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One Nation Calls for Inquiry into Unsustainable Immigration

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Australia is in a housing crisis. Tent cities are appearing across the country, from parks and bridges to family cars, as rents soar and home ownership becomes unattainable. I’ve seen these conditions firsthand, and it’s heartbreaking. Since 2020, rents have increased by 40%, and the average house price has jumped to nearly 10 times the average income.

A major driver of this crisis is our turbocharged immigration program. While I value the contributions of migrants—being one myself—the current intake is unsustainable. In 2023 alone, over half a million net migrants arrived in Australia. This relentless surge is straining our housing market, health services, infrastructure, and economy.

The math is simple. With 2.45 million temporary visa holders in the country, about one million homes are occupied by these individuals. Yet, we’re building far fewer homes than we need, leaving more Australians homeless and without hope. This unprecedented immigration inflates demand, driving up costs in housing, infrastructure, and everyday essentials. High inflation, soaring interest rates, and gridlocked roads are the direct results of this unsustainable growth. Meanwhile, our health system is overwhelmed, and working families are left to fend for themselves.

The government’s solution? More immigration. It’s time to prioritise Australians—our families, our communities, and our future. Let’s address the housing crisis with meaningful reforms, not empty promises.

Transcript

Australia is in a housing crisis—a housing catastrophe. Tent cities are appearing across the country in the way many people have never seen before. I have been to them. It’s disgraceful. In almost every major city in Queensland I’ve been to, the tents are there. People are sleeping under bridges, in caravans, in parks or in their family car. In August 2020, the national average rent was $437 a week. It’s now $627 a week. That’s an increase of 40 per cent over just a few years. In 1987, the average house price was 2.8 times the average income. Today the house price is 9.7 times the income. That’s nearly 10 times. What hope have our children got? 

A major driver of the housing crisis is Australia’s turbocharged immigration program. Listen to the facts that I’ll come up with soon, and remember that I’m not against migration. I was born in India; I’m half migrant. Australia has a very proud history of migrants building this country, but at the moment we have too many. Let me give you those figures. Australia’s net overseas migration used to average a bit over 80,000 a year. For the 2023 year, our net intake was an astonishing 547,000 new people. That’s more than half a million new people net. In the nine months to September 2024, 394,000 immigrants were added to the population. That puts us well on track for yet another year of more than half a million arrivals into the country. That’s net. That’s after the people who’ve left have been removed from the count. 

Soon after setting Australia’s immigration record last year, Prime Minister Albanese promised he would cut immigration rates. Instead he increased immigration rates and is on track for a second new record in a row. Before 2020 and excluding tourists and short-stay crew, there were around 1.8 million temporary visa holders in the country. Today that number is 2.45 million temporary visa holders in the country, an increase of a third. Using Australia’s average household size of about 2½ people per dwelling, that means temporary visa holders are taking up one million homes. One million homes are unavailable because of this immigration program. 

The Master Builders Association’s October housing review shows that, in the 12 months to 30 June this year, only 158,000 homes were completed. So much for your housing policy. That’s less than we needed to cover new arrivals let alone the homeless and those sharing who want their own place. Every year that this Labor government is in power is yet another year Australia’s housing crisis becomes worse. That is why it’s beyond a crisis; it’s a catastrophe. The ALP and the Greens can promise more houses all they like. Houses aren’t built out of rhetoric. When Australians are sleeping on the street we have to stop the flow of more people into the country. 

Some of these temporary visa holders have to leave. Let’s start with the 400,000 overseas students who have completed or discontinued their study and have failed the 100-point test necessary for permanent residency. These students are in a limbo which is best solved by returning home and developing their own countries with the skills learnt here. Then there are hundreds of thousands of long-stay visa holders who have failed to learn English and failed to get a job but who nonetheless avail themselves of social security. I’ll say that again: they failed to learn English, failed to get a job and are on social security that the Australian taxpayers are paying for. If someone has been in this country for five years and has failed to earn their own way then their visa must be critically reviewed to determine if Australia is the right place for them. It’s time to put the temporary back into temporary visa holder. Our country is bleeding; stop twisting the knife. 

The unprecedented level of immigration isn’t just leading to the housing crisis; 2.45 million extra people add to inflation. Inflation is caused when too much demand is chasing too few goods. It’s really simple, and 2.45 million new arrivals is a lot of new demand. It’s a hell of a lot. The government’s net zero energy policy has driven up power prices—we can all see that— and reduced the capacity of agriculture and manufacturing to meet this demand, leading to demand inflation. It’s a double whammy on inflation. The Reserve Bank has refused to lower interest rates because, as they have publicly stated, this unprecedented rate of immigration is creating so much excess demand, and they have said that reducing interest rates now would cause inflation to worsen. House prices are at highs. Now we’ve got interest rates high. This is a huge catastrophe. 

Why is the government doing this? As Senator Hanson said, we’ve been in a per capita recession now for six quarters. We should be in a recession, according to the performance of our economy. The only reason we’re not in a recession is that they’re flooding the joint with migrants to bump up the gross domestic product. You see, a recession is defined as two quarters of negative gross domestic product. So the only thing saving the recession tag from being hung around Prime Minister Albanese’s neck and Treasurer Jim Chalmers’s neck is the record immigration coming in to take us over zero so we’re just barely hanging in there. They don’t want to be tagged, the Prime Minister and the Treasurer, who are in office, when the recession hits. Instead they will let hundreds of thousands of people go without what they need, facing inflation and tens of thousands of people without a home. 

Immigration is also affecting our health response. Ambulance ramping is at an all-time high in most states, including in my state of Queensland. It takes time to train paramedics, expand emergency departments and buy new ambulances. The pace of the government’s increase in new arrivals has placed demand on our health system and it simply can’t keep up. Lives are at stake, people are dying, and Labor does not care. It doesn’t care about working families. It doesn’t care about mums and dads working then coming home at night to their family car in a park to see if their kids are still there. That is what this government is doing. 

One of the largest budget costs is more infrastructure, especially on roads and transport. These projects are collectively costing hundreds of billions of dollars. The huge demand for infrastructure materials and qualified people is driving up the cost of infrastructure, adding to inflation. Many of these projects wouldn’t be necessary if we didn’t have an extra 2.45 million people in the country. The people coming to work from the Gold Coast to Brisbane, coming to work from the Sunshine Coast, even Caboolture, Burpengary, Morayfield, every day to work in the city of Brisbane are tied up in a car park or are in stationary traffic for hours—their lives just slipping away. 

We have people sleeping under bridges. As I said a minute ago, we have a mother and father returning after work to see if the children are still in the car in the park in which they live, or a showground or maybe a tent under a bridge. Australia has the world’s richest reserves of minerals, bar none, and we have people sleeping in tents because the Labor government does not care. 

It’s a vicious cycle where the government claims that we can fix the immigration problem with more immigration and that we can fix the housing catastrophe by adding bureaucrats and more immigration—fix housing, the catastrophe, with more immigration.  

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Infrastructure Investment Can Address Australia’s Economic Disaster

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Treasurer Jim Chalmers and the Albanese Government have created the worst economic conditions in Australia in 30 years. In an attempt to shift the blame for this mess, the Treasurer has unfairly targeted Reserve Bank Governor, Michelle Bullock. The reality is that the RBA has increased interest rates in response to the government’s policies. While the Treasurer could order the Reserve Bank to lower interest rates, the Government knows that doing this would make Australia’s economy worse. So instead, they trade insults. 

It’s time for Treasurer Chalmers to stop the bullying and focus on solutions. Infrastructure is the key to overcoming this economic disaster. 

In this speech, I outline how One Nation plans to bring down inflation and reduce interest rates.

Transcript

In the last few days Australians have witnessed an unedifying sight: the Treasurer blaming the Reserve Bank for policy outcomes that are firmly the government’s fault. When Treasurer Chalmers was rightly criticised for his misbehaviour the Labor Party rallied the troops, dusting off Labor Party artefact Wayne Swan to defend the Treasurer. This display is why people dislike and distrust politicians. The reality is that high interest rates are the direct result of economic policy under successive Liberal and Labor governments—policy that damaged our manufacturing and farming sectors whilst transferring gross domestic product from real jobs in the private sector to jobs in the government sector. Reserve Bank Governor Bullock’s interest rate strategy is a response to Labor government policy. Labor government policy has decided the RBA’s strategy. 

Instead of bullying the Reserve Bank governor into taking further interest rate rises off the table, Treasurer Chalmers could take action to prevent the need for those rises. Balance the budget and reduce government spending to match your income; Minister Shorten tried to bring the NDIS under control, and you forced him to walk the plank. Stop replacing base load power with net zero wind, solar transmission lines and battery back-up, driving up electricity prices and sending the government into debt. Reduce immigration, which is distorting the housing market and inflating government welfare and infrastructure spending. Stop giving grants and subsidies to foreign multinationals operating solar and wind here, and instead encourage local companies who retain the wealth here. Develop our productive capacity through a national rail loop enabling an Australian steel industry. There’s $100 billion of production, 40,000 real jobs and $25 billion in government revenue just in the Capricornia steel proposal at Queensland’s Abbot Point and the port of Gladstone every year. Treasurer Chalmers should stop bullying and start building, which is exactly what a One Nation government will do. 

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Is CPI Still Relevant for Everyday Australians?

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For those following my Senate Estimates posts, it’s become clear that the Albanese Government is ‘stage managing’ the Estimates process to the point where getting answers has become nearly impossible. In early August, I was pleased to secure a new type of inquiry to supplement estimate questions, which will allow the Senate to call a department or agency for a brief session to have specific question/s answered.

The first agency to be called will be the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). We’ll be asking how they compile the cost of living index, which is Australia’s official inflation index. This is a very important piece of data, as it decides wage increases for everyday Australians, interest rates, government bond yields and our exchange rate.

With many Australians questioning the accuracy of the official 3.8% inflation rate—feeling that inflation is actually worse—I am eager to get to the truth of what our inflation rate actually is.

Transcript

The actual rate of inflation—or, more accurately, the consumer price index—represents how much cost of living has changed in the previous quarter and over time. To measure the CPI change, the Australian Bureau of Statistics uses a basket of goods and services that should fairly represent the purchases an average Australian household would make. Incremental changes are made to the measure every few years to take into account changes in household spending patterns. After many years of adjustments, chops and changes, the question now arises: how relevant is the CPI calculation to the lives of working Australians? 

Mortgages have become a massive expense, rising 45 per cent across the 12 interest rate rises that have occurred under the Anthony Albanese Labor government, yet housing is only 13 per cent of the inflation basket for households, no matter how high your mortgage or rent goes. In part, this is because the spending pattern that sets the weightings is taken from 2022, before Labor’s inflation actually set in. The weighting in the basket given to holidays and recreation has increased to 12.1 per cent. This is interesting, because holidays were really expensive during COVID and then, as the economy reopened, the cost came back down. Increasing the weighting for holidays has acted to reduce the inflation rate artificially. How accurate is that? Who can afford expensive holidays in the current cost-of-living crisis?  

In creating a system that relies on spending patterns which may be years old or which fail to reflect the main demographic—working families—the ABS is failing to accurately reflect cost-of-living increases as households feel the pain right now. Governments can fudge the figures. Government subsidies on energy, for instance, reduce the inflation rate for energy, even though consumers are paying the full bill themselves either through their wages or through tax. Inflation should be expressed before government cover-up payments, not after. 

One Nation will return to this topic next week on behalf of Australian working families. 

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Reserve Bank Governor Shifts Focus to People Rather than Spreadsheets

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Reserve Bank Governor Michelle Bullock was appointed to the position after a 20-year career in the Reserve Bank, including being the recipient of subsidised housing loans despite her substantial salary. Her early comments were reflective of her being “a long time in the public service bubble” and were out of touch with the hardships faced by everyday Australians due to past Reserve Bank policies causing high inflation and interest rates.

Her recent comments, however, appear to be much more in tune with understanding everyday Australians’ concerns.

At Senate Estimates, my questions were aimed firstly at getting updates on less reported projects and secondly, I wanted to know whether the Governor realised her role is about people not spreadsheets.

I found her responses encouraging and look forward to more people-oriented management from the Governor going forward.

Transcript

CHAIR: Thanks. Senator Roberts.  

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you for appearing. I missed you last time because I couldn’t get on the schedule. I want to get a quick update on as many things as possible. Part of the Reserve Bank’s process is to review inflation data and unemployment data. Do you use data from the ABS and, if so, do you use that data exclusively, or do you have other sources for unemployment and inflation data?  

Ms Bullock: We use ABS data obviously for inflation and unemployment. We use a variety of other sources of information, though, because we don’t just focus on the unemployment rate itself; we focus on a variety of measures that the ABS put out. We also focus on things like vacancies and advertisements. There’s information we get from our business liaison program, where we talk to businesses about what they’re doing with their labour forces: are they demanding more labour or not? So we use the ABS data, but we have a wealth of other information that we look at as well.  

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. Business-to-business payment defaults and business bankruptcies, to the third quarter of 2024, are at a record. I’m sure you know that. Are you watching these metrics? And would these record figures act to reduce the appetite in the Reserve Bank for another interest rate rise?  

Ms Bullock: We do watch the business insolvencies data. My understanding is that they haven’t actually returned to the trend that they were prior to the pandemic. In the pandemic, with low interest rates and government assistance, insolvencies were actually at a record low. They have popped up, but they haven’t popped up to where the trend was going prior to the pandemic. So I think that’s important perspective to put it in. We do look at it and we look at it from a couple of perspectives. We look at it from the perspective of how monetary policy is impacting businesses, but we also look at it from the perspective of financial stability and the potential impact on banks, banks’ arrears and banks’ balance sheets.  

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. Suicide Prevention Australia’s community tracker, also to the third quarter of 2024, shows a huge rise in the number of calls to help services, in suicidal behaviour and in clinical presentations. This is an independent and accurate barometer of how everyday Australians are doing. Are you aware of that tracker?  

Ms Bullock: Yes, I am. In fact I have regular meetings with various organisations—for example, Beyond Blue. They talk to us a lot about this sort of data. We also talk to ACOSS regularly, we talk to other charities in our business liaison program and we hear a lot about the fact that charities are seeing people come in who they haven’t seen before. So this is obviously an indication that they’re stressed. So, yes, we do keep in touch with that stuff. 

Senator ROBERTS: Can you update me on the state of the central bank digital currency, please? The last word we had was I think when Mr Debelle was deputy governor. I understand you’re developing a standard, not an actual currency itself? Is that correct?  

Ms Bullock: We’ve done a couple of things. We ran a pilot program with a real claim on the central bank last year. 

Senator ROBERTS: Is that what’s known as a ‘sandbox’?  

Ms Bullock: It was sort of like a sandbox, if you like. We had a number of different use cases. Various businesses came in with their use cases to use the central bank digital currency. From that information, what we took away was that probably the most fruitful piece of research we could continue with was the use of a central bank digital currency in a wholesale sense. By that I mean there’s a lot of discussion about putting assets on the ledger—for example, having a distributed ledger of financial assets—and then you could have a central bank digital currency which is used to make settlements of those financial instruments, or they might be physical instruments, physical assets. That’s the most fruitful work and that’s where we’re going at the moment. We’re in the process of standing up a project that looks at how a central bank currency could be used in the atomic settlement of assets. That’s where we’re going at the moment.  

Senator ROBERTS: So you’re not developing a standard?  

Ms Bullock: No. Basically, we’re looking at what the business case might look for. We’re not so interested in the technology and we’re not so interested in standards. What we’re interested in is: is there a business for this?  

Senator ROBERTS: Would that allow other parties, including each of the banks, to develop their own cryptocurrency?  

Ms Bullock: The banks themselves can develop what some people call ‘stable coins’, and some banks have developed stable coins. Central bank digital currency, if it were to be developed, would be something that everyone could potentially use—not literally every Australian, because, if we’re focusing on business, then it might be that some businesses can use it. Individual banks can, in theory, at the moment—and some of them have experimented with it—develop stable coins, which are effectively cryptocurrency. CHAIR: It’s your last question, Senator Roberts.  

Senator ROBERTS: This would not exclude existing cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin?  

Ms Bullock: No. The central bank digital currencies would not have a relationship with bitcoin, no.  

Senator ROBERTS: But it wouldn’t exclude bitcoin?  

Ms Bullock: What do you mean by ‘exclude bitcoin’?  

Senator ROBERTS: To sideline them or remove them.  

Ms Bullock: No, bitcoin would continue to exist, but central bank digital currencies offer a different business proposition than bitcoin. Bitcoin has particular uses; central bank digital currencies would not be encroaching on that space, I suspect. 

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Government Guaranteed Mortgages Not Under Stress!

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Since 2020, the government has guaranteed mortgages with only a 5% deposit. 

Given 150,000 Australians were unable to afford a 20% deposit, I was concerned many of them may have been hit especially hard by the RBA’s interest rate rises.  Based on the figures provided here, it looks like most of these households are coping well so far. 

The full data put on notice should clarify this further, but if what I’ve been told here is true, it’s good news for those homeowners.

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Liberal and Labor Dance to Taylor Swift While Oz Suffers

Hundreds of thousands of Australians are homeless with more added every day.

The Defence Force is the most unprepared to defend Australia it’s been in 50 years.

Inflation has cancelled out all of the wage growth of the last ten years.

Let’s have a look at what Liberal and Labor are doing about it.

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Reserve Bank Rate Decision

Why does the Reserve Bank want to send everyone broke?

The RBA will make its interest rate decision shortly.

In this video from the last interest rate decision, I explain how crazy their plan is and how it’s a problem they created.

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Labor Has Form on Making Life Harder

When the ANZ CEO, the outgoing Chair of the Future Fund and the Reserve Bank all tell us that immigration and the net zero transition are inflationary, the Government should stop and listen. Instead they are pushing ahead with a massive arrivals program that is causing inflation and making life harder for everyday Australians.

The cost of net zero has been estimated by Net Zero Australia at $1.5 trillion. We are only a few hundred billion into that, so strap in, life is going to get harder still. Labor advertise themselves as the party of the worker but life for workers is harder under Labor.

The tragedy is that we already had a great electricity capacity and the world’s most affordable, reliable electricity. ALP/Greens/Liberal/Teal globalist puppets are tearing that down and building a worse option – weather dependent power.

One Nation will reverse this immigration and energy net zero perfect storm of financial and social mismanagement. We will reverse this perfect storm of dishonesty and stupidity.

Transcript

As a servant to the many different people who make up our one Queensland community, I draw the Senate’s attention to remarks on Monday by ANZ Chief Executive Officer Shane Elliott. He said: 

Australia’s massive green energy transition and immigration boom will further boost rising house prices. 

Lending regulations have made this the most challenging lending environment in 30 years. 

The 30 years reference is to Labor Prime Minister Keating’s 17 per cent interest rate nightmare. Labor has form on making life harder. These remarks are confirmation the government’s insane levels of arrivals are one cause of the inflation that’s hurting everyday Australians. The outgoing future fund chair, Peter Costello, warned Australia’s runaway immigration levels represent ‘an enormous adjustment for the property sector and the Reserve Bank’s inflation fight’. 

Why is Labor, once called the party of the worker, pursuing an immigration policy that is creating high inflation and harming Australian workers so badly? Australia did not vote for high immigration, and Prime Minister Albanese has no mandate for this insanity, this inhumanity. Nor was the Prime Minister forthcoming in the last election about the true cost of net zero. Net zero Australia puts the cost at $1.5 trillion by 2050. If life feels hard now, we’re only a few hundred billion into the $1.5 trillion. Buckle up, this is going to hurt! 

The tragedy is that we already had a great electricity capacity and the world’s most affordable, reliable electricity. And you globalist puppets are tearing it down and building a worse option: weather dependent power. Insane! As Shane Elliott asked, is this the society we want, where people can’t get a home loan or get a loan to start a business? Labor’s answer is clearly yes. That’s what life under Labor means—no home, no business, no future, no energy. 

One Nation will reverse this immigration and energy net zero perfect storm of financial and social mismanagement. We will reverse this perfect storm of dishonesty and stupidity and callousness. 

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Reserve Bank Uses “Blunt Tool” on Inflation

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The new Governor of the Reserve Bank is not ruling out raising the cash rate again to further control inflation. She refers to these measures as part of a tightening phase.

The Reserve Bank is unwinding the massive expansionary monetary policy it took during the COVID response which created $500 billion out of thin air. Meanwhile the States and the Federal ALP are spending money like it is play money.

This spending acts against the Reserve Bank’s rate rises. This is why I say this Government is hitting the brake and the accelerator at the same time.

The high rate of immigration is expanding the economy and that also acts against the dampening effect of rate rises. The pain and stress of mortgage rate hikes can be attributed to the costly COVID response and to immigration. That is all on Prime Minister Albanese and Treasurer Chalmers.

One Nation will reduce immigration to reduce rents and take the heat of the property market, removing the need for further rate rises.

Transcript

Senator ROBERTS: Congratulations on your appointment.

Ms Bullock: Thank you, Senator.

Senator ROBERTS: How does it feel being in a highly complex job which is affecting so many people’s lives and livelihoods?

Ms Bullock: I do feel a great deal of responsibility, Senator.

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. Inflation has gone from 7.8 per cent, peak, to 5.4 per cent. In your speech yesterday you went on record to say the Reserve Bank will not hesitate to raise rates again if it looks like inflation is not coming under control. Is inflation coming under control? I’m guessing from your comments so far that you’re wary and there are signs that it’s not.

Ms Bullock: I’d say what I said earlier, which is that we got an important piece of information yesterday. We need to take that away, analyse it and figure out what it means for our forecast going forward. That’s no different to the comment we’ve been making to date, which is that we are—’wary’ is a good word. We’re looking at some of the more persistent parts of inflation and asking ourselves: are there signs that those might be coming down in the future? So, yes, we are wary. We don’t know if the job is done yet, and we’ve made that very clear. Even though we haven’t raised interest rates since our last interest rate rise in June, we’ve made it very clear that we might need to go again. We had not ruled that out, and we’re in the same position now.

Senator ROBERTS: When debating the need for a rate rise, is the effect on mortgage affordability, especially mortgage stress, taken into account? If so, what measure do you use, and what is that measure telling you about how hard life is getting for mortgagees?

Ms Bullock: We do understand that there is a distribution—let me step back for one moment. Higher interest rates and monetary policy work through a number of channels. The one that gets the most attention is what we call the cash flow channel, which is the impact on people who have debt. That gets a lot of attention, particularly in Australia, because, as Chris already mentioned, most of the debt of households and businesses is variable rate debt or very short fixed-rate debt. That’s why that channel gets the most attention, but there are other channels. In fact, Chris gave a speech on that fairly recently. One is the intertemporal channel, which basically means: as interest rates go up, people are incentivised to save rather than to spend, and in fact we are observing that. We are still seeing people in aggregate save, and there’s an incentive even for mortgage holders to save. Their interest rates have gone up, so, for them, there’s an incentive now to try and put even more away into their offset and redraw accounts if they can. That’s the other way that it works. Another channel is the exchange rate channel. The way that works is: as interest rates rise, the exchange rate—if everyone else wasn’t raising their interest rates the exchange rate would rise, but at the moment it means that it hasn’t fallen very much. It has been reasonably stable over the last year. We’re not getting inflation through that particular channel. There are other channels as well.

Senator ROBERTS: Do you measure the stress?

Ms Bullock: No. We can’t very precisely say: particular channels contribute X to inflation. We can’t do it that way. But they’re all the channels that we’re watching and trying to understand how they might impact.

Senator ROBERTS: How do you assess whether or not people are under mortgage stress? Ms Bullock: We don’t do individual mortgage stress assessments. What we can observe is data we get from the banks on hardship calls that they’ve got, arrears rates and those sorts of things. We can observe those at aggregate level. The feedback we’re getting at the moment, from the banks and from the data we see, is that that has risen but it’s still at very low levels.

CHAIR: Last question.

Senator ROBERTS: Surely the inflation that’s still hitting Australians has something to do with the Reserve Bank creating $500 billion out of thin air—or, as Dr Debelle said, electronic journal entries—over COVID. Have you thought about that? Your predecessor admitted it was a cause of the inflation problem, creating that $500 billion out of thin air.

Ms Bullock: Basically, you’re referring to the massive expansionary monetary policy that we undertook during the pandemic?

Senator ROBERTS: Yes.

Ms Bullock: I think my response would be that, at the time, we were facing a very, very dire economic situation, and the appropriate response at the time was to run a very expansionary monetary policy. We have now unwound that and we’re in a tightening phase, so, yes, the purpose of the expansionary monetary policy was in fact to encourage demand and encourage growth. That was very much the intention. To the extent that we look back and now say, ‘Well, demand is too strong,’ we are now in a tightening phase to wind that back. But I wouldn’t say it was the sole reason for the increase in inflation. You might remember that there were very big supply chain issues as well, and when constrained supply meets high demand, you get inflation.

Senator ROBERTS: Building on that, you have a very blunt tool to attack inflation, don’t you? Because the cash rate for the entire country is a very blunt tool to try to bring down inflation.

Ms Bullock: Yes, it’s a blunt tool.

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you.

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Huge Immigration numbers causing rental crisis

Has your rent gone up in the previous year? Well you can thank Anthony Albanese. He’s bringing in up to 400,000 immigrants a year and every one of them needs a house too.

Transcript

As a servant to the many different people making our amazing Queensland community, I know rental prices are a savage problem. Interest rate rises are increasing mortgage repayments and forcing more investment property owners to dip into their own pockets to pay their mortgage. If owners do not have that extra money, then negative gearing is not going to help. Inflation of 7.8 per cent means that council rates, water rates, maintenance costs and insurance are making it harder and harder to hang on to investment properties.

Now the Greens propose a rent freeze, which is really a 7.8 per cent rent reduction each year that it goes on. The only effect of a rental freeze will be to drive investment property owners out of the market. Australia needs investment property owners to provide a home to people who are renting. Driving them out of the market will hurt the 400,000 new Australians who arrived last year and the one million likely to arrive during the course of this government. 

Rising rentals are a product of too many people chasing too few rentals. We know 10 per cent of Australian homes are owned by investors who are not renting them out. Their investment strategy is to buy a new home and keep it locked up while it appreciates in value. Having a tenant in there is a complication they don’t want and lowers the resale value because the home is no longer new. Most of these properties are foreign-owned.

One Nation would give these owners 12 months to sell those properties to Australians. Bringing that number of homes onto the market would do more to bring prices down than a price cap. And One Nation would reduce immigration to net zero, meaning there would be only enough arrivals each year to replace those that leave. This will allow time for the housing construction industry to catch up with demand. It is about supply and demand.

These sensible, honest policies are One Nation’s solutions to high rents, which will protect real estate values from the chaos a rental cap will introduce. 

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