Australia’s population growth rate is returning to normal. Instead, of cutting migration, the solution to Australia’s housing crisis is to increase the rate of new dwelling approvals and completions.

Opposition to Labor’s allegedly high rates of immigration was a key element of the Liberals’ last election campaign. However, they lost and lost badly.

Nevertheless, less than six months since that election loss, Andrew Hastie, when resigning from that front bench of the Liberal Party, sought to make his opposition to present migration rates an issue yet again. According to Hastie, high overseas immigration made Australians “feel like strangers in our own home”.

Personally, I doubt that this changing nature of our society would worry many of us. I can remember Australia before the rapid surge in migration in the 1950s and 1960s, and my memory is that most of us welcomed the way migrants changed our cities to make them much more interesting. Migrants greatly enlarged our quality and variety of life and helped build our economy over the last 70 years or so.

However, where I suspect the critics of migration might strike a chord is the fear that migrants are adding to the housing crisis. And it is the cost of housing that is the key driver of unacceptable living costs.

But that hypothesis begs the question of how the rate of population growth compares with the rate of housing development.

Population growth

As can be seen from the chart below, population growth was close to zero during the COVID years due to net emigration. Subsequently, migration soared and recovered the lost ground, but migration and population growth are now dropping back to normal.

Indeed, the Treasury forecasts in their latest Intergenerational Report (2023) are that population growth will........

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