Terry Young (Longman, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When I'm out and about in the great community of Longman that I serve, there are three things that people are most concerned about. Those three things are, first, cost of living—it's becoming unaffordable. They're sick and tired of going to the grocery store—every single time it seems to go up. Their electricity bills continue to rise. I speak to people who are constantly having rent rises, because landlords have to increase the rent to pay for the higher interest rates.

One of the greatest challenges, which brings sadness to my heart when I go out and speak to young people at schools, is that the great Australian dream of homeownership is fast disappearing. When I ask for a show of hands for who thinks they'll own their own home one day, sadly, it's probably one in 20. Nineteen out of 20 don't think they'll ever achieve that dream, which many of us from my generation took as a given. That's what we did in Australia. It's been driven, no question, by outrageous immigration levels.

We need immigration, and, unless you're 100 per cent Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, the news is that we're all descendants of an immigrant or an immigrant ourselves. When we have controlled immigration, then our country is better for it. But, when it's out of control, it puts a great burden on the housing stocks, and housing isn't difficult. It's pretty simple. If you've got more people than you've got houses, the price goes up. If you've got more houses than you have people, the price goes down. That's why, over the last three or four decades, both sides of politics have kept immigration to about 160,000 to 180,000 people. The reality is that we build enough homes on average for about 280,000 people. We grow organically by about 100,000 people. Do the maths. That leaves about 180,000. So that's why it was always at that level. But for some reason this government has tripled immigration over the last three years. That's just driven the price up.

The problem is that it's our people—the Australian people, the citizens—that are suffering. It's our young people. We see these prices exponentially grow and grow and grow. It's crazy, and I'm calling on the government. We need to have a good hard look at this and reduce it and make sure we put the citizens of this country first and foremost. Then we bring in enough people in the areas where we have a shortage—instead of a lot of the unskilled immigration that's coming in at the moment, simply for political reasons. Let's think about our kids and our grandkids and make sure that they've got that dream of owning a home in this great country once again.