Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

We often speak in this chamber about economic growth as though GDP alone tells the story of our nation's success, but GDP is not a measure of whether young Australians can own a home, start a family or build a secure life. It counts money changing hands and it counts population growth. It doesn't count the stress of housing insecurity or the heartbreak of delaying having children because people just can't afford a place big enough to raise them.

When the fundamentals of ordinary life become unattainable for the next generation, economic policy is failing at its most basic purpose. Over the past three years Labor has brought in over one million migrants. Unless there is respite, we will approach two million in five years. This includes 536,000 in 2022-23, the highest intake in our history, and 446,000 in 2023-24. To put that into perspective, we've added the equivalent of the entire population of Brisbane in just three years but we haven't built a city like Brisbane to house, feed, employ and educate these additional people. That is population scale growth on a scale that our housing market, our infrastructure, our planning system, our hospitals, our schools and our communities are not prepared for. Even in the 2024-25 budget papers, there's an admission that net overseas migration will remain above the long run average for years to come, and the result is a housing market in crisis—a market that caters for those young people who are fortunate enough to have parents or grandparents wealthy enough to help them out with a deposit.

In the early 2000s, the house-price-to-income ratio sat at around four. Today it is over eight nationally. In Sydney it is among the least affordable in the world, now exceeding 14 times the median wage. It means teachers, nurses, police officers and clerical workers can't afford to live anywhere close to where they work. The median dwelling-price-to-income ratio nationwide was 9.6 in 2000 and has jumped to 16.4 in 2024. Economist Alan Kohler has warned that if the ratio had stayed where it was in 2000—around four—Australian families would be paying half as much for their mortgages as they are today. Instead, mortgage repayments now chew up over 50 per cent of household incomes compared with 36 per cent two decades ago. The median Sydney house price has doubled from $680,000 in 2014 to about $1.4 million today. This is not sustainable. It is shutting a generation out of homeownership entirely.

The social impacts go even further. As Ross Gittins recently posed, have we arrested the development of our young? Danielle Wood, Jim Chalmers' own head of the Productivity Commission, has warned that Australia is in danger of breaking the generational bargain—the promise that each generation would live better than the one before. The statistics are sobering. The proportion of young Australians not yet married has doubled from 26 per cent to 53 per cent. The median age of first marriages has risen from 27 to 34. Among 25- to 39-year-olds, the proportion living as a couple has collapsed from over half to just one-fifth. A Deloitte analysis of the census found that more than half of Australians aged between 18 and 25 now even believe they are unlikely to ever have children. These are not just lifestyle choices. These are economic constraints forcing people to delay or abandon entirely the most fundamental decision of adulthood. And let's be honest about who benefits and who loses.

High immigration feeds the interests of big business, which wants more workers and more consumers to keep driving that economy. It feeds big universities, which rely heavily on international student revenue. And it feeds big government, which grows larger with every extra million people to regulate and serve. So that's who benefits. But the costs of these policy settings are borne by young Australians locked out of homeownership, by young couples delaying marriage and children and by young families struggling to pay rent or save a deposit while prices climb faster than they could ever possibly catch up on.

Every child not born today is another job and another taxpayer that needs to be filled by skilled migration over the next 20 years. We're drifting towards a society where homeownership depends entirely on whether your parents can help you out, where homeownership increasingly comes from inheritance, not from hard work, and where the idea of starting a family depends less on aspirational love than on whether you can even afford a house with a backyard. Ross Gittins, again, has written, 'A society that tells its young people they cannot buy a home unless their parents are rich is a society that's lost its way.' Herein lies the irony at the heart of the debate.

We're told we need high immigration because the birthrate is too low, but the birthrate is falling partly because housing costs are too high, because family formation is delayed further each year because young Australians can't get on with ordinary life. We're using migration to fix a problem that migration itself is making worse and that—