NSW Premier Chris Minns has revealed he is in favor of high immigration, even though Sydney is highly unaffordable and congested, so that more foreigners can build new high-rise apartments.
A record 454,400 foreign migrants moved to Australia in the year to March, with the vast majority of them moving to Sydney, one of the world’s most unaffordable housing markets.
The situation is now so bad that the Paris-based OECD has raised concerns about Australia’s high population growth and housing shortages, which are driving up property prices.
Labor’s first NSW budget since 2010, presented on Tuesday, promised the state government would build just 4,700 homes over 16 years, even as Sydney needs to house 100,000 new overseas migrants every year.
Despite the population influx, Mr Minns said he supported record levels of immigration, arguing more migrants were needed to build houses and apartments in Australia’s most populous state.
“We support the Commonwealth Government’s decision to lift immigration into New South Wales, despite the fact that we will accept not the majority, but the largest number of incoming immigrants,” he said on the ABC program on Tuesday 7:30 am.
NSW Premier Chris Minns has revealed he is in favor of high immigration even though Sydney is highly unaffordable and congested – so foreigners can build new homes (he is pictured center with State Housing Minister Rose Jackson)
“A lot of the labor coming into the state will be sent to the housing market and we need them to build houses and apartments.”
Mr Minns also called for planning laws to be relaxed so that more apartment towers could be built in established suburbs, rather than freeing up land to build new homes in far-flung suburbs.
“It means more urban infill, it means more apartments and units,” he said.
“My job is to create the infrastructure and remove the red tape that blocks this type of housing supply for the state.”
Mr Minns argued that more apartments would improve affordability, even though couples with children often prefer a home with a backyard.
“If we can get that done, and at least get to the east coast first, we can alleviate some of the housing issues that young people in New South Wales in particular face,” he said.
“We believe we have sufficient capacity for large-scale infill development, so high-rise apartments are particularly closer to the CBD.”
Sydney is so unaffordable that even apartments are expensive, with an average unit price of $822,145 out of reach for an average income earner of $95,581, based on CoreLogic’s August house price data.
Dozens of rate hikes at the Reserve Bank since May 2022 mean a bank can’t lend someone more than six times their income.
Sydney’s average house price of $1,359,936 is so expensive that a borrower with a 20 per cent deposit would need to earn $181,000 – putting them in the top four per cent of income earners – to avoid mortgage stress.
Nearly a third, or 29.6 per cent, of residents in the NSW Premier’s Kogarah electorate in Sydney have Chinese ancestry and Mr Minns almost lost his seat in 2019 after former NSW Labor leader Michael Daley was videotaped saying that Asians with PhDs were taking local jobs.
Minns’ support for high immigration is in stark contrast to that of Bob Carr, who as NSW Labor premier in the late 1990s called for sharp cuts to immigration.
Mr Carr’s call was ignored, with net foreign immigration rising continuously into six figures from 1999, when John Howard was the Liberal Prime Minister, while figures continued to rise outside the Covid pandemic.
AMP chief economist Shane Oliver estimates Australia will have a housing shortage of 285,000 by mid-2024 and has called for net overseas immigration to be halved from around 500,000 to 200,000 now so housing supply can keep pace with population growth.
Australia’s population growth rate of 2.2 percent is among the highest in the developed world.
Canada’s population grew by 3.4 percent in the year to June 2023.
After Hong Kong, Sydney is the second most unaffordable housing market in the world when comparing average incomes to average house prices, followed by Vancouver, Honolulu, San Jose and Los Angeles.
The Paris-based OECD is so concerned that it has noted a link between high immigration and unaffordable housing in Australia.
“Supported by structural factors, including robust population growth and a limited supply of homes for sale, prices have returned to growth in a number of countries, including the United States, Canada and Australia,” the report said in its September interim report . week.
Despite the influx of population, Mr Minns said he supported record levels of immigration, arguing that more migrants were needed to build houses and apartments (pictured are workers from the Construction Forestry Maritime Mining and Energy Union in Brisbane who typically build apartments)
Mr Minns argued that more apartments would improve affordability, even though couples with children often prefer a home with a backyard (pictured are apartment towers in Parramatta in Sydney’s west)
While the federal government’s $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund aims to build 30,000 social homes over five years, the NSW government aims to build a more modest 4,700 homes over 16 years.
The state budget included a $2.2 billion housing and infrastructure plan.
This includes $1.5 billion to build roads, parks, hospitals and schools to support the construction of new homes in Sydney, the Lower Hunter, Central Coast and the Illawarra.
The package included $300 million Enable Landcom, the state government’s property developer, to deliver a further 1,409 affordable homes and 3,288 market homes by 2039-2040.
Mr Minns admitted he needed help from Canberra to build more homes.
“We will always seek assistance from the Commonwealth Government, especially when it comes to homes,” he said.
Sydney and Melbourne hosted 56 percent of new migrants between 2000 and 2021, Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows.
Broken down, Sydney became home to 29.3 per cent of new migrants, compared to Melbourne’s share of 26.6 per cent.
Parts of Western Sydney have seen the strongest population growth, with the wider Parramatta area seeing a 10 per cent population increase between the 2016 and 2021 census surveys.