In this interview, Saxon Davidson appeared on Sky News Australia with Steve Price to discuss the IPA’s research on immigration.
All media appearances posted onto the IPA website are directly related to the promotion and dissemination of IPA research.
Below is a transcript of the interview.
Steve Price:
Now still on the debate on immigration, the debate about the Palestinian Visas. This week there was some new data released that showed that the Albanese labour government, your federal government, has overseen a record increase in population growth. Now, anyone who lives in any of the big cities, mainly Sydney and Melbourne, but any big city, they know the impact of what this has had on their lives. Now, since the Albanese government came to power in 2022, 1.15 million, I’ll repeat that, 1.15 million migrants have entered the country, if you can believe that number. That beats the previous record set by the Rudd/Gillard government by 62%. Now, the Institute of Public Affairs undertook an analysis, and research fellow Saxon Davison joins me now. Saxon, these numbers are extraordinary. Now, rather than cutting migration, this government seems to be letting it run rampant.
Saxon Davidson:
You’re exactly right, and they simply have no plan to cut migration, even though they promised to cut net migration in the most recent budget for the last financial year. Now, the amount of migrants that were let in the last financial year resulted in a housing shortage of 24,000 homes. If nothing changes, this is going to result in a housing shortage of 250,000 homes, over 250,000 homes. By 2028. The level of migration this government is simply pursuing and is attaining is simply putting Australians behind, and even regardless of whether they just got here or they’ve been here for generations.
Steve Price:
What do you think is behind those inflated numbers? I mean, when you go back and look at your report, and you go all the way back to the Hawke/Keating days, you can look at, as we said there, what happened during Rudd and Gillard. Why the explosion? Is it the political nature of the left-leaning federal government we now have? What’s driving this?
Saxon Davidson:
What’s driving this is that they just simply have no economic plan besides population growth. In 2023, 85 per cent of all economic growth in Australia was led by population growth, and when you compare that to the Hawke and Keating years, and the Howard years in the 90s, it was as low as a third. This migration programme, this unplanned migration programme that the government is running simply mask the fact that the government has no plan economically for how to grow the economy, and that is how this programme is inflationary.
Steve Price:
I remember back in the 2000s in New South Wales in Sydney. I mean, the then premier, labour premier, by the way, Bob Carr said, “Hang on. Look, Sydney’s full. We can’t take any more people,” and various mayors of Western Sydney local governments saying, “Look. Why are all these people coming into our area? We can’t cope with it. We don’t have the houses. We don’t have the infrastructure,” and so it’s one thing for the government to keep jamming people into the country to try and falsely keep the economy going, but the infrastructure doesn’t exist, does it, that’s included to cope with it?
Saxon Davidson:
No, the infrastructure simply doesn’t exist, and a large reason for that is actually international students. International students took over 100 percent of equivalent new dwellings in 2022, 2023 in some major cities, including Sydney, and close to 80 percents in cities such as Melbourne and Brisbane. The infrastructure simply does not exist, and the only policy lever available to the federal government, not the state government, but the federal government, is immigration, and it’s a popular policy lever to pull. 60 per cent of Australians, according to IPA polling, want immigration to be paused, not just reduced or cut, but paused until our important social and economic infrastructure, such as housing, can catch up.
Steve Price:
So we’ve got a government promising to build 1.2 million new homes. They’re way behind on that. They’re way, way, way behind, and some research that I’ve seen recently suggests that many of the migrants that are coming here for, clearly, if you move countries, you’re moving to have a better life for yourself, but many of these migrants don’t want to be jammed into Sinclair into apartment blocks. They actually want what most Australians want, the Australian dream of a quarter-eight block, a house, and a backyard. So many of them are arriving with money, and that is then causing great pressure on the housing market right around the country.
Saxon Davidson:
Absolutely, and this is partly due to the ideological nature of the type of homes that the government want to build. Built to rent is not actually the Australian way of life. Australians have always endeavoured to have urban sprawl and be able to have their own backyard, and these are the type of homes that typically Australians want to live in and that want to be built, but unfortunately, this is not the type of housing that the government is pursuing, and they’re not building enough homes anyway to fill in the amount of migrants that they’re bringing into the country.
Steve Price:
And just finally, you’re convinced there’s a link between inflation and the numbers of people that we’re bringing into Australia.
Saxon Davidson:
100 percent, and this is simply because all of our economic growth, or 85 percent, as I mentioned earlier, is being led by population growth. This means there’s very little productivity into the economy from businesses, and it’s not being encouraged by government. We have a record amount of red tape. We have a record amount of green tape, and the government is routinely and re-regulating our most prosperous industries. The link between inflation and our current migration programme is undeniable.
Steve Price:
Sinclair, thanks for your time. Appreciate it as always. Now, one of the-
This transcript with Saxon Davidson talking on Sky News Australia with Steve Price from 16 August 2024 has been edited for clarity.
