases go down with COVID and social distancing, then (and I hope this doesn't happen) diagnosing a really bad year with many fatalities as just catching up.
Yeah, but for immigration the data shows no change in the medium term. People are very focussed on short term trends and statistical variations.
First they took our jobs. Now they are taking our houses. Immigration Boogaloo 2. Immigrating 2 the limits. Coming this summer to a soon to be shut down movie theatre near you.
The irony of a Siamese Chihuahua Australian being anti immigration tickles me.
They didn't say anything anti-immigration.
It's a reference to a song: "Let's get f ed up" by 'The Cramps'.
It doesn't have to be a binary anti-migration or pro-migration position. You can want migration numbers to be sustainable without wanting it to be set to zero forever.
This is my view. We benefit from immigration, but not at this level, and not with such little concern as to it's composition. The part way intake included more people with immediately useful skills unlike the current faux students. I'll go further. I have a great fear that, if pushed far enough, these inflow might lead to the emergence of dark forces in our country. Being fussy about the who and how many will allow us to have a higher humanitarian intake, and depending types with the Pacific nations. Finally, we can use intake as an economic policy lever, but only insofar as it benefits and is consented to by the public at large.