Dick Smith has blasted Australia’s latest record immigration figures for January as a “disaster for families”, as the federal government faces growing calls to reduce the number of new arrivals to ease pressure on the housing market.
Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, the legendary Aussie businessman slammed the latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released on Thursday, which showed the country brought in a record 125,410 permanent and long-term arrivals in January.
Even accounting for departures, the net increased of 55,330 was the highest January intake ever recorded.
“Every Australian family has a population plan to have the number of children they can give a good life to, but at the rate we are going it means the average Australian family will have less,” Mr Smith told the newspaper.
“The problem is billionaire political donors have a short circuit in their brains, and all they want is unlimited population growth to grow their wealth.”
The outspoken entrepreneur has been one of the most prominent voices calling for a reduction in Australia’s immigration numbers for many years.
While insisting he is “pro-immigration”, he has long argued the “figure should be about 75,000 a year” in line with the long-term average for most of the country’s history up until around the 1990s.
Last month, Mr Smith warned that if immigration continued at current levels Australia’s population would reach 100 million by the end of the century which “no one believes is sensible for an arid country like Australia”.
It comes after Australia’s net migration intake soared to a record high of 510,000 in the year to July 2023, double pre-pandemic levels.
In December, Labor pledged to halve the annual immigration rate to a “sustainable level” over the next two years under a series of migration reforms, including a crackdown on dodgy colleges and tighter rules around student visas.
But Leith van Onselen, co-founder of MacroBusiness and chief economist at MB Fund and MB Super, said it appeared immigration was actually ramping up even higher under Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
“The question every Australian should be asking the federal government is — why did it choose to ramp-up immigration to record high levels when the supply-side of the housing market was clearly bottlenecked?” he wrote on Thursday.
“Australia’s population grew by a record 680,000 people in 2023, which dwarfed the circa 170,000 homes built over the same period. The federal government’s reckless immigration policy is the primary driver behind the collapse in the nation’s rental vacancy rate to record lows, alongside the hyperinflation of rents. It is an inequality disaster in the making, courtesy of the Albanese government.”
Daniel Wild, deputy executive director of the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) think tank, said the latest ABS data show “the federal government has not honoured its promise to ‘normalise’ Australia’s migration intake, as it continues to bring in an unprecedented number of arrivals without any plan for how they will be accommodated”.
“The federal government simply refuses to listen to community concerns and continues to recklessly push the accelerator on migration at the exact same time as the brakes are being slammed on housing construction,” Mr Wild said in a statement. “It is unsustainable.”
He suggested the “unplanned mass migration approach is setting Australia up for an economic and humanitarian disaster, and actively undermines Australians who are struggling with rapidly rising house prices and rental costs”.
“In addition, for the first time in 40 years, per capita GDP has gone down for four consecutive quarters, leaving Australians, at an individual level, in a recession,” he said.
“While the overall size of the economic pie may be growing, it is leaving Australians with an even smaller slice.”
Earlier this month, the Coalition said Australia’s migration levels were “too high” and needed to be drastically reduced to keep housing affordability and rent prices at bay.
Opposition immigration spokesman Dan Tehan said the country could not sustain the 1.6 million migrants forecast to enter the country over the next four years given the current housing and rental crisis.
“When people can’t get in to see a doctor, when we’re seeing cuts in our infrastructure … that is too high,” he told ABC’s Insiders.
“What we need is a proper plan when it comes to immigration and set out what that should look like … it’s a complete mess.”
But Mr Tehan dodged questions on exactly what the Coalition believed the numbers should be, saying only that they wanted a “better” not “bigger” Australia.
“We will announce what our better Australia will look like in the lead-up to the election,” he said. “There will be an immigration policy that will be announced before the next election and it will be very different to Labor’s immigration policy.”
Brendan Coates, economic policy program director and the Grattan Institute think tank, said the record migrant intake was “clearly a driver of pressure in the rental market”.
“We estimate that every 100,000 additional migrants above the long-term trend probably adds about 1 per cent to rental costs,” Mr Coates said.
“So certainly, the surge that we saw over the course of the last financial year through to June 2023, that’s probably adding 3 to 4 per cent to rent prices. Given that rents rose by 7.8 per cent over the course of last year, it’s a big driver.”
NSW took the bulk of new long-term arrivals in January, followed by Victoria.
This week, NSW Premier Chris Minns sat down with news.com.au to discuss the Labor government’s proposed solutions to the housing crisis — sparking scores of comments attacking immigration as the cause of affordability pressures.
“It’s no wonder there is seemingly a growing resentment towards migration,” PropTrack executive director of research Cameron Kusher said.
“When you consider those that are already here in Australia are paying high prices for shelter or struggling to even find shelter for themselves.”
But Tenants Union of NSW chief Leo Patterson Ross told The Daily Telegraph migrants should not shoulder all the blame.
“The worry is we don’t want to lose any positive impacts of migration on the education industry, the tourism industries, skills shortages,” he said.
“The point for us is that we make sure that in other essential services like health and education, the infrastructure meets the needs of a community and adjusts to population growth and we don’t have the same approach in housing.”
frank.chung@news.com.au