Mass Immigration and the Rental Crisis, By James Reed
In another article today, discussed the extreme financial pressures that people renting are finding, with one in five renters now having to go without essential items, including some food items (like meat) and medical and dental. That means cutting right back on things like breakfast and lunches for school children. David McCloskey and Bob Birrell from the Australian Population Research Institute (TAPRI), have released a report: Labor fails to control the overseas student crisis. The rental crisis will worsen: https://tapri.org.au/. International student numbers are back to the high after the Liberals joined with the Greens to defeat the cap that was to be put on out of control numbers, an act of total treachery by the Opposition. The rental crisis will get worse; here is the abstract to the report:
"On November 18, the Coalition announced that it would not support the Labor Government's legislation to allow quotas to be set for student visa numbers, including individual caps for each university. The legislation will now probably not become law.
Where to next? This report provides the background needed to assess what is likely to happen to the overseas student industry and the implications for the rental crisis. The report shows that since December 2023 when the Labor Government announced it intended to restrict the number of student visas in the interest of taking pressure off the housing crisis, the Government has backtracked.
In response to a backlash from the overseas student industry, Labor's policy has come to hold the issuance of visas at previous high levels. To do this it gave the Department of Education the task of setting a National Plan for student visa numbers and of allocating them via quotas stipulated for each university provider.
The Plan was set for 270,000 in 2025 and the quotas have already been allocated. They restored the numbers to most of universities affected by the initial downturn.
Labor, having already blinked in the face of the backlash will not turn back to its 2023 position of reducing the student influx. Instead, it will stick with its National Plan and give the Department of Home Affairs the task of achieving the target number of new visas.
In this report we detail the initial impact of the tight visa policy, the scale of the subsequent backlash and the Labor Government's response. Labor changed course during 2024. It jettisoned its restrictive visa policy.
The task of setting overseas student visa numbers and of allocating them across each sector student and each university provider visas was shifted to the Department of Education (DOE). Its Minister, Jason Clare, set about restoring the university sector, though not the Vocational sector.
The analysis shows that, in Sydney and Melbourne, the annual net influx of these students alone, would need additional rental accommodation larger in volume than the total current annual number of medium and high density starts in the two cities. The outlook is that the rental crisis will get worse."
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