The great Australian dream used to be to own your own home. Now it is more like to own somebody else's home, or more. And last week's productivity roundtable doesn't look like doing much about it.

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There are two reasons. The first was the sort of people in the room. And the second was what they did not discuss.

Most of the people invited were either from the tail-end of the Baby Boomer generation or came from the very professions and interest groups that caused the problems they were supposed to be addressing in the first place. Or both.

They all agreed that the Australian tax and welfare system was causing inter-generational unfairness. Wow.

They agreed that housing was the most significant element of inter-generational unfairness. Then they completely ignored the biggest contributor to the fact that young Australians are finding it near-impossible to buy a dwelling without parents and/or grandparents chipping in - high immigration.

Since the end of the pandemic, Australia has brought in a net number of more than 1.5 million people. In 2022-23, it was a record 536,000.

Whatever the planning rules, building regulations, red tape or green tape, or tax system, the task of housing all those people was always going to be impossible.

And it will continue to be impossible if we continue the madness of bringing so many people into the country - stressing not only housing, but infrastructure generally and the environment generally.

It is elementary economics that if you increase demand, you create scarcity, and you drive up prices. The roundtablers would have learnt that in Economics 101, yet they studiously ignored it.

Worse, they did not make the obvious connection between high immigration and low productivity.

Australia's productivity slump has almost exactly coincided with the ramping up of immigration since the mid-to-late 1990s.

Businesses are simply not going to invest in innovation and technology while it is easier to import........

© Canberra Times