The endless debate over immigration and housing numbers is long on rhetoric and short on facts; political point-scoring dominates. Monte Dwyer reckons he has the answer.
Right, pay attention please. I’ve crunched the numbers, and I reckon I’ve worked out how we solve the housing crisis with immigration capped at 130,000.
First, though, credit where it’s due: I’ve nicked the idea from One Nation MP David Farley, who’s come up with the genius hack of adding more categories as required. If there isn’t room for enough tradies, backpackers, and health workers to service rural areas under the 130,000 cap, just sneak in an extra 100,000 as a job lot and
send ‘em bush as a country carve-out.
Brilliant! Who’d have thought we could solve a room shortage with a simple extension?
Unfortunately, Farley’s boss, Senator Pauline Hanson, disagrees. She’s determined to stick with her quota of 130,000 net overseas migration (NOM), which she now says excludes Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM – I’m lovin’ these acronyms) workers from the Pacific Islands and Timor-Leste, an exemption that may go some way towards accommodating a Farley carve-out (FCO).
Either way, it’s still more generous than her earlier ceiling of 100,000, a mean figure she arrived at all by herself by subtracting 130,000 from the 230,000 overseas departures figure, leaving us with an NOM of minus 100,000! A girl can dream, right?
Enter Barnaby and Angus
No wonder Barnaby keeps popping up on the tele to save his boss from herself, this time assuring us everything’s cool; it was always net 130,000, a number in any case that will barely keep us in Vietnamese nail technicians, much less engineers, bricklayers and doctors.
Confused? Don’t worry, so is everybody else. Labor MP Pat Conroy called it “policy incoherence”, and most thought he was being kind.
Leader of the Opposition Angus Taylor has come up with his own plan to hitch migration to housing, and he’s confident he can get numbers down to “well below” 200,000, presumably by subtracting the number of houses we build every year –175,000 – from the Treasury-forecast NOM? (Should I go there? You’d be disappointed if I didn’t:
“Fantastic. Great move. Well done, Angus.”)
Respected economist Alan Kohler, however, thinks there’s a problem with his maths as well. The working ratio for people per dwelling is currently 2.4, meaning if Taylor did tie immigration to housing, this year alone he’d need to increase our immigration numbers to 420,000 (ie 2.4 X 175,00) to keep pace with the houses built.
Unless he’s applying his equation on a one-for-one basis – ie one completed build per immigrant – in which case there’d be plenty of available rooms if only there was enough skilled labour to build the houses in the first place, given we’re already short 115,000 construction workers as it is . . . a classic Catch-22.
Albo’s time bomb
All the while, Anthony Albanese’s Labor government is circling a time bomb created by decades of boomer-friendly tax breaks, ill-attended labour shortages and poorly regulated immigration, with boomer-antagonistic tax breaks for first home buyers, free nail bag and hammer with every TAFE building course and an immigration policy
so secretive it can’t be played until everyone else has tabled theirs.
So, that’s our context; here’s how we fix it by adjusting the three main streams of immigration to align with the housing shortfall.
University Education
We welcomed around 200,000 new overseas students in 2025, with roughly 25-30% (on current trends) expected to stay after they graduate. Since that’s already blown our quota, I propose we halve both numbers and send the overflow as an FCO to Albury-Wodonga University to be sorted out by the Member for Farrer himself, David Farley.
Any resulting reduction in sandstone university places for Aussie students may, of course, lead to an eventual dumbing-down of the population, but it remains to be seen if that would be a problem under a One Nation-led Australia anyway. Result: 115,000 NOM.
Working Holiday Tourism
Backpackers are vital to rural economies, not only because they contribute so much labour, but most drink for their countries as well, so they spread it around.
Last year Australia granted over 320,000 Working Holiday Maker (WHM) visas to geezers from the UK and other places, most of whom will get homesick and leave of their own accord.
Nonetheless, WHMs are added to the NOM numbers once they stay for 12 months, so let’s bung half in an agricultural FCO, another half in a hospitality and tourism FCO, and the last half we’ll count on-the-books as a third, observing the KISS theory of creative accounting. Result: 107,000 NOM.
Skilled Workers
Australia allocates 130,000 permanent migration visas in this category every year, designed to address shortfalls in specific sectors – currently healthcare, construction, education and IT.
This number includes the primary worker and his or her family and incorporates the PALM and Short Stay Specialists (SSS), which I have nothing constructive to say about except I like the SSS acronym. There doesn’t seem to be much slack in this group, but I guess we could pare the number back by 10,000 or so if we send the kids out to work after school? Result: 120,000 NOM.
Now, adding my adjusted NOMs up, we have 342,000. A reasonable number, you might say, and not so far removed from the actual 2025 NOM of 301,000.
But Hanson insists on 130,000 and not a Muslim more.
So, here’s how we get there: my 342 into Hanson’s 130 gives us 0.38, multiplied by 175 being the number of houses built per annum gives us 66.5, divided by the current occupancy rate of 2.4 people per dwelling equals 27.7, multiplied by 4.7 which is the average number of years’ wages it took to buy a house before John Howard introduced the 50% CGT discount in 1999 . . . bringing us right back to 130,190 – near enough to a perfect fit to stick in your thumb and pull out a plum.
Eat your heart out, Pythagoras!
Construction workers
Now all we need to do is subtract the deficit of construction workers (115,000) from the number of new houses needed (130,190 or 54,245 depending on whether you’re using the 1:1 or 2.4:1 ratio), and you either have a surplus of 15,190 or a deficit of 60,755 houses. Obvious, really, when you think about it.
Maybe One Nation has been right all along, and any fool could run this country.
Monte Dwyer - formerly a professional fisherman, fashion model, foreign aid worker, hospitality worker, failed property developer and TV weatherman - is an author and filmmaker. His latest book, "MAGA, Guns & God – A road trip through ‘red’ America", is available from his website.