Concerns migrants are being blamed for housing crisis

ABC NEWS (Australia)

More than 40 housing and community organisations have written to the Prime Minister, to express concern that migrant communities are being blamed for the housing crisis.

Transcript

00:00 Migrants are no more to blame for this crisis than anybody else who's trying to look for

00:06 housing in this market, right?

00:08 And we also know that migrants aren't just looking for homes and taking up homes, they're

00:12 actually building the homes that we need.

00:15 And it's interesting because the kind of migration that the government is looking at pausing

00:20 or winding back, they're not people who are taking up whole leases, they're people who

00:24 are taking up perhaps a room in a share house.

00:27 So we know that this is not really about housing affordability, it's about looking like they're

00:32 doing something and we need them to take real action instead of, you know, action for show.

00:39 There's two things we really need the government to do.

00:41 The first thing we need government to do is really step up and provide housing itself.

00:45 That's what it used to do back when housing was affordable in Australia.

00:48 Government used to build and supply homes to people who needed it as the main solution

00:52 to affordability.

00:53 It stopped doing that over the last 40 years.

00:55 And in the 40 years that it stopped doing that, housing has stopped being affordable.

00:59 The other thing we need to do is take a look at these tax handouts for investors that really

01:04 push up demand in the wrong places and make housing really unfairly distributed and push

01:09 up the costs for everybody.

01:11 So government has been hugely reliant on the private sector.

01:14 We know that's not working.

01:15 We know it's not distributing housing in the way that it needs to be distributed.

01:18 We know it's not getting housing to the people who need it.

01:21 And we know that it's definitely not providing housing in an affordable way.

01:25 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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