Dick Smith issues a dire warning to Australia as he calls for immigration to be slashed

Australian entrepreneur Dick Smith claims high immigration is to blame for rising house prices in the country and wants this number reduced to just 75,000 a year.

Mr Smith made the bold demand during a Sky News debate on Monday evening.

A record 500,000 migrants have moved to Australia in 2022-2023, with the population officially reaching more than 27 million last month.

It is estimated that Australia’s population will double in the next fifty years.

“We can continue that immigration trajectory, but it’s not going to be good for normal people,” Smith said.

“It will be great for the rich; they will make even more money. Our billionaires have doubled their wealth in five years, they will get richer still.

‘The figures are actually worse: at the current rate of growth, due to massive immigration, we will end up with 100 million people in Australia, while our grandchildren will still be alive at the end of this century.

‘No one believes that 100 million is sensible for a barren country like Australia.’

Mr Smith said the number should be around 75,000 per year, which is similar to the average number of people admitted until the 1990s.

“I’m pro-immigration, I think that’s fantastic, but at 75,000 a year that puts our population at about 30 million, and that seems like a pretty sensible number to me,” he said.

“If you have more people, it normally means you spread the wealth around, and if you have more people, everyone gets less.”

He explained that Australia is not a manufacturing country like China and has created most of its wealth through mineral exports and primary industry.

Mr Smith said Australia didn’t need “many more people to do that” and claimed doubling the population would result in people being “worth half as much”.

He also rejected the idea that immigration was necessary due to a skills shortage, claiming the country should be able to train 500,000 people without work.

“Every Australian family has a population plan. They don’t have twenty children; they have the number of children that they can give a good life,” Mr Smith said.

“Our politicians need to have the number of people in Australia that we can give a good life to.

‘That’s not happening at the moment. Young people cannot afford a house, you are stuck in traffic jams, it is getting worse.’

Emilie Dye, a policy analyst at the Center for Independent Studies think tank, responded to Smith’s claims.

She said blaming immigrants for the housing crisis was a “political ploy” to distract Australian voters from the government’s poor housing policies.

Policy analyst at the Center for Independent Studies (CIS) think tank Emilie Dye argued that blaming immigrants for the housing crisis was a “political ploy” used by the government to divert attention from poor housing policies

“It’s easy to blame immigrants for policy failures, for issues like housing affordability, but when it comes down to it, immigrants generally just add to our society and make us richer – they make us all richer, not just the people on the other side of the world. at the top,” she said.

“We have people, we should take care of those people, and all we do is blame the victim when we say ‘our population is too big, that’s why we can’t house people.’

“That’s a political ploy to deter the politicians who have implemented decades of bad housing policies and limited housing supply.”

Mr Smith said he was not blaming any one group of people for the housing crisis, but added that the “main reason” for rising property prices was “huge population growth”.

“We’re not blaming anyone, it’s just a fact that if you bring into a market an incredible amount of people wanting to buy houses, you’re going to raise the price, and that’s what happened,” Mr Smith said.

‘I have undoubtedly benefited from the growth, but what matters to me is my grandchildren.’