Australian Politics
The big reason you can’t afford a home: Immigrants
There is nothing wrong with the government bringing in selected imigrants who will pull their weight economically but bringing in immigrants at twice the rate that new homes are being built is asking for trouble and very unfair to our young first-home buyers. They pay the penalty for irresponsible government
Apartment towers are springing up like mushrooms where I live in Brisbane but even they are not enough to house the huge numbers of imigrants received in recent years. The pandemic slowed down the rate of immigration for a while but there are no plans to make that permanent
Why are houses so ridiculously expensive in Australia? This, and other expletive-laden questions, I shouted at my screen while scrolling through realestate.com recently.
Is it because of our high wages? Maybe it’s because of Baby Boomers? Or is this just the way the world works, so stop asking questions?
Alan Kohler of the ABC puts it down to interest rates. Writers at The Guardian blame a lack of social housing. And politicians mutter something about supply chain issues, then quickly change the subject. Insightful as always.
As with most things, the simplest answer is often the first one overlooked.
Dr Shane Oliver, Head of Investment Strategy and Economics and Chief Economist of AMP Capital writes:
‘Starting in the mid-2000’s annual population growth surged by around 150,000 people per annum and this was not matched by a commensurate increase in the supply of dwellings
‘The supply shortfall relative to population-driven underlying demand is likely the major factor in explaining why Australian housing is expensive compared to many other countries that have low or even lower interest rates.’
In non-economist speak, it’s supply and demand, stupid. Thanks largely to net-overseas migration, our population is growing faster than housing supply can ever keep up with.
Leith van Onselen, Chief Economist at Macro Business, echoes a similar sentiment, saying that though interest rates have had a major impact on recent rises, immigration is the longer-term driver of higher house prices in Australia.
‘Overseas migration rose from an average of 90,500 between 1991 and 2004, to 219,000 between 2005 and 2019… that’s 140 per cent annual average increase.’
Using data from the ABS, van Onselen finds a correlation between migrants overwhelmingly choosing to settle in Sydney and Melbourne, with an above-average rise in house prices in those areas.
Essentially, what van Onselen and Oliver have done is confirm a lot of people’s suspicions that growing our population without proper planning is dumb as nails and making people’s lives worse. Even monkeys could make better strategists.
Some might say that owning a house is a pretty integral part of, oh, let’s say civilisation. We know that upward pressure on housing prices puts downward pressure on wages, living standards, birth rates, and eventually, quality of life.
Why, then, is the topic utterly trivialised with shrugged shoulders and phoney solutions by our experts and leaders?
To paraphrase recent government policies: ‘Ha! Housing? Who cares! That’s the next generation’s problem. Up yours, kids.’
Indeed, the government either completely ignores the effects of migration on house prices, or they mindlessly promote it, citing the benefits of increasing consumer demand in an economy.
Yet presumably this ‘increased demand’ extends also to houses and rentals, not just things like chocolate bars and televisions. Oh, and not to mention the overbearing demand on infrastructure, roads, and health services. Is the air thinner in Canberra?
(Sardonically, they also state ‘improved social cohesion’ as one of the reasons for current migration levels, conveniently ignoring the fact that most Australians want less migration.)
Big business finds the government’s positive tone towards migration numbers highly agreeable. Of course they would, they’re the ones benefiting from it. To understand how, one simply needs to listen to their frequent and vocal calls for an even higher migration intake to do things like ‘boost productivity’ and, bizarrely, ‘increase wages’.
For years, Australians have asked for a reduction in migration so that housing, wages, and infrastructure can all have a much-needed breather. Yet time and again the government has blatantly ignored these calls, instead upping the numbers. If they’re not listening to us, maybe they’re listening to the people who benefit most from migration. You’ll find them on the donor list.
Money talks.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/07/the-big-reason-you-cant-afford-a-home/
***********************************************Quick jobs fix: import more skills, Skills Minister says
Skills Minister Brendan O’Connor supports bringing in more overseas workers to help fill immediate job vacancies in key parts of the economy, ahead of a longer-term fix of training Australians in growth industries, including blue-collar trades, IT and healthcare.
Mr O’Connor said a short-term solution to worker shortages would need to include full restoration of the temporary and permanent migration schemes.
In comments that will buoy business, he said he did not believe there was a binary choice between training Australians and supporting migrant workers, and both were needed to help the economy grow.
Mr O’Connor said a lack of skilled workers was one of the biggest economic challenges facing Australia, with the government, unions and employers poised to come up with a comprehensive plan to tackle the issue at a jobs summit in September.
“I believe that there’s a combination of investing in skills in the labour market, and also relying on the restoration of the skilled migration streams,” Mr O’Connor told The Australian.
“I’ll be very supportive if we’re attending … to the things we need to attend to quickly and can be attended to quickly, in part, only through the restoration of the skilled migration stream.
“But it never should be, and never will be under a Labor government, at the expense of investing in skills in our existing labour market. “It is never one or the other; it never should be one or the other.
“I think the previous government got a bit lazy and too reliant on those temporary skilled visas.”
Mr O’Connor said it was a mistake for the former government to allow droves of skilled migrant workers to leave Australia during the pandemic, arguing that they should have been considered for government support programs such as JobKeeper.
The push for more migrant workers comes as Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil on Sunday announced that international visitors no longer had to prove their Covid-19 vaccination status to be allowed in Australia.
“Removing these requirements will not only reduce delays in our airports but will encourage more visitors and skilled workers to choose Australia as a destination,” Ms O’Neil said.
The number of job vacancies reached a record 480,000 in May, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics data released last week.
This was a jump of 14 per cent since February and more than double pre-pandemic levels of about 225,000, with vacancies high across the economy including in construction, mining, healthcare, IT and retail.
There are 548,000 people who declare themselves as jobless.
With more than 40 per cent of blue collar trades suffering from worker shortages, Mr O’Connor said Australians were increasingly realising that a university degree was not the only way to obtain a fulfilling career.
“I think as a country we failed to properly appreciate and elevate and advocate the real benefits of taking the vocational, technical pathway to employment,” he said.
“The mindset has changed, not completely, but I think it’s getting a lot better. “There is some great, well-remunerated work in the traditional trades.”
Net migration in the 2021 financial year led to a population loss of 89,000, with the Coalition’s March budget “planning” on hitting the permanent net migration cap of 160,000.
On top of low permanent migration, business leaders complained that processing times for temporary skilled migration visas had blown out from an average of eight days before the pandemic to more than 70 days.
The Business Council of Australia in February called for the 160,000-a-year cap on permanent migration to be lifted to 220,000 for the next two years, before reverting to the pre-2019 cap of 190,000.
On Sunday, BCA chief executive Jennifer Westacott said addressing worker shortages was “not a choice between migration and domestic skills”.
“We have to do both,” Ms Westacott said.
“Realistically, there aren’t enough workers here today to fill the critical worker shortfall hamstringing businesses across the economy, from the local cafe to global investors employing thousands of Australians.”
Ms Westacott said the government needed to reform the migration system to ensure local firms could “outcompete others in the fierce global battle to attract the best talent and skills”.
“That means keeping (labour market testing) safeguards in place but speeding up visa processing, removing the friction that makes it difficult for prospective migrants to get to Australia and giving them access to four-year visas to make uprooting their families and moving across the globe more attractive,” she said.
ACTU president Michele O’Neil said she would support higher permanent migration levels if there was strenuous labour market testing.
“The ACTU supports increased permanent migration and independent verification of labour and skill shortages,” Ms O’Neil said. “After a decade of running down our TAFE and higher education systems, there is an urgent need to improve skills and training for local workers and increase women’s workforce participation.”
In an interview with The Australian in June, Immigration Minister Andrew Giles said his priority was to address the blowout in processing times for Temporary Skill Shortage visas. He said he would also consider a broader overhaul of the immigration system to ensure it was compatible with the government’s skills agenda, flagging plans to have a stronger focus on permanent migrants more than short-term workers.
“We are worried about the drift away from the permanent model of migration that’s been a cornerstone for Australia as a very successful multicultural society,” Mr Giles said. “We’ve really got to focus on the national interest in terms of the economy, but also in terms of how our society functions … a society built principally on pathways to permanency.
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Did mass-migration topple Australia's Christian culture?
The first tranche of results from the 2021 Census, released last week, confirmed that Australia is experiencing a revolution in its demographic and cultural character.
For the first time in Australia’s history, those identifying as Christian are now a minority. Whereas 86.2 per cent of Australians listed a form of Christianity as their religion in 1971, by 2016, that was down to 52 per cent. In 2021, it had plummeted to 44 per cent, a decline of over 15 per cent in a mere five years.
Christianity arrived on these shores with the first British settlers and profoundly influenced the development of Australian society. It has been argued that Christian churches did ‘more than any other institution, public or private, to civilise Australians’.
For previous generations of Australians, Christianity was not simply a matter of private faith but a major ingredient in Australian public life, shaping our laws, politics, and culture. The unfashionable truth is that Christian tenets helped furnish us with a common moral and ethical framework.
But that common framework is disappearing. As The Australian’s Paul Kelly observed:
‘Churches have moved from the centre of our public life, religious figures are accorded diminished attention and the Christian faith is challenged in the public square… The consequence is apparent: Australia is more divided on the pivotal moral issues, once seen as the bedrock for a stable cultural order.’
The decline of Christianity in Australia is not the only epochal change captured in the 2021 Census. The Census also found that nearly half of the population (48.2 per cent) had at least one overseas-born parent and 27.6 per cent of the population was born outside of Australia – a record high. Almost a quarter of the population (24.8 per cent) spoke a language other than English at home. Of the over 5.5 million who spoke a different language at home, 852,706 reported that they did not speak English well or at all.
These shifts are in large part the result of decisions by successive federal governments since the mid-2000s to massively increase immigration levels. The numbers were ramped up during the final years of the Howard government, with an effective doubling of the intake. Immigration increased even further under Rudd and remained at extraordinarily high levels – around 240,000 a year in net terms – until Covid forced the closure of Australia’s borders. Despite the majority of Australians wanting lower immigration, the recently-ousted Morrison government was planning a return to ‘Big Australia’ immigration levels.
Australia, it has been remarked, is in the midst of an unprecedented mass immigration experiment the likes of which the developed world has never seen. No other major Western country has such a high proportion of foreign-born residents and recent migrants. Our 27.6 per cent of residents born elsewhere compares to 13.7 per cent in the United States and 14 per cent in the United Kingdom and Sweden. Even Woke-left, ‘post-national’ Canada doesn’t have such a high proportion of migrants.
In short, Australia is doing something very different from nearly every other country on the planet, and this has far-reaching ramifications. The millions of migrants who have come to Australia since the start of the century obviously include high-achieving people who add to this country. But they change it, too.
Migrants helped build this country, of course, but the successive waves of European immigration brought together people who were not as dissimilar as those arriving now. The bulk of new migrants to Australia now come from the non-Western world. While we call them minorities here, they are from countries that are vastly larger than Australia in terms of population. They also have strongly-defined cultures and belief systems, which are in some cases very different to the Western tradition.
In the past, new migrants were encouraged to assimilate into the Australian mainstream and become unhyphenated Australians (periodic slowdowns in immigration assisted with this process). But now, under the policy of multiculturalism, migrants are encouraged to retain their ancestral cultures, identities and, indeed, loyalties. At the same, Australia has seemingly lost all confidence in itself and its heritage. Whereas Australians were once proud of their achievements, nowadays schools, universities, the media, and politicians declare that Australia is an illegitimate project built on stolen land and guilty of all manner of sins. One is left with the distinct impression that nothing has been achieved in the last several centuries worth preserving and passing on.
Three decades ago, Geoffrey Blainey identified an emerging intellectual trend to view Australia not as a nation in its own right but as ‘a subsidised rooming house for the peoples of the world – a rooming house without any of the safeguards which a nation needs for its preservation’. As Australia’s population becomes more diverse and more international, some difficult questions arise: what will unite this disparate conglomeration of peoples? Without shared history, culture, belief systems, traditions, or even language, what will be the glue to hold our society together? How will Australia engender a sufficient sense of fellow feeling, solidarity, and shared purpose among a multicultural mass of peoples with little in common?
To these existential questions, I suspect our ruling class has no real answers. Call me a pessimist, but it appears inevitable that Australia faces an increasingly fragmented, discordant future. The worst thing we could do is exacerbate the situation by doubling down on reckless immigration policy, cultural self-loathing, and divisive, Woke identity politics
https://spectator.com.au/2022/07/did-mass-migration-topple-australias-christian-culture/
************************************************Too late for mask mandates as Omicron continues to drive high case numbers
Omicron’s measles-like infectiousness, five times higher than any other Covid strain, is driving the continued high number of cases across the nation, but experts say Australia has done relatively well in terms of controlling case numbers.
They also say it is now too late for governments to impose restrictive rules and mask mandates, with the path out of Covid reliant instead on better public health messaging, better vaccines and earlier access to antivirals.
The reach of Omicron is clear in the numbers as the nation reached a grim milestone on Sunday, surpassing 10,000 Covid-related deaths since the virus landed here in January 2020.
Of those deaths, almost 8000 were in the first half of this year when Omicron has been the dominant strain.
The majority of mortalities occurred in Victoria and NSW, with the states recording 3934 and 3590 deaths, respectively.
The 2022 death toll is nearly four times the previous two years’ mortality rate combined, with 905 reported in 2020 and 1323 in 2021, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
While increased movement and relaxed rules following lockdowns caused transmission to increase, Deakin University chair in epidemiology Catherine Bennett blamed the arrival of Omicron and sub variants “first and foremost” for skyrocketing cases.
“It’s the most infectious variant we’ve had. It’s more equivalent to measles than the first strain and more than five times more infectious,” Professor Bennett said.
“It’s because we’ve got these sub variants. Every time the numbers start to drop a little bit, the next sub variant comes along with not even a brief respite between.”
Ms Bennett said while masks had been proven to reduce transmission, the debate over reintroducing mandates was too late.
“This is the long haul now. You have to move from rules to something else and that something else is really good public health communication and really good education … what I think we have missed is converting to a new way of managing this disease.”
Griffith University Infectious Diseases and Immunology director Nigel McMillan said targeted vaccines were the clear next step in combating the Omicron strain.
“What we’re really holding out for, of course, is that the next vaccine to come on to the market will be a multicomponent vaccine,” he said. “It’ll have the ancestral strain, plus Omicron, and that vaccine will be much, much better in terms of preventing infection, and even much, much better at preventing hospitalisation and serious illness.”
Professor McMillan said we should be making antivirals more accessible during earlier stages of infection. “Antivirals reduce the ability of the virus to grow inside you and therefore give your body a chance to recover better to limit the infection and for your immune system to kick in and really give you full recovery. “However, they have to be used early on in infection.”
Currently, antiviral drugs are limited to people who are moderately to severely immunocompromised or those aged over 65 with some sort of comorbidity, such as diabetes.
Professor McMillan has called on them to be made more widely available if supply allows.
Professor Bennett said while the growing winter death toll was “shocking”, Australia had still done a better job of controlling the virus than the northern hemisphere during their colder months. “In January, places like France had a death rate of four people per million and the US had seven per million. Australia is sitting on under two people per million and that’s in the middle of our winter, our Omicron winter. So actually we’re still controlling it reasonably well,” she said.
“The death rate per infection has gone so far down. You just can’t compare it to what we would have experienced if we’d gone through community transmission back in 2020. We had a taste of it in Victoria, but nothing to compare us to the kinds of infection rates we have with Omicron.”
Of the 28,408 infections recorded in 2020, 3.1 per cent of all cases resulted in death. More than 7.8 million people have been infected with the virus this year, with 7786 people – or 0.10 per cent of cases – dying with Covid.
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EVs may soon threaten the security of the power grid
If Australians start buying electric vehicles in big numbers, the power grid will come under enormous stress, with EVs potentially increasing demand by between 30 and 100 per cent, according to recent trials conducted by Origin Energy.
If thousands of EVs are being plugged in during peak evening periods, the effects could be disastrous, unless Australian households start using smart-charging devices, the research found.
The trials, conducted by Origin Energy and independent Federal Government Agency the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), studied the charging patterns of 150 EV drivers with smart chargers installed in their homes to better understand how behaviours may impact the grid.
Smart chargers, which currently cost between $2,000 and $3,000, allow EV owners to automatically charge their vehicles when electricity prices are lower, or when solar power is being generated, reducing household costs and taking pressure off the grid during peak periods.
Chau Le, general manager of e-mobility at Origin, believes smart chargers will be an essential tool in reducing the risk of blackouts once EVs enter a phase of mass adoption.
“At the moment, our electricity grid is not coping at all. If we were to add another 30 per cent of peak load to the grid during those periods of high prices and constraints on the network, this would require significant investment to increase capacity,” Ms Le said.
The research found that 30 per cent of EV charging was done in the peak period between 3pm and 9pm.
In one trial, participants were given a 10-cent-per-kilowatt-hour credit on their electricity bill for charging off-peak, which reduced charging during the peak times by 10 per cent.
A second trial was run where charging was limited to mostly off-peak periods, which saw evening peak usage for charging those EVs reduced to just six per cent.
A third trial is now underway. It will see Origin work with several power distributors to investigate whether or not upgrades to the grid are required based on the findings of the first two trials.
Darren Miller, chief executive of ARENA, says the agency funded $840,000 of the $2.9 million trial, due to concerns about what may happen to Australia’s power grid once EVs become the dominant mode of transport.
“If we all end up having EVs and charging them at exactly the same time, say 6pm to 9pm on weeknights, then no doubt the distribution system won‘t be able to cope with that,” said Mr Miller.
“Extra investment will have to be made, and that will cost all of us on our electricity bill, too, ultimately.
“We can make sure we don‘t have to invest an extraordinary amount in the distribution system, the poles and wires outside our homes and businesses, to accommodate that extra load.”
While current EV sales are hovering around 2 per cent of the Australian car market overall, the Labor Government has previously stated that its climate and energy policy aims to have nine out of 10 new cars sales being EVs by 2030.
Recent research from the Reliable Affordable Clean Energy for 2030 Cooperative Research Centre (RACE 2030) claims that even if that number reaches eight in 10 by 2030, it will still double the current demand on the grid.
The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) has also weighed into the debate via a new report that states that “all actionable projects should progress as urgently as possible”, including $12 billion of investment in new transmission lines, if the grid is to remain secure over the next decade and reach net zero emissions by 2050.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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