We need migrants to build more homes: Immigration minister

Immigration Minister Andrew Giles says skilled migrants are needed to build new homes, warning Australia must engage in a sober debate on the pressure the surge of overseas arrivals is placing on the housing crisis.

In a marked intervention in the political debate about “big Australia”, Giles said while the population is lower than was forecast before the pandemic, the nation’s mortgagees and renters faced “significant pressure points” in the housing market.

Immigration Minister Andrew Giles says skilled migrants are needed to build homes in Australia.Credit: Simon Schluter

“I think this is a really important debate, but it’s really important that it is carried out in a considered manner,” Giles said in an interview.

“I think the biggest driver for increasing demand and one of the key aspects is, of course, one of the skill shortages that we’re experiencing is the skills we need from migrants to build the houses in Australia.”

His comments highlight the tightrope walk the Albanese government faces over curbing the overseas net migration intake while importing the skills the country desperately needs for critical industries, including construction.

Construction lobby Master Builders Australia has been pushing to make it easier for building and construction workers to obtain skilled visas to plug the critical shortfall in labour needed to meet the government’s ambitious housing demands.

“We need at least 480,000 new workers to enter the industry in coming years for business as usual. This number does not include the huge workforce that will need to be trained to meet the net zero transformation or housing accord goals,” MBA chief executive Denita Wawn said.

The government is overhauling the temporary migration system to lure skilled professionals away from rival nations such as Canada and the UK, while introducing several measures to refine the intake of international students and to ensure they are not exploited as a low-paid temporary workforce at the expense of their education.

A new overarching migration strategy will be released before the end of the year by Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil.

The return of international students, currently at a record 664,000, has been credited with driving the surging increase in net overseas migration (deducting departures from the country in that period), which reached a record of 454,000 in the year to March.

According to former top immigration official Abul Rizvi, the number is likely to have surpassed 500,000.

The current population of 26.5 million cited by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in March this year is only slightly behind the almost 27 million forecast in the 2019-2020 budget for the end of 2022.

“Unless current net migration is reduced from its current level of around 500,000, that situation could reverse in a few years,” Rizvi said.

Net overseas migration is a key tool for measuring migration’s impact on population growth, and the figure has been seized upon by the federal opposition’s immigration spokesman Dan Tehan as evidence the government is presiding over a “big Australia by stealth”.

Tehan said earlier this year that Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil must answer several questions on the review, of which the first is: “how big will Labor’s Big Australia get?”

“Not even a year into government and Labor have increased the permanent migration cap by 35,000 people, overseen an influx in net migration of 650,000 people over the next two years, and offered no plan to deal with the 101,000 asylum seekers in Australia, which continues to grow each month,” he said.

According to a poll conducted by research company Resolve Strategic in July, 59 per cent of voters believed at the time of the survey Australia’s migrant intake was too high.

Government MPs and the international education industry have also acknowledged the return of international students is placing pressure on an overstretched rental market.

Giles cautioned against a return of the rhetoric used in the mid-1990s when One Nation founder Pauline Hanson was elected as an independent in part on a platform that called for net-zero migration.

“I just think immigration policy is complicated. We have seen in Australia’s recent past some very divisive debates around aspects of migration policy, that have seen real impacts in communities, in the 1980s, and, of course, when Senator Hanson was first elected as a member of the House of Representatives.” Giles said.

Giles himself has said the net overseas migration figure is too high, telling Melbourne’s 3AW radio station it should be in line with budget paper forecasts of 235,000.

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