In an ideal world, Peter Dutton would replicate the achievement of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. Not because he’s as bigoted, or racist, or Islamophobic, as the Dutchman, but because the latter has showcased how a right-wing politician can exploit housing and immigration for considerable political success.
Wilders’ recent success — having purported to have moved away from the bigotry that characterised his earlier career — has been based on linking a shortage of affordable housing to migration, and promising to fix the former by cutting the latter. Undoubtedly, this also gives racist and anti-immigrant Dutch voters legitimate cover for views they would espouse regardless of whether housing was a problem. But Wilders’ success with younger voters must be deeply appealing to Dutton, given it’s now an article of faith that the Liberal Party has a big and growing problem with people under retirement age.
Dutton’s budget reply thus doubled down on his housing-migration pitch. He wasted little time getting into it last night. “The government has brought in an additional 923,000 migrants in just two years. But on the available data, it has only built 265,000 homes.”
Just in case you missed it, he made a few more observations. “Australians are struggling to find homes to rent and buy, and not always due to a lack of money. Amidst this housing crisis, Labor is bringing in 1.67 million migrants over five years — more than the population of Adelaide … by getting the migration policy settings right, the Coalition can free up more houses for Australians.”
There’s also the “congestion on our roads and pressure on existing services which are stretched, like seeing a GP, [from the] Albanese government’s poor management of the migration program”. But the main game is housing: “by rebalancing the migration program and taking decisive action on the housing crisis, the Coalition would free up almost 40,000 additional homes in the first year”.
The “decisive action on the housing crisis” Dutton refers to is his proposal, backed by the Liberals’ band of industry super haters (half of whom lost their seats in 2022), to enable young people to raid their superannuation to buy a house. That will push up house prices for the benefit of older asset owners and leave younger people without any retirement savings at all. It’s a very, very smart policy, because it ostensibly appeals to younger voters, and you can Cry Freedom against the iniquities of compulsory super, while every single cent of the benefits flows to the Liberal Party’s boomer base.
The problem is, Dutton’s fiddling at the margins on migration. He promises to cut permanent migration by a small amount, temporarily, but it will spring back up to 160,000 within four years. His commitment on foreign students — a far bigger contributor to the housing crisis and, ironically, almost entirely young people, albeit not ones registered to vote — is little different to Labor’s. “We will reduce excessive numbers of foreign students studying at metropolitan universities to relieve stress on rental markets in our major cities. We will work with universities to set a cap on foreign students.”
That’s not gonna cut it when it comes to housing.
And despite pretending to be a born-again foe of business’ reliance on migration, Dutton doesn’t want to cut temporary workers either. “We will ensure there are enough skilled and temporary skilled visas for those with building and construction skills to support our local tradies to build the homes we need.” That seems to imply that construction will be exempt from any restrictions on temporary migration, but Dutton doesn’t say what they will be, if any.
Will he cap temporary aged care workers? Temporary GPs, given he specifically mentioned GP shortages last night? Temporary mental health professionals, given he wants to expand access to mental health services? Temporary engineers with experience in building nuclear power plants? (speaking of which, has The Australian checked back in on its promise Dutton would unveil all on nuclear power before the budget?).
The opposition leader does imply there’ll be some sort of temporary worker restriction, because he keeps coming back to a vision of our workforce shortages being fixed by retirees returning to employment. “A Coalition government will encourage thousands of people to engage more in the labour market,” Dutton said. A retiree army in the thousands ain’t gonna cut it on workforce shortages, Pete. Any more than adjusting a couple of numbers in the migration intake will fix the housing shortage.
Why doesn’t Dutton want to go further and make a real difference on migration, enough to end the housing crisis and make housing more affordable for young people? Well, imagine if he found a way to dramatically slash net overseas migration down to, say, 100,000 a year, a fraction of current levels and of the 395,000 Labor says will arrive in 2024-25?
Sure, as he said last night, “the usual CEOs and big businesses may not like this approach”.
But the real screams wouldn’t be from business, they’d be from homeowners and investors who were suddenly looking at not merely a halt in the constant increase in the value of their assets that they prize so much, but maybe even a fall in the value of their homes and investments.
Dutton, like any other major party politician, will never accept any policy that would genuinely, seriously increase the affordability of existing housing stock. The people who own them won’t wear it, and they dramatically outnumber young people trying to enter the market.
That’s why Dutton is only playing at being Wilders.
