The Real Truth About Immigration, By George Christensen

Here's the real truth they do not want you to know: mass migration is not being sold to you to make your life better. It is being sold to you to make the numbers look better.

Not your rent. Not your wage. Not your kid's first home. Just the numbers they can wave around at a press conference.

Treasury waves the term "growth" around like it is a magic wand. GDP up. If they say the economy is up, then confidence must also be up. And if you are drowning in rent, or your kids have no chance of buying, well… that is apparently your problem. Because the Canberra bubble does not live in your suburb. It does not turn up to the jam-packed home auctions to see a broken-down two-bedroom cottage from the 1970s sell for $1 million or more. It doesn't have to go through the humiliation of turning over your entire financial history just to rent a studio apartment.

Meanwhile, the banks are grinning like the proverbial fox in the henhouse. They do not want a housing market that cools off. They want it hot, red hot, because housing credit is their oxygen. The more people you cram into Australia, the more demand you manufacture for shelter. It is that simple.

Mass migration is not a humanitarian project. It is not a "nation-building" miracle. It is a numbers game, a growth drug, and you are the one paying for the high.

And if you think I am exaggerating, here is what it looks like at the flesh-and-blood level.

I know Morgan Cox. You might remember Morgan Cox. He is a normal Aussie dad who got pushed past the point where you just grumble and cop it. When his housing costs became unbearable, he pitched a tent outside Anthony Albanese's Central Coast holiday home to force the issue into the open. That is not the kind of stunt an ordinary bloke pulls when life is going well. That is what you do when you feel your country has left you behind.

What kind of system drives people to that?

Morgan Cox and those like him are inconvenient truths. They are the living contradiction to the propaganda that "everything is fine" and "migration is good for everyone".

Treasury will tell you migration helps "the economy" and offsets an ageing population. That logic is baked into their long-term planning. But here is the trick they pull on you, over and over: they talk aggregate, whereas you live per capita.

When you add vast numbers of people, you can juice headline GDP even if the average person is going backwards. Sure. It might be a bigger pie, but you're getting a thinner slice. That is the scam.

Have a look at the raw migration intake since Albanese took office.

In 2022-23 alone, Australia recorded about 738,000 migrant arrivals. In 2023-24, it was another 661,000. In 2024-25, it was another 568,000. That is almost two million migrant arrivals in three years.

Let that sink in: Nearly two million migrants.

Inside that flood of foreigners is the international student rort. And it is a rort. Overseas, agents acting on behalf of Australian-based foreign student degree mills blatantly promote their service as a gateway to permanent residency in Australia. They're not buying a degree. They're buying access to our welfare system, free healthcare, higher wages, and way of life. And there are hundreds of thousands of them doing it every year.

The official figures show about 278,000 foreign student arrivals in 2022-23, about 204,000 in 2023-24, and 157,000 in 2024-25. That is roughly 639,000 student arrivals across three years. And the universities want those numbers to grow.

So while you are being told to accept "tight" rentals, "normal" overcrowding, and "flexible living arrangements", the policy settings keep pouring demand onto a housing system that is already buckling. If you are struggling to find a rental, if your landlord is jacking the price, if your kids are giving up on home ownership, none of that is mysterious. This is what happens when you keep piling bodies into a market that cannot keep up.

Do you feel richer? Do you feel more secure? Or do you feel like every year you are running harder just to stay in the same place?

Australia's banking model is basically: property, property, property. When property is roaring, the banks roar. When mortgages grow, they grow. When prices rise, their collateral looks stronger, and their profits look safer and shinier.

So tell me, do you reckon the biggest financial institutions in the country want a housing market that resets to something sane, something that lets young families breathe? Or do you reckon they want the pressure kept on, forever, so prices stay elevated and everyone stays leveraged?

And then there is the political class, always ready with the same line. We need "skills". We need "workers". We need "growth". We need "population".

It sounds responsible until you realise what it really means. It means they would rather import bodies than fix the rot. They would rather inflate demand than reform the economy. They would rather chase a bigger headline number than build a better country. Productivity reform is hard. Building critical infrastructure costs money that could be spent on local pork-barrelling. Addressing the housing supply harms the big end of town.

So we get the worst of everything. Congestion. Overcrowding. Strained hospitals. Stressed schools. A rental market that feels like a cage match. Wages that never seem to win. Then you are told to accept it because "the economy needs it".

Personally, I hate the misuse of the term 'economy.' The economy is not an abstract. It is not some demi-god. It is not something over there. The economy is basically us. To be precise, the economy is the interaction of human beings within a defined system (such as the Australian nation), producing goods and services (including labour), then distributing and consuming them, all for the betterment of each other and of the whole.

In other words, the economy is supposed to serve the nation, not crush it.

So, if mass migration is so wonderful, why does it always feel like you are the one making sacrifices?

Why do you have to move further out?

Why do you have to downsize?

Why do you have to delay kids because you cannot secure a home?

Because the policy is designed to keep you competing. Competing for rentals. Competing at auctions. Competing for a sliver of stability, while the people who designed this mess sit comfortably above it.

And why is it always the same people lecturing you about it, the same people insulated from the consequences, the same people whose suburbs do not absorb the pressure, the same people whose kids get first pick at opportunity?

Yes, there are other accelerants. Planning failures. Infrastructure bottlenecks. A university sector that has turned into an import pipeline. Fine. Add it all in.

But none of that changes the core arithmetic: when you import demand faster than you can build homes, you squeeze locals. You squeeze wages. You squeeze services. You squeeze communities. You squeeze the next generation until "normal life" starts to look like a cramped rental, a longer commute, and a permanent feeling of being priced out of your own country.

That is basically the destruction of a nation, done quietly, with spreadsheets.

And the part that should make your blood boil is the nerve of it.

They will tell you "migration is essential," that "we are a migrant nation," and that "without immigration, we won't be able to fill the jobs." Then, in the same breath, they will shrug when your wage cannot keep up, when your rent jumps again, when you move further from family, church, community, and the very things that make life stable and meaningful.

They are asking you to accept a future where home ownership becomes hereditary, something you are born into rather than earn. They are asking you to accept a future where Australians compete for shelter in their own homeland, as if it were a luxury product. They are asking you to accept less and call it progress.

Morgan's tent outside Albo's place should have haunted every politician and every Treasury boffin who is pushing this. It was a picture of where this goes if you keep feeding the machine. Instead, it was a sidenote during the last federal election that came and went.

Labor won that election convincingly, and now the immigration numbers continue to surge while wages stagnate, the cost of living escalates, and the housing crisis worsens. And they call all of that "growth".

But you and I know a country that can't house its own people isn't "growing". It is failing, loudly, even if Treasury, the banks and the politicians claim the opposite.

https://nationfirst.substack.com/p/the-real-truth-about-immigration