Liberal senator Dave Sharma calls for immigration to be slashed until housing crisis solved

A new Liberal Party senator has called for a reduction in immigration levels in Australia until housing supply can keep up with rapid population growth.

A record number of 518,000 migrants moved to Australia in the last financial year. The updated figures published on Thursday are expected to show an even higher influx for 2022-2023.

Dave Sharma, the former MP for the Sydney seat of Wentworth who revived his political career as a Liberal senator for New South Wales, says immigration must be reduced until Australia can provide adequate housing.

“The housing shortage is exacerbated by high immigration, which fuels demand for an already limited supply,” he said in his first speech to the Senate on Wednesday afternoon.

“Until we can accelerate the pace of our housing construction, we must reduce our immigration inflows, otherwise we will only put further pressure on our housing market.”

Australia’s population growth rate of 2.4 percent is the highest since the early 1950s.

Sydney’s average house price of $1.396 million would require someone to earn more than $200,000 a year to even qualify for a home loan, CoreLogic data showed.

A worker with an average income of $98,218 can only afford a house worth up to $639,000, which would not buy the average-priced house in the capital worth $949,410.

Senator Sharma said unaffordable housing risks causing major social problems.

“Today’s younger Australians have done everything we asked of them,” he said.

“They’ve finished school, gotten a degree, found a job, paid taxes, and yet they find that no matter how much they earn or how hard they save, owning their own home is out of their reach.

“This is a violation of our social contract and if left unchecked, we are storing up huge problems for the future.

“We will undermine social mobility in Australia and entrench inequality.”

With Sydney home to a greater proportion of new migrants, Senator Sharma said the undersupply of housing was particularly prevalent in NSW.

“The failure here is largely a matter of supply,” he said.

“Consistently, over the past 20 years, we have simply failed to build enough new homes to meet the demand of the Australian population, and this problem is particularly acute in my home state of New South Wales.”

In the year to September, Australia built 109,322 homes and 60,813 units, construction activity data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows.

The 170,215 newly completed homes would house 425,538 homes, based on an average household size of 2.5 people per home at the last census.

The supply of new homes would leave a deficit of 92,462, based on new migrants.

Senator Sharma pointed out that NSW only builds 32,000 homes a year, which is well below the post-World War II level of 40,000, when Australia’s population was 7.4 million, down from 26.6 million people today.

‘We have to do better. “We need to enable more homes to be built, faster and cheaper, or we will leave Australia behind,” he said.

Last year he replaced former Foreign Minister Marise Payne as Liberal Senator for NSW and was previously Liberal Member for Wentworth in Sydney’s east until he was defeated by Teal independent Allegra Spender at the last election in 2022.

Australia’s former ambassador to Israel warned that anti-Semitism is a major threat following the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks.

“What we have seen in recent months has clearly crossed the Rubicon and left one community and one community alone – the Australian Jewish community – feeling unwelcome in their own country, fearful in their own neighborhoods and worried about the future with which they are confronted. here,” he said.

‘This is completely unacceptable. It’s also incredibly dangerous.’