Tyron Whitten (WA, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm here to speak today on the economics of mass immigration. This is not a discussion about immigrants. Immigrants have been part of Australia's story for hundreds of years and are as much a part of Australia as anyone here in this chamber. But what Labor refuses to acknowledge is that the rate of mass immigration has serious impacts on the economy and echoes down to catastrophic impacts on individual Australians. It reaches into housing, productivity and wages. It touches all aspects of everyday Australians' lives.

Labor and the Greens want to pretend immigration has no effect on the economy, but you can add an endless number of people to a population and nothing changes. They want to believe that the iron-clad laws of supply and demand magically don't apply to their policies and that record immigration doesn't drive up the price of limited housing stock or everything else. When I got up this morning, I dressed myself and I don't think I put my stubbies on back to front!

In my home state of WA, we're seeing rental vacancy rates of 0.7 per cent while locals compete with the flood of new arrivals. Perth's rents have risen more than anywhere else in the country, up 7.6 per cent just this year and over 50 per cent higher in the past five years. That amounts to an increase of around $243 a week or over $12,000 a year. The median wage for Western Australians is around $80,000 a year. These rises have chewed up 15 per cent of the median Western Aussie wage.

I know the government doesn't believe additional demand drives up prices, so let's look at the science. A paper from 2020 by Moallemi and Melser, titled The impact of immigration on housing prices in Australia, concluded that a one per cent increase in population in an area led to a 1.4 per cent increase in the price of houses. Thanks to Labor and coalition governments, Australia has increased its population since 2000 by over 45 per cent—the largest growth of any advanced economy. The science is settled, as my Labor friends would say. So what does Labor do? Drive up demand by increasing quotas for international students and drive record net overseas migration. What a callous disregard for the people of Australia, especially the young, who now have an impossible mountain to climb to own their first home. And don't tell me about your five per cent deposit scheme. That will see these young buyers saddled with massively inflated mortgages that they can barely afford, six to eight times their annual wage, when their parents had the same chance to buy at only two to three times their wage. You are selling the next generation into life-long debt.

It is not only housing that is affected. As Australia's immigration accelerates, our productivity also hits the skids. I questioned the government about this just last week and was told that Labor is unaware of any connection between immigration and productivity. What an unbelievable claim. The concept of capital deepening was discussed by their own Treasurer, saying that we need to promote capital deepening, defined as increased capital per worker. But the only reason we need capital deepening is that, thanks to Labor, we've had years of capital shallowing. The other half of the equation, which Labor refuses to acknowledge, is that 'per worker' means that more workers shallow out the economy.

I'll give you a stylised illustration of what I mean by capital shallowing. If I'm digging a ditch with a shovel and someone comes to help me dig but they don't bring a shovel, we aren't going to dig that ditch twice as fast. And if I'm getting paid per ditch, that extra person, without the proper equipment, is going to cost me wages. That's what we mean by capital shallowing and how it affects wages.

With this concept in mind, how has Australia performed? Since 2023 our population has risen at an alarming rate of 2.1 per cent per year, while our capital investment is estimated to have grown by a mere 1.2 per cent. That is, if the government maintains its current course we will continue to see further capital shallowing and productivity collapse, because the capital investment in our country cannot possibly keep up with the insane population growth, fuelled by mass immigration.

And they aren't just maintaining course, according to ABS data. The net permanent and long-term immigration to May 2025 was 246,000 people—a record for the first five months of the year. It is not only the sheer number; it is also the poor targeting of annual net migration, with 340,000 net migration of skilled workers representing just 66,000. A Deloitte report from 2023 found that 44 per cent of permanent migrants in Australia are underutilised and working in jobs below their qualifications. If the jobs aren't there for the people you're bringing in, then not only are you hurting the Australians who are already here but you're also hurting those immigrants who came here with the promise of a better life.

The 2023 migration review found that 51 per cent of foreign-born university graduates worked in unskilled employment three years after they graduated. This suggests one of two things: either the workers who are being brought in are not properly qualified for the job they have been brought in to do, or there are simply not enough jobs and they are now competing with Australians in a tight job market. Both these outcomes are a disaster for productivity and wages.

We are short of all manner of qualified tradespeople. While the government drags them away with their political vanity projects, like environmentally disastrous Geographe Bay windfarms in my home state of WA, instead of seeing vital trades come into the country in meaningful numbers we are seeing record numbers of international student enrolments, with 816,587 enrolments in just the first five months of the year—another record. Many of these students will compete for housing and jobs in an economy that is not attracting the level of capital investment required to keep them productively employed. None of these concepts are new. This is not something Labor could be unaware of. They themselves have talked about the need for capital deepening in the lead-up to the economic roundtable.

We can't continue to see immigration numbers outstrip investment in Australia. If the tools, infrastructure and housing aren't there to support these new arrivals, the country as a whole suffers from the inevitable wage erosion. We have sky-high housing prices. We have cratering productivity and standards of living. Mass immigration is not just irresponsible policy; it is devastating to the people this government is meant to serve. It begs the question: what motivation would a government have to drive down standards of living to push housing out of reach for so many Australians? The answer lies in the true motivation of these politicians that are wilfully blind to the suffering they cause. They are not here to improve Australians' lives; they are here purely to be re-elected.

To this point, mass immigration serves two distinct purposes. Firstly, polling by Redbridge Group indicates that immigrants vote overwhelmingly for Labor—of course they do. When Labor's focus is purely on being re-elected, they will continue to bring in as many likely voters as they can. Secondly, the flood of immigration hides the horrible management of the economy by driving up overall GDP to just barely avoid a technical recession. While they may have avoided a technical recession, Labor have presided over the largest per capita recession since quarterly data became available in 1973. Is this another 'recession we had to have'? Since December 2023, Australians have only seen a single quarter of per capita growth, of 0.1 per cent in December 2024. It's almost a rounding error. We're back to per capita GDP declines as of March 2025.

These are the reasons that Labor refuse to address the economic impact of mass immigration. The political benefit to them far outstrips their care for the people they are meant to represent—good, honest, hardworking Australians from all walks of life.