Labor migration failures create an underclass of working homeless citizens

When the population equivalent of the city of Hobart is landing in Australia in the space of a month, we shouldn’t be surprised when Australians find it hard to secure a rental.

Failure to manage migration has created an underclass of working homeless citizens. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen/Courier Mail

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An Australian father appearing on ABC television’s Q+A recently became a viral sensation when he asked the following question: “I recently got a rent increase notice for an additional $180 a week, which works out to be about $10,000 a year … I tried to find a cheaper place and there just aren’t any. What little is available, there’s dozens of people lined up. Lots of them are immigrants and they have plenty more money than I can possibly get.

“I’m already working two jobs. One more rent increase and my family, my one-year-old baby, we’re facing homelessness and we’ve got nowhere to go. My family has already been forced out of Sydney for the same reasons. I want to know, is the government going to cut immigration to match housing availability or are we just going to keep going until every regular working Australian is homeless?”

Replying to the young father, federal Health Minister Mark Butler and Climate Change Authority head Matt Kean rehashed tired boilerplate about the situation being “complex”.

Health and Aged Care Minister Mark Butler on the ABC’s Q+A. Picture: ABC

But the situation is not complex at all. According to Australian Institute of Health and Welfare figures, across the past two years, under the current government, the number of working people who have become homeless has risen by 66 per cent.

Homelessness NSW reports that of those seeking support in the 2023-24 financial year, almost 20 per cent were employed. Seventy per cent of the employed homeless are women and 39 per cent are aged between 18 and 34.

Labor’s failure to manage migration has created an underclass of working-homeless citizens.

And this crisis is not an accident. In 2022 Anthony Albanese, along with Jim Chalmers, attended a Jobs and Skills Summit in Canberra with business and university leaders who lobbied the government to lift the permanent migration ceiling and relax working restrictions on international students. The Prime Minister and the Treasurer complied.

In February, 201,490 international students flooded the country, a figure that is 15 per cent higher than the corresponding month in 2024. When the population equivalent of the city of Hobart is landing in Australia in the space of a month, we shouldn’t be surprised when Australian citizens find it hard to secure a rental.

These statistics are simply abstractions on a spreadsheet for the business and university leaders who pushed for such increases. But for those being squeezed out of the housing market, the reality is existential.

Not being able to afford rent means that young people are not starting businesses. It means couples are not having babies.

And it means an entire generation of essential workers is being driven out of the cities in which they work.

Placing our recent immigration figures in context, economics writer Tarric Brooker points out that in 2024, Australia’s population was growing at a rate of 2.05 per cent. That’s double the growth rate of Western Europe, even after the Ukraine war sent hundreds of thousands of refugees westward.

Brooker says a population growth rate of 2 per cent is “the highest level of per capita migration in Australian history excluding the impact of returning servicemen and women following the conclusion of the first world war”.

Why is anyone surprised we continue to have a housing crisis? To keep pace with current migration levels, Australia would need to build 255,000 new dwellings every year. In 2024, only 39,715 dwellings were built, leaving a catastrophic shortfall of more than 215,000 homes in a single year.

A queue at a rental inspection in Sydney’s inner west. Picture: Reddit

With international students now arriving at a rate that is 15 per cent higher than in 2024, the 2025 housing deficit is set to explode even further.

So who exactly is benefiting from this? To understand who is reaping the rewards from this broken system, we have to return to the skills summit of 2022 in which Albanese and Chalmers were pressured by lobbyists to open the floodgates.

The biggest profiteers from this system are our tertiary institutions. Universities in Australia have largely become visa mills, charging the highest visa fees in the world, representing a $40bn industry. Australia’s university administrators take home seven-figure salaries. The average vice-chancellor of one of our visa mills gets paid almost double what the Prime Minister takes home – while more and more working Australians sleep in their cars.

Big business relentlessly lobbies for higher migration as well, citing perpetual “skills shortages” as justification. The evidence regarding an apparent skills shortage tells a different story. Research from economic think tank e61 has shown that Australia’s migration program actually harms productivity, contrary to what corporate interests claim. Their analysis found “migrant workers are more likely to work in lower productivity industries, and within industries they are more likely to work at lower productivity firms” – a trend that “appears to have worsened over the decade to 2020”. What this means is that migrants with engineering degrees are not necessarily working in start-ups creating innovative new products but are more likely to be driving Ubers and doing other low-skilled jobs that ordinary Australians could do. This is why Australia’s productivity remains stagnant despite our record-breaking immigration.

While the Coalition is seeking a cap on foreign students – pegged at 30 or 35 per cent of the total student population – government intervention needs to go further.

In the short term, migration needs to be capped at levels that match housing availability. And voters must demand that our governments prioritise the housing security of Australian citizens over university profits and corporate interests.

Australia’s democracy depends on restoring the social contract that rewards work with basic dignity. Either we control our borders to match our infrastructure capacity or we continue the slide towards becoming a country where full-time work is no guarantee against homelessness.

The choice should be obvious, but our leaders seem determined to make the wrong one.