Renters in Misery: Don’t Worry, Big Migration Australia is Here to Help (Bury Us)!

There is good news for Australia's struggling renters. Just when more than half are reportedly experiencing financial difficulty and advertised rents have risen by roughly 50 per cent since the pandemic, governments continue to ensure that hundreds of thousands of additional people enter the country each year requiring somewhere to live. It is an unusual way of solving a housing shortage, but for the elites mass migration cures everything, even cancer, we suppose.

According to Macrobusiness, Cotality estimates that advertised rents have risen by around 50 per cent since the pandemic, adding more than $12,500 to the annual rental bill of the median tenant. Rental growth is now slowing and vacancy rates have improved somewhat, but rents are still increasing faster than wages. In other words, the crisis is not so much ending as worsening more slowly.

Other evidence shows just how severe the affordability problem has become. Everybody's Home calculated in August that the median Australian apartment rent of $614 a week consumed 56 per cent of the take-home income of a worker earning $70,000. Even Adelaide, the cheapest capital in its comparison, required more than half that worker's take-home pay.

The National Housing Supply and Affordability Council provides another measure. Among lower-income renter households, the proportion experiencing rental stress rose from 24.9 per cent in 2014 to a series high of 29.5 per cent in 2024. Rental stress here means spending more than 30 per cent of disposable household income on rent.

Even government assistance frequently does not solve the problem. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reports that 44 per cent of income units receiving Commonwealth Rent Assistance remain in rental stress after receiving the assistance. Welcome to the Australian housing miracle.

Successive governments spent decades creating a system in which owning residential property became an extraordinarily attractive investment while building enough housing and infrastructure for the population became somebody else's problem. Planning restrictions, construction costs, infrastructure bottlenecks, interest rates, taxation arrangements and years of inadequate supply all contributed. Then Australia added another ingredient: population growth.

The latest ABS figures show that Australia's population increased by 392,700 people in the year to March 2026. Natural increase accounted for only 100,600 of them, while net overseas migration contributed 292,100. That means almost three-quarters of Australia's population growth over that year came from net overseas migration.

Migration has certainly fallen from the extraordinary post-pandemic peak, and that should be acknowledged. The Albanese government can reasonably point out that the number is moving down. But 292,100 additional people is still 292,100 additional people who need somewhere to live.

This elementary fact sometimes disappears beneath Australia's immigration debate. Migrants do not cause Australia's dysfunctional planning system. They did not create decades of underinvestment in infrastructure. They are not responsible for governments failing to build sufficient social housing, nor for construction companies collapsing, building costs soaring or Australians using residential property as an investment vehicle. Migrants are responding rationally to opportunities Australia offers them.

The relevant criticism therefore belongs with government policy, not with the people arriving under that policy. If you have a severe shortage of rental accommodation and simultaneously maintain population growth heavily driven by immigration, you are increasing housing demand before the supply problem has been solved. This is not xenophobia; it is arithmetic.

Imagine a town with 1,000 rental properties and 1,100 households wanting them. The town has a shortage. Government announces a heroic program to build another 50 dwellings, while policies simultaneously result in another 100 households arriving. Government can boast truthfully that it built more houses, while the shortage nevertheless became worse.

That simplified example captures something fundamental about Australia's housing debate. Governments constantly discuss the supply side while treating demand as though it arrived from another universe.

Housing Minister Clare O'Neil can announce more homes. State governments can promise planning reform. Canberra can subsidise construction, assist first-home buyers and increase Commonwealth Rent Assistance. Some of these policies may be useful, but none repeals arithmetic.

Australia cannot rapidly increase its population without rapidly increasing the number of dwellings required to house that population. Nor is it enough eventually to build the required houses. People arriving today require accommodation today. If housing construction responds three or five years later, existing renters compete for the limited stock in the meantime, and that competition appears in vacancy rates and rents.

The rental market does not care whether the additional demand comes from an Australian-born twenty-year-old leaving his parents' house, an interstate migrant moving to Brisbane, an international student arriving from India or a British engineer recruited under a skilled visa. A household needs a dwelling. Add households faster than dwellings and pressure increases.

The political irony is difficult to miss. Governments tell renters that they understand their pain. They provide assistance to help them pay higher rents, announce ambitious housing targets, promise planning reform and condemn landlords when rents rise too quickly. Meanwhile, federal population policy continues adding housing demand on a scale that requires an enormous construction effort merely to prevent conditions deteriorating. It is rather like finding somebody struggling to carry six shopping bags and helping by handing him a seventh.

Then there is the question of wages. High immigration is frequently defended because it expands aggregate GDP, provides workers and helps address particular skills shortages. Those benefits can be real, but renters do not live inside aggregate GDP. They live in houses, and their relevant calculation occurs every week when rent leaves their bank account.

If someone's wage rises 3 per cent while the cost of accommodation rises 8 per cent, explaining that Australia's total economy has grown is unlikely to produce much celebration at the kitchen table. This is one of the central criticisms of Australia's Big Australia model: aggregate economic growth can coexist perfectly comfortably with declining material security for individuals.

The economy becomes larger because there are more people producing and consuming. The individual Australian does not necessarily become richer. Housing exposes that distinction with unusual clarity because land and well-located dwellings cannot be multiplied instantly.

There is another uncomfortable distributional aspect. Rapid population growth creates winners. Existing property owners can benefit from rising land values. Developers gain customers. Universities gain international students. Businesses obtain workers and consumers. Governments obtain additional taxpayers and can point to expanding headline GDP.

The costs are distributed differently. Renters encounter them through rent increases and competition for properties. First-home buyers encounter them through prices. Commuters encounter them through congestion. Taxpayers eventually encounter them through the infrastructure required to accommodate a larger population.

Statements about "the economic benefits of migration" conceal the question that matters politically: benefits to whom, and costs to whom? For a renter watching half his disposable income disappear into somebody else's mortgage, the answer may look rather different from the answer produced by a Treasury aggregate.

Australia therefore needs to decide which objective comes first. If the housing crisis is genuinely an emergency, housing demand must form part of the discussion alongside housing supply. That requires matching immigration to Australia's demonstrated capacity to provide additional housing and infrastructure without continually reducing living standards for people already here.

A rational system would therefore ask how many additional residents Australia can accommodate given actual dwelling completions, rental vacancies, infrastructure capacity and construction constraints. Instead, Australia has too often worked backwards: set immigration and population policies for economic, educational and demographic reasons, discover that the housing system cannot accommodate the resulting growth, then announce emergency measures to deal with the housing crisis. When those measures fail to restore affordability, announce some more.

The Albanese government inherited a housing system already suffering deep structural problems. It did not invent Australia's planning laws, property tax arrangements or decades of inadequate infrastructure investment, and it cannot reasonably be blamed for every dollar of Australia's enormous increase in rents.

But governments are responsible for the policy levers they actually control, and migration is one of them. The ABS says net overseas migration added 292,100 people to Australia's population in the latest year. Those people required housing.

At some point Australian governments must stop discussing that elementary relationship as though acknowledging it were somehow improper. Renters do not need another lecture explaining why everything will improve when sufficient houses are eventually built. They need enough houses relative to the number of people requiring them.

Until Australia gets those two sides of the equation into balance, the housing crisis will remain a magnificent exercise in government contradiction. Canberra will sympathise with renters, subsidise renters and promise to build homes for renters, while the housing system struggles to catch up with the number of people looking for somewhere to live.

Putting renters "out of their misery" indeed. Unfortunately, some of them may first be put out of their homes, thanks to mass migration.

https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2026/09/more-than-half-of-australias-renters-are-struggling-financially/