Australia has a housing crisis caused by a failure of the housing stock to keep up with population growth and the dramatic increase in the price of housing over the last 4 or so years. This is a problem for young and economically disadvantaged Australians. Not only is it difficult for them to buy a house, but the failure of the market to supply demand means that rents are also rising as well.

My rent in Coorparoo in inner city Brisbane has increased 10% this year, but it is not an inner city effect. When I comparison shop on realestate.com.au it is hard to rent a decent two-bedroom unit for less anywhere in the state.

Worse, at the same time, the Reserve Bank is increasing interest rates to deal with inflation, part of which is created by rising rents and mortgages. The effect of these rate increases is to make investment in housing less attractive adding to the problems of supply.

However, part of the problem is the 140,000 migrants who came into Australia last year. Even assuming a ratio of 4 per dwelling, this creased demand for 35,000 extra houses and units making it even more difficult for the housing industry to keep pace.

So, one solution to the crisis would be to decrease the immigration rate for a couple of years. Studies show that immigration has very little positive or negative effect on the economy, so it wouldn't affect GDP, but it would improve the standard of living of the rest of us by taking the pressure caused by increasing rents and mortgages off.

The more people who are affected by stupid, unnecessary immigration, the sooner pressure will be brought on politicians to start thinking about a population policy for Australia. They don’t listen to reason or common sense; they have to learn the hard way, usually when it’s too late.

Sadly, I think that the political agenda is being set by those interests benefiting from immigration. What disturbs me is that if immigration provides no net per capita benefit, then any profit for one can only come at the expense of others. This would make politicians in favour of immigration default supporters of economic parasitism.

It's not a zero sum game Fester. The reason that migrants make little difference to per capita income, but are welcomed, is because they increase the overall size of the economy. So some industries do well servicing their capital needs, because they need to re-establish themselves here, while others diminish because of the redirection of capital, but overall there's not much difference. One study said there was a small net benefit, and another a small cost.

And migration brings people at a particular stage in their lives who have skills that we lack, so they facilitate some industry that otherwise would experience capacity constraints.

Thanks for opening up this discussion, Graham.

The Courier Mail is full of stories of housing shortages and yet it continues to promote interstate immigration into Queensland and migration into Australia.

I have been unsettled by the question of immigration for decades, but have felt very constrained, unitl very recently, to raise my voice against it because it has been considered a taboo topic.

As I have already mentioned in another thread (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=4834#55050), can I recommend an excellent Masters Thesis: "The Growth Lobby and it's Absence" by Sheila Newman? It shows how a growth lobby representing property developers and land speculators has successfully lobbied for population growth in Australia since the 1970's, whilst France has achieved population stability and maintained housing affordability for its own residents over the same period.

It is available from the Swinburne University of Technology at http://adt.lib.swin.edu.au/public/adt-VSWT20060710.144805/index.html or here: http://www.candobetter.org/sheila

GrahamY

On a per capita basis it is a zero sum game or close to it, so I believe my concern well founded. You might also note whether the immigration studies considered the infrastructure costs that would be born by the comunity to support an increasing population; the PC Report on the economic impact of immigration did not. This would make it a negative sum game on a per capita basis, and would well and truly make any profit parasitic in nature.