The argument that migrants are responsible for the housing crisis in Australia has no basis in fact and is propaganda in the service of the economic elites, writes Martin Barker. 
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The Nazis and far-right racists (including the son of one of Australia’s largest property developers) who called the reactionary March for Australia on 31 August are demanding an end to mass migration because “Aussies are sleeping on the streets”. 
It’s not just fascists linking migration to the housing crisis. Before the last election, both the Liberals and the ALP had migrants in their sights. “We’re going to cut immigration because Labor’s brought in a million people over two years and that has created the housing crisis”, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said at the time. Labor criticised Dutton but conveyed essentially the same message in more acceptable language. Treasurer Jim Chalmers said of a proposed cap on international students: “Enrolments have grown ... this puts pressure on prices and rents ... it makes finding a house harder for everyone”. 
Politics and the media blame migrants for the housing crisis, and it can seem to make sense. We’re told there aren’t enough houses to meet demand, so the more people there are, the more prices rise. 
But the argument doesn’t stack up.
First, there is no shortage of houses in Australia. As the Australia Institute think tank <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/migrants-are-not-to-blame-for-soaring-house-prices/">reported in March</a>, the construction of new dwellings has outpaced population growth for the last ten years. Indeed, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the number of residential properties in Australia exceeds the number of households by almost 1 million.
Second, there is no meaningful connection between immigration levels and rents. As TikTok user @acutallyadu has <a href="https://x.com/ArtistAffame/status/1958698381779579363">pointed out</a>, the proportion of housing relative to the population in 2014 was roughly the same as today, but rent price growth in 2014 was 1.2 percent compared to 8.1 percent in 2023. Similarly, the <a href="https://www.tenants.org.au/blog/rents-and-migration-what-does-data-tell-us">Tenants Union of NSW</a> has created a dashboard comparing rental price changes to population changes, which shows that there isn’t a strong link between the two. (One example: rent prices in the Sydney suburb of Ryde fell by 5 percent in 2019 and rose by more than 7 percent in 2022, but 33 percent more migrants moved into Ryde in 2019 compared to 2022.) 
It’s the same with house prices. At times, prices have fallen while immigration has increased, and prices have gone up when immigration has reduced. During the COVID-19 border closures, there was negative net migration, meaning more people left the country than came in; but house prices rose by <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/migrants-are-not-to-blame-for-soaring-house-prices/">20 percent</a> in eighteen months. 
International students in particular have been blamed for high rents and low vacancy rates in the suburbs surrounding major universities. The <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-24/international-students-did-not-drive-rents-inflation-higher-rba/105562616">Reserve Bank of Australia</a> found that the return of international students after lockdowns had a marginal effect on rents, contributing at most 0.5 percentage points to rent increases. The majority of rent increases occurred before the borders were reopened, jumping by 13.8 percent between 2021 and 2022. 
So if migrants aren’t to blame, why are house prices and rents so unaffordable? 
House prices and rents are soaring because access to housing in Australia is dominated by a for-profit market that is rigged in the interests of billionaire developers and wealthy investors.
Developers like Mirvac and Meriton (owned by Australia’s second-richest person, Harry Triguboff) are making a killing from high house prices. Meriton made $290 million in profits last year, and Mirvac more than $500 million. And that’s only two of the companies that dominate the housing market. 
Their only concern is profit, and they have a clear interest in higher house prices. In April, the Melbourne Age newspaper reported that <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/the-melbourne-suburbs-with-hundreds-of-cheap-brand-new-apartments-20250329-p5lni7.html">developers in Melbourne were letting 8,000 properties sit empty</a> because prices weren’t high enough, and selling them too quickly would bring down the cost to buyers. 
Developers receive tax and development concessions from the government and benefit from policies like the First Home Buyers scheme, which claims to make it easier for people to buy, but actually drives up prices. 
The tiny proportion of investors who own most investment properties (1 percent of taxpayers own more than 25 percent of them) also want to drive up prices. They receive massive handouts from the government that subsidise their speculation, which increases prices and allows them to out-compete first-home buyers for properties. 
Negative gearing (when a property costs more to maintain than it generates in income, even if it is increasing in value) allows them to claim losses as a tax deduction, and capital gains tax discounts mean they pocket more of the returns when they sell. The ABC <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-17/one-million-australians-are-negatively-gearing/104737164">reported last year</a> that CGT discounts cost the public $23 billion, with 80 percent of the benefits going to the top 10 percent of taxpayers. 
These government handouts mean that investors and developers can sit on properties until the price is right. Some rent them out, others leave them empty, knowing they’ll get a tax concession when they sell. That’s why Prosper Australia, a research and advocacy group, estimates that there are <a href="https://www.prosper.org.au/2024/07/report-100000-vacant-homes-in-melbourne/">100,000 empty or “barely used” properties in Melbourne</a> while 30,000 Victorians are homeless. 
Blaming migrants for the housing crisis shifts the blame away from those who are actually responsible: big corporations and banks, the super-wealthy and Labor and Liberal governments. Migrant bashing is about dividing workers to make it harder for us to unite and fight against our common enemy. The super-rich would much rather have us blaming each other for unaffordable homes than aiming our sights on them.
The argument that migrants are responsible for the housing crisis in Australia has no basis in fact and is propaganda in the service of the economic elites.
Even if there were a housing shortage and migration was having a measurable impact on housing affordability, socialists would still oppose blaming immigrants and imposing migration controls. 
Australia is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. We have more than enough resources and productive capacity to comfortably house a significantly larger population. The problem is that the vast majority of that wealth is owned and controlled by a tiny minority of the population, whose sole concern is making profits. 
The housing crisis won’t be fixed by blaming migrants or limiting immigration. The solutions lie in challenging the market’s domination over access to housing, the power and wealth of developers and investors, and the Labor and Liberal governments that act in their interests.

Martin Barker

Migrants are not to blame for the housing crisis

Twenty years ago, Eddy Groves blazed a trail as the first of Australia’s childcare industry capitalists to make the annual Rich List. As Groves’ portfolio of childcare centres ballooned, so did his personal wealth—from a hundred childcare centres and $40 million in 2002, to a thousand childcare centres in Australia, a similar number overseas, and a fortune of $260 million in 2006. By this stage, Groves owned a ranch in Nevada, a house in France and the Brisbane Bullets basketball team.
Groves’ empire collapsed in 2008. But he had proved in practice that it was possible for cashed-up operators to make a fortune in care industries governments were retreating from. So long as there is a steady flow of government money, rapid expansion of the corporate footprint, poorly enforced regulation and a ruthless, cost-cutting approach to staffing and conditions, there is money to be made. 
Just look at Pejman Okhovat, the CEO of G8 Education. His total remuneration was $3.3 million in 2024, up from $3 million the year before. G8 Education is the biggest childcare provider in Victoria, with 130 centres across the state. An <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/victoria-s-largest-childcare-chain-repeatedly-failed-to-protect-children-20250805-p5mkg0.html">investigation</a>
by the Age following a major alleged child abuse scandal reveals a chronic shortage of trained staff in multiple centres and a failure to report incidents in which a child was harmed or at risk of serious harm: “One mother said she believed it was ‘painfully obvious’ the childcare giant prioritised its reputation over providing adequate care”. 
Child care today is highly profitable. The public financial advice website <a href="https://www.finexia.com.au/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-the-average-profit-of-daycare-centers-in-australia#:~:text=Average%20Profit%20of%20Daycare%20Center,explore%20in%20the%20subsequent%20sections.">Finexia</a>
claims that a profit margin of 10 to 20 percent is typical—which is significantly more than Woolworths’ reported profit rate of around 6 percent of sales. 
But the big money comes from accumulating the centres themselves, which ensures larger streams of government cash. News.com <a href="https://www.news.com.au/finance/real-estate/revealed-the-cashed-up-players-making-millions-from-childcare-centres/news-story/5c5075f0aed1143a007795d20b399b09">carried a story</a> in March this year profiling just a few of the characters who have enriched themselves in this way. The list includes Brendan McAssey, who sold off his “Only About Children” childcare chain to private equity company Bain Capital in 2016 for $400 million. The deal set him up for a $22.5 million luxury home at Noosa and (according a <a href="https://bigsteps.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/spitting-off-cash-uwu-report.pdf">report</a>
from the United Workers Union in 2018) a “44 metre superyacht, helicopter, private jet and $17 million mansion at Balmoral Beach on Sydney Harbour”. 
Vijay and Phyllis Narula sold their 14-centre Little People’s Places childcare business for $40 million in 2021. This cash funds what news.com describes as their “opulent lifestyle played out online with pictures of their beachfront mansion, Lamborghinis, and first-class global travels, regularly updated on social media”.
Adrian Fonseca already owned a $14 million mansion in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Selling his 12 childcare centres to Affinity in 2022 for around $40 million no doubt helped him find the $15.6 million needed for the mansion next door in 2023. 
We could continue the list, but even this is all chickenfeed. The big players in the industry aren’t motivated by luxury lifestyles, though they no doubt enjoy them. The real game is capital accumulation, on a spectacular scale. 
This is enabled by steady government money and a regulator uninterested in creating barriers to private enrichment. In 2016, the model was attractive enough to entice private equity firm Anchorage to buy Affinity Education, one of Australia’s biggest childcare operators, for $210 million. Anchorage achieved an extraordinary return on this investment, tripling their money in just five years by selling Affinity off to Quadrant, another Sydney private equity company, for $650 million in 2021. 
The executives at incoming owners Quadrant were then faced with the task of squeezing even more money out of Affinity Education. The <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/the-big-money-behind-childcare-operator-at-the-heart-of-alleged-sex-abuse-scandal-20250717-p5mft7.html">plan</a>
seems to have been a simple one: load up on debt, crack down on costs, expand the corporate footprint by buying up more centres—and then cash in. 
The ABC’s reporting shows that breaches of mandated legal minimums on staffing—and intense pressure on staff to leave regulatory breaches unreported—are part and parcel of this business model.. Loretta Dodwell was one of the childcare workers who <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-12/video-shows-childcare-worker-hitting-baby-at-affinity-education/105268298">spoke to the ABC</a> in May about what she’d seen while employed by Affinity Education. “The cost cutting and the lack of staff really caused serious incidents in the centre”, she said. “They were also putting on lots of trainees, like young trainees that were cheap to employ and that put a lot of pressure on the qualified staff ... They [Affinity] are just not suitable to be in the childcare industry because they are just so greedy ... They cut staff, they put the staff under so much pressure ... they’re just a big company that wants to make money out of children.”
The head of this “big company that wants to make money out of children” is Chris Hadley, the executive chairman of Affinity Education’s current owner, the private equity firm Quadrant. Hadley is a legend in Sydney money circles. He’s probably a billionaire, although, as the Australian Financial Review <a href="https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/inside-the-dog-eat-dog-world-of-australia-s-most-successful-pe-firm-20230822-p5dyf6">reported</a>
in 2023, Quadrant’s “labyrinthine corporate structure” makes it impossible to be certain. 
For the workers, it is a different story. “Food or rent. I can’t afford both.” This is how one member of the United Workers Union responded to a union <a href="https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/sites/am2024-19/am202423-sub-uwu-020625.pdf">survey</a>
of early childhood educators last year. Others reported working a second job, not being able to afford essentials, or not being able to afford a holiday with their kids. 
This is the reality of caring being left to the market. Capitalism has always seen care as a high fixed cost that generates no direct profit, and that therefore should generally be cut to the minimum. This counts double for those too old to make a profit for a boss, or too young, or with a disability that makes someone less profitable to employ. So even before our current neoliberal age with its mania for privatisation, aged care, childcare and other community care facilities were often overcrowded institutions with underpaid and overworked staff. 
But it’s also true that all of these problems have become dramatically worse as the Chris Hadleys and their ilk moved in. Instead of local councils providing the bulk of aged care and child care, with some basic level of political and legal accountability, the profiteering wannabe billionaires (and actual billionaires) are interested only in making a buck. 
Tripling your corporation’s wealth, as Anchorage private equity did with Affinity child care in five years, and as Quadrant hope to do, is the highest mission for any capitalist. More than a hundred and fifty years ago, Karl Marx explored the desperation of capitalists to multiply their capital in volume one of Capital, quoting the British trade unionist Thomas Dunning: “With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain ten percent will ensure its employment anywhere; twenty percent certain will produce eagerness; fifty percent positive audacity; hundred percent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; three hundred percent, and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged”.
The quote sums up the ethos of capital perfectly. The only difference today is that there’s no chance of any of the childcare profiteers being hanged for their crimes. In fact, it’s an absolute rarity for any of them even to be prosecuted, let alone convicted. Modern day neoliberal “regulators”, in child care and anywhere else, are generally no impediment at all to companies systematically breaching the regulations in pursuit of profit. 
So back in the day, Eddy Groves walked free despite leaving over $1 billion in bad debt. And 20 years later, Affinity look to be following in his footsteps. Adele Ferguson and Chris Gillet <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-12/video-shows-childcare-worker-hitting-baby-at-affinity-education/105268298">reported</a>
on the ABC in May this year that, despite constant pressure on staff not to report regulatory breaches, between 2021 and 2024 Affinity childcare centres “were hit with more than 1,700 regulatory breaches, averaging more than one a day” in New South Wales alone. “Despite this”, Jones and Gillet reported, “the NSW regulator issued just nine infringement notices, totalling less than $2,000 in penalties.”
Labor’s reforms, at best, tinker at the edges of this grotesque system—a system that they’ve helped to create since the 1990s, and which they have no interest in transforming. 
In the wake of Eddie Groves’ spectacular implosion, academic and gender equity advocate Deborah Brennan outlined Labor’s track record on child care, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald: “How did we get into this mess? Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard has blamed John Howard for ‘letting the market rip’, but it was the Hawke government, in 1991, that introduced market forces into the sector. It did this by extending child-care assistance to the users of for-profit care and then by changing the structure of Commonwealth funding to encourage private provision and marginalise the community sector ... The Howard government intensified Labor's market focus, ending operational subsidies to community-based care in 1997”.
This whole architecture needs to be scrapped. ABC investigations are important, but far from sufficient to drive this level of change. In aged care, for instance, there have been incremental improvements to wages and staffing since the royal commission triggered by a shocking 2018 Four Corners investigation. However, the fundamental structure of the industry remains untouched and, with it, many of the problems. 
For more far-reaching reforms, the crisis in child care will have to be transformed into a political crisis for the government and the profiteers. The actions of workers in the sector—which we saw a glimpse of in the Big Steps campaign of walk-offs and protests organised by the UWU—can be crucial in this. 
We should be fighting for a society that puts human dignity first—in early childhood education, disability, aged care and far beyond—and relegates the profiteers, their Lamborghinis and their obscene, dog-eat-dog system to history.

Jerome Small

The profiteers plundering child care

If you were to try to distinguish a house from a cave, you might ask: “Is it cold? Is it damp? Do fungi grow there?”. By this metric, some caves around the world would pass as houses, but many of our houses would pass as caves. 
Cold homes in Australia: Questioning our assumptions about prevalence, a <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629623001846">study</a>
by the Australian Centre for Housing Research, monitored homes through the winter in 2022. It found that during that time, 81 percent averaged below 18 degrees Celsius, the minimum “healthy” standard of indoor temperature set by the World Health Organization. 
The effects of cold on the human body can be deadly. Colder temperatures cause blood vessels to constrict to reduce heat loss, increasing blood pressure and raising your risk of heart disease and strokes. Likewise, cold, dry air can narrow your airways, making chronic bronchitis, emphysema and asthma attacks more likely. A report by the University of Melbourne Professor Rebecca Bentley, published in 2024 with the headline “Your cold house is bad for your mental health” also found that those who cannot afford to keep their homes warm are 49 percent more likely to report depression or anxiety.
The cold is more deadly in Australia than it is in Arctic-straddling Sweden. Research published in the Lancet in 2015, “Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multicountry observational study”, found that 6.5 percent of all deaths in Australia are at least partly attributable to cold weather, almost twice Sweden’s 3.7 percent. Thousands are dying from the cold, and the danger doesn’t end there.
Asthma Australia surveyed 5,041 people in 2022, finding in its report <a href="https://asthma.org.au/about-us/advocacy/housing/">Homes, Health and Asthma in Australia</a> that one in three people have mould in their homes, while one in two have problems with either mould or dampness (water damage, condensation, water leaks or flooding). Black mould spores can cause asthma attacks, allergic reactions and immune system disorders. One couple recently interview by the Sydney Morning Herald explained that the mould in their flat made them sick for months with <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/the-toxic-blooms-hiding-in-many-of-our-homes-and-a-new-way-to-find-them-20250526-p5m29i.html">vertigo and cyclical vomiting</a>. This isn’t just a problem in old, poorly ventilated homes. The 2015 Nationwide Condensation Survey found that more than 40 percent of new buildings had problems with condensation and mould.
So why are our houses so crap? It certainly isn’t because we don’t know better. Building shelters is something human beings have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. The cumulative effort of countless generations struggling against the elements has taken us from animal skins to adobe bricks to heaters and fibreglass insulation. The wind catchers used in Iran today—ingenious chimneys that use basic physics to displace hot air inside a home and replace it with cool air—date back thousands of years, while ancient Roman villas commonly used <a href="https://www.britannica.com/technology/hypocaust">hypocausts</a> that acted as a system of underfloor central heating.
The gap between the kind of housing we’re forced to endure and what science makes possible is immense. Australia’s Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme (NatHERS) rates houses out of ten stars. A 10-star home is one that remains comfortable all year with little or no heating or cooling, while a 0-star home provides almost no protection from the outside climate at all. 
In a 2022 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/13/freezing-indoors-thats-because-australian-homes-are-closer-to-tents-than-insulated-eco-buildings">piece in the Guardian</a>, “Freezing indoors? That’s because Australian homes are closer to tents than insulated eco-buildings”, the head of the University of New South Wales School of the Built Environment, Phillip Oldfield, calculated the amount of power that differently rated homes would require to be kept at a comfortable temperature. “If [a house] received a 2-star NatHERS rating”, he wrote, “it would need 27,349kWh’s of electricity. If we assume $0.20/kWh, the cost would be $5,470 per year. A 6-star home would require 8,249kWh and cost $1,650, while a 10-star home would need only 100 kWh, costing a mere $20 a year.” The average Australian home has a NatHERS rating of just 1.8 stars. 
Although new buildings and major renovations are now required to meet a 7-star rating (and most do not go above this minimum), 70 percent of all homes were built before national energy efficiency standards were introduced in 2003. There is no national standard for that 70 percent, which includes most of the properties leased out by landlords today. The only state requirements are in Victoria and the ACT—which now require landlords to install ceiling insulation (i.e. the absolute bare minimum).
Paying for proper insulation and double-glazed windows would eat into the profits made by property hoarders and developers. So it doesn’t happen. Instead they pass on the costs to those who end up living in their houses, who face the terrible choice: pay thousands each year to warm their homes, or suffer through the winter cold and the damaging consequences for their health. 
For most people, this isn’t a real choice. They can’t afford to stay warm. Finder’s <a href="https://www.finder.com.au/news/heating-hardship-winter-2024">August 2024</a>
Consumer Sentiment Tracker found, based on a survey of 1,049 respondents, that one in two Australians had gone cold to avoid a high energy bill, with 36 percent avoiding using heating as often as possible, and 13 percent going cold all the time.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Double-glazed windows are the norm throughout much of Europe, where triple-glazed windows are becoming common. We could raise the minimum NatHERS rating to 9 or 10 stars, reducing the need for heating and air conditioning to a bare minimum. All houses could be required to meet this standard before being leased or sold, and we could tax property hoarders and developers to subsidise those who own only a home or two to do so. 
We could mandate new building designs to feature cross-ventilation, so that we can cool our houses at night when it’s hot and avoid the build-up of condensation. We could mandate mechanical ventilation for old homes. With high standards of insulation, we could create houses that stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer, something that will be increasingly important as the climate crisis worsens.
Houses where we can live with dignity are not beyond the reach of science, or our resources. They are only beyond the reach of our for-profit housing system.

Cormac Mills Ritchard

Rent freeze? No. Rent, freeze: Australia’s winter housing nightmare

If more evidence were needed that workers’ losses are capitalists’ gains, then look no further than the latest Australian Council of Superannuation Investors report on CEO salaries. It finds that the CEOs of Australia’s top 100 companies last year “earned”, on average, 55 times the average salary of an Australian worker. That’s up from 50 times the year before. 
At the top is the CEO of News Corp, who received $42 million for managing Rupert Murdoch’s far-right propaganda machine—Sky News Australia, the
Australian and dozens of other rags masquerading as journalism. Not far behind are the bosses of Macquarie and Commonwealth banks, who earned a combined $38.7 million for squeezing billions of dollars out of working-class families. Rounding out the list are the bosses of two of the planet’s most destructive corporations—Rio Tinto and BHP. They pocketed a cool $19 million each.
Such eye-watering salaries at the top end of town might have you thinking that at least some of the wealth would trickle down. You would be wrong. In fact, the opposite is true. The cost-of-living crisis has resulted in a transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top. Analysis by the Australia Institute in November last year found that a full-time worker is, on average, $8,000 worse off compared to just three years ago. A big part of the decline is due to housing. Whether someone is a mortgage holder or a renter, a bigger chunk of their pay packet is going to either the bank or the landlord.
The situation is particularly bad for workers on the bottom end of the wage scale. Just over 900,000 low-income workers on award wages have seen their real wages fall by 14.4 percent over the last four years. These workers are disproportionately young and in less stable forms of employment, like casual work.
And yet, the lobbyists of Australian businesses vehemently oppose any notion that wages should rise by even the slightest amount above inflation. The Australian Industry Group considered the Fair Work Commission’s recent 3.5 percent increase in award wages “higher than necessary” and “well beyond what current economic conditions can safely sustain”.
The growing gap between rich and poor is not an unfortunate accident; it’s capitalism working as intended. CEOs live lives of luxury while workers must be grateful for their crumbs. Only a serious fightback of the working class can start to change this.

Tom Sullivan

Keeping up with the CEOs: capitalism’s reality show

You might think that Australia’s housing crisis is the fault of greedy developers, wealthy investors and a market that puts profit before people’s need for a home. Not so, according to Labor Minister for Housing Claire O’Neill. The problem is planning laws that allow selfish, “anti-development residents” to put their interests before those who need affordable homes. 
“Planning laws at the state level are being used much too much to protect existing residents, and not enough to address the fact that we’ve got millions of people who are in housing distress”, O’Neill said in a recent interview in the Age. Apparently, this bureaucratic red tape is to blame for Labor likely falling at least 220,000 homes short of its target of 1.2 million built by 2029. 
Harry Triguboff, owner of mega-developer Meriton and Australia’s second richest person, agrees. In <a href="https://www.meriton.com.au/news/harry-triguboff-on-the-major-housing/">a press release</a> titled “We’re in a major housing crisis. So why do I find myself talking to brick walls rather than building them?”, Triguboff urged all levels of government to “work together to address the red tape” and stop sabotaging the housing industry. Things are so bad that “there is no profit” in building, leading Triguboff to ask, “Why would anyone choose to do it?”. The Australian Financial Review’s 2025 Rich List provides a clue: Triguboff’s wealth is up 12 percent and now stands at a staggering $29.65 billion.
O’Neill’s ire at “anti-development residents” is not aimed at the rich. Labor’s planning proposals target “middle ring” suburbs, particularly those close to transport corridors, which means predominantly middle-income working-class communities.
Despite what Labor and billionaires like Triguboff might say, the planning system is already heavily geared towards developer interests and has little or no impact on either the supply of housing or its price.
Current rules allow developers to build boxed-in housing in western Sydney with black roofs, contributing to soaring temperatures that experts say could make the region <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-01-24/heatwaves-sydney-uninhabitable-climate-change-urban-planning/12993580">unlivable by 2050</a>—no red tape getting in the way there. The Opal Towers in Sydney’s Olympic Park were approved as a major building project by the NSW government in 2015, but serious defects caused <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/opal-tower-residents-evacuated-after-concerns-building-may-collapse-20181224-p50o4b.html">cracking in the building</a> and the evacuation of more than 3,000 residents in 2018. 
In a <a href="https://osf.io/preprints/osf/r925z_v1">2020 paper</a>, economist Cameron Murphy showed that planning approvals for new properties far outstripped the number of houses built, with more than 100,000 surplus approvals since 2012. In Sydney and Melbourne, 94 percent of planning applications are approved, most within three to four months. As Murphy wrote in the Conversation in 2021, “planning regulations permit development, but it is the market price that determines if and where development occurs ... developers select their sites, build, and sell in strong markets and wait or avoid selling when markets are weak”. In other words, developers have no problems getting planning approvals, but they use the approvals only if building and selling will make enough profit. 
Labor’s attack on planning “red tape” is part of its broader argument that lack of supply is responsible for housing unaffordability. But this is a myth, as economists like Murphy have <a href="https://osf.io/preprints/osf/r925z_v1">demonstrated</a>. Between 1996 and 2018, Murphy estimates that new supply exceeded demand by 458,000 dwellings, but house prices and rents went up, not down. 
If more supply might reduce prices, developers don’t build. In March 2025, the<a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/the-melbourne-suburbs-with-hundreds-of-cheap-brand-new-apartments-20250329-p5lni7.html">
Age</a> reported that developers in Melbourne were holding back 8,000 apartments because they couldn’t sell them at a high enough profit. It’s the market and profits that have made housing in Australia unaffordable, not a lack of homes. 
Labor and big developers like Triguboff want to blame anyone but themselves for Australia’s escalating housing crisis. Whether it’s international students, migrants, local residents or young people eating avocado on toast, anyone is a target as long as it’s not profit-gouging developers or the government. Labor’s plans to address the housing crisis by making it easier for developers to build low-quality unaffordable homes is like contracting employers to protect workers from wage theft.
If Labor was serious about ending the housing crisis, it would be taking on the developers, not giving them more handouts. The developers should be forced to build high-quality properties at affordable prices, and if that means they won’t build, then the government can and should do it instead by constructing the hundreds of thousands of public housing properties we need and building affordable homes for people to buy. It’s measures like those—in addition to controlling rents and mortgages, ending the massive tax concessions to wealthy investors and seizing empty homes—that would start to fix the crisis. But Labor doesn’t intend to do any of that; instead it is committed to lining the pockets of the rich while pouring fuel on to the bonfire of Australia’s housing crisis.

Labor’s latest non-solution to the housing crisis

The Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF), Labor’s flagship policy to address the housing crisis, described by Housing Minister Julie Collins as “life-changing legislation that will help generations of Australians”, has not resulted in a single home being built in the nearly two years since it was passed. This was revealed in Senate Estimates Committee hearings in February, when Labor’s Finance Minister Katy Gallagher tried to claim that the HAFF had “completed” 340 new homes (already a derisory number). She was quickly forced to admit that these were existing properties that had been acquired. 
From the beginning, the HAFF was a fig leaf to hide Labor’s inaction on the housing crisis. What was touted as a $10 billion boost to housing was actually an investment fund, with the money gambled on the stock market and a maximum of $500 million in returns to be spent on housing each year. Labor claimed the HAFF would build 30,000 “social” and “affordable” houses over five years, but <a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2023/05/19/housing-australia-future-fund-10-billion-welfare/">reporting by Crikey</a> showed that it would construct around 14,000 properties at best. With 122,000 people homeless, 172,000 on the social housing waitlists and thousands more people being pushed into housing insecurity each year, the HAFF was only ever going to help a tiny number of people to afford a home.
Two years on and the HAFF hasn’t helped anyone. Anglicare’s 2025 Rental Affordability Snapshot reported that affordability has crashed to record lows. Buying a home is more out of reach than ever: you’d need an income of more than $275,000 a year to get a mortgage for a median-priced house in Sydney, according to a SQM Research report. As this article is being written, Queensland police are <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/may/08/police-rangers-and-excavators-move-in-to-brisbane-parks-as-tent-city-residents-face-eviction">clearing a “tent city”</a> of the homeless in Brisbane’s Musgrave Park. Where these people are supposed to go is anyone’s guess. 
The Liberals have blamed the HAFF’s failure on government bureaucracy and red tape, but this is cynical rubbish coming from a party whose idea of “red tape” is a planning control requiring windows in an apartment or paying construction workers the minimum wage. The Liberals’ real objection to the HAFF is that they don’t think the government should even pretend to be building affordable housing. They’d prefer to dispense with the fig leaf and openly shovel public money into the pockets of the developers and let the market rip. 
The HAFF hasn’t resulted in any properties being built because almost none of the money was ever intended to go directly into the construction of affordable homes. The HAFF is a <a href="https://www.housingaustralia.gov.auhttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/2024-01/HAFFF%20NHAF%20Fact%20Sheet%20-%20Developers%2C%20Builders%2C%20Financiers%20and%20Investors.pdf">financial instrument</a> that gives concessional loans and subsidies to private developers who partner with community housing providers. In other words, it’s a handout to big corporations, which can get cheaper debt to build for-profit developments in return for providing a small number of “social” or “affordable” properties. The government has no control over when the homes are built, or whether they are built at all. Instead, it’s up to developers, whose sole concern is maximising their profits. If the market looks good, then maybe they’ll build, but if not, they’ll wait and build nothing, as we’ve seen for the past two years. 
The HAFF is a failure. If the government’s priority was building affordable homes rather than underwriting corporate profits, there are straightforward measures it could implement now to tackle the crisis. It could spend $10 billion (or more) directly on housing, rather than gambling it on the stock market and drip-feeding the returns. It could establish a public builder to construct new homes, rather than holding itself hostage to the market and developers’ profits. And it could keep the properties as public housing, not hand them off as “social housing” to external providers. 
In the wake of Labor’s election win, Albanese has told the Greens and anyone who cares about housing justice to “get out of our way on housing”. Get out of the way so Labor can do what? Introduce more policies like the HAFF that can’t get a single property built? Give more cash handouts to developers like Build to Rent? Tout more token measures like Help to Buy that drive up house prices? We shouldn’t get out of the way; we should get in the way and fight a Labor government that has made the housing crisis worse.

A HAFF is not a home

The ALP and the Coalition have spent roughly equal time governing Australia in the last four decades. Several elections in that period have been politically meaningful. Yet, looking at society’s wealthiest people and the companies they run, election outcomes have been largely irrelevant to their fortunes.
No matter how you measure it—the income share of the wealthiest 10 percent of the population, the share of national income going to company profits, billionaire wealth as a share of the total economy—the fat cats have gotten fatter decade after decade, regardless of which party was in power.
In 1984, just after the Hawke Labor government took office, the wealthiest 10 percent of the population took home about one-quarter of all domestic income. Corporate revenues were about 21 percent of the annual gross domestic product (the total value of all the goods and services produced in Australia), and the wealth of the richest 200 Australians was 3.5 percent of GDP. 
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/np6GS-the-rich-have-gotten-richer-for-50-years.png" alt="" /></figure>
Reviewing Business Review Weekly estimates of ruling class accumulated wealth after almost a decade of federal Labor government in 1992, Matthew Eaton and Frank Stilwell wrote in the Journal of Australian Political Economy:
“Overall, the BRW data provides a striking picture of the private wealth amassed by corporate cowboys, paper entrepreneurs, wealthy families and the ‘captains of industry’ in the last decade ... [I]t shows the powerful tendency towards increased wealth concentration.”
That was just the start of it. By 2004, after twelve years of the ALP and eight years of the Coalition (give or take), the wealthiest 10 percent were taking home about one-third of all domestic income—a 30 percent increase in their share. The wealth of the richest 200 Australians was 8.4 percent of GDP—more than double their share in 1984.
After another twelve years of the Coalition and eight of the ALP (give or take), the wealth of the richest 200 Australians in 2024 was 27.3 percent of gross domestic product—more than triple the 2004 figure and eight times more than in 1984. Corporate revenues climbed perpetually as well. If you take 1975 as the starting point, they have gone from 15 percent of GDP to 27 percent—an 80 percent increase.<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/Billionaire-pigs-at-the-trough.png" alt="" /></figure>
According to the <a href="https://www.afr.com/rich-list/australia-s-10-richest-people-revealed-20240521-p5jfe4">Australian Financial Review</a>
(which took over publishing the rich list in 2017), the fortunes of the Rich 200 grew by more than 10 percent to $624.9 billion in the last twelve months of Labor in office. Even when accounting for inflation, the growth in the wealth of these people in just one year is more than the wealth the top 200 families of the early 1980s had accumulated in their entire lives.
To put the $624.9 billion figure in a different light: <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/earnings-and-working-conditions/monthly-employee-earnings-indicator/latest-release">the total wages earned by all 14.5 million people in the labour force across Australia</a> in the last six months is less than what the top 200 are worth.
It’s not just the super-wealthy and big corporations raking it in under the two-party system of Labor-Liberal governments. The upper-middle classes have also thrived.<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/australia-s-property-casino.png" alt="" /></figure>
In the 21st century, residential property speculation has become one of the most reliable paths to riches among the wealthy layers below the billionaire class (although some billionaires, such as Harry Triguboff, Australia’s second richest person last year, have certainly built property empires as well).
Both the ALP and the Liberal Party have turned housing into a casino in which investors, on average, never lose. Real property prices have more than doubled since 2000. The biggest beneficiaries? The wealthiest 20 percent of the country, who “earned” three-quarters of the gains in investment property values between 2002 and 2022.<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/nutso-property-boom-mainly-benefits-the-wealthy.png" alt="" /></figure>
So while the smashing defeat of Peter Dutton’s right-wing Coalition is a tremendous political victory, the ultra-wealthy who have increasingly accumulated the country’s wealth will not lose much sleep over the election result.
They know that, whoever is in office, the big winners will continue to be those with the biggest bank accounts.

Ben Hillier

The biggest winner of the federal election? Capitalists

Whyalla, four hours’ drive north of Adelaide, is a working-class town dominated by steel. The 60-year-old steelworks commands the skyline and underpins the local economy. Just under half of Whyalla’s workforce is dependent on the steelworks and the plant produces three-quarters of Australian structural steel.
Yet the industry is in trouble. Last week, the operation was placed under administration for the second time in less than a decade. British billionaire Sanjeev Gupta’s GFG Alliance, the current owner, owes at least $300 million to creditors, including local contractors and the South Australian government.
The crisis in Whyalla reveals catastrophic failures of the market and of successive governments’ embrace of partnerships with the private sector.
In 2017, GFG purchased the steelworks from its then owner, Arrium. To much fanfare, Gupta marched alongside politicians and union leaders to mark the handover. He promised over $1 billion to expand the plant, decarbonise operations and repair aging infrastructure. Gupta was feted by the corporate press as the “saviour of steel”. Adelaide’s Advertiser predicted “the most exciting time in Whyalla history”.
Gupta returned the plant to profitability, but none of the desperately needed investments materialised. Like Arrium, GFG was unprepared to forego revenue to upgrade the plant. Last year, despite <a href="https://www.amwu.org.au/correction_on_misreporting_of_a_deal_with_whyalla_steelworks">warnings by union members</a>, the blast furnace responsible for smelting was damaged during a botched repair operation. When operations were forced to shut down for many months, GFG responded by axing 56 jobs and slashing wages by 30 percent.
As workers’ pay packets shrunk and contractors were left unpaid, Gupta refused to subject himself to such fiscal restraint. Instead, he announced plans to renovate his $35 million harbourside mansion in Sydney’s Potts Point, including installing a cinema and whiskey tasting room.
Many of the steelworks that comprise Gupta’s debt-ridden global empire are idle, bankrupt or for sale. GFG has pursued a dramatic restructuring program following the collapse of its primary financier, Greensill Capital, in 2021. Falling commodity prices have also hit company profits. 
Europe’s IndustriAll trade union federation <a href="https://news.industriall-europe.eu/Article/1122">warns</a> that thousands of steel jobs in Czechia, Poland, Hungary and elsewhere have been lost at plants owned by GFG. Workers in Whyalla and abroad are being asked to pay for a crisis of their bosses’ making.
To guarantee jobs and ensure the long-term viability of manufacturing, the steelworks should immediately be placed in public hands and run to benefit workers. Despite pledging $2.4 billion to help entice a private buyer, Labor has ruled out nationalisation. Such a course of action would mean breaking with corporate interests and the public-private partnerships that have been so devastating for Whyalla’s workers.
Whyalla, the largest of three towns in South Australia’s once-powerful “Iron Triangle”, is in long-term decline. A former industrial centre of steelmaking and shipbuilding, today the region is burdened by high unemployment and economic disadvantage.
In 2016, government support to keep the steelworks open was contingent on cutting wages. A 10 percent pay cut was <a href="http://redflag.org.au/node/5535">accepted by union officials</a>, who have been more than ready to go along with the slashing of wages and conditions with no guarantee of job retention in return. 
It’s a familiar story. In 2018, Port Pirie’s Nyrstar lead smelter shed more than 100 jobs despite a $291 million state government guarantee. Nor did wage freezes and billions of dollars of public subsidies prevent the automotive industry pulling out of Australia.
While the government’s latest promise of funding has been greeted with understandable relief, many locals are right to remain cynical about their future. With more public money being thrown at private investors ahead of a possible sale of the steelworks, the promise of well-paid, long-term jobs remains elusive.

Nix Herriot

Trouble at the Whyalla steelworks

For most of the time since the 2022 federal election, the Labor Party has held office in almost every state and territory. Such a strong political position could have been used to introduce reforms that would help ordinary people. Instead, the party has ruled for the rich, while overseeing the most significant attack on working-class living standards in generations. By nearly every measure, workers, renters, pensioners and students have gone backwards under Labor, while the billionaires’ wealth has increased.
The private rental market has been one of the greatest sources of insecurity and poverty for the one-third of the population that rent, while being a boon to the roughly 8 percent of the population who are property investors. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese seems proud to be part of that elite 8 percent, having recently bought his second investment property for a cool $4.3 million (and listing it at $1,500 per week). 
As a property investor, he also enjoys a share of more than $20 billion in annual tax concessions. So while he and his cabinet of landlords (together, they own 57 properties) continue to rig the market in their own favour, rental prices have hit record highs under the current government. The median rental price in Australia now sits at $640 per week, up $43 per week in a year.
Of the one-third of the population with a mortgage, most are from the middle classes. But thirteen consecutive interest rate rises have been a colossal hit for working-class households that owe the banks. Since just before the pandemic, the average monthly repayment has increased by $2,100, according to Mozo, a financial comparison site. According to Roy Morgan, around 27 percent of owner-occupiers are living in mortgage stress. Meanwhile, the banks are recording record profits. The Commonwealth Bank, for example, which holds a quarter of all Australian mortgages, just announced a half-yearly after-tax profit of more than $5 billion.
Pensioners are another group that has faced the brunt of the cost-of-living crisis. Around 2.6 million people are on the age pension, and millions of others are dependent on other forms of pension payments. Most pensioners own their own homes, which will not be true, if current trends continue, when today’s young people retire. Twelve percent of pensioners rent—and most live in poverty. It’s particularly bad for pensioners who rent in the private market: two-thirds live in poverty. 
This is the grim reality for the working class under Labor. Even when the government has offered crumbs as “cost-of-living relief”, it has served corporate interests. For example, the much-touted energy bill rebates do nothing to put downward pressure on energy prices. Instead, the energy companies continue charging exorbitant prices, but taxpayers subsidise them.
The cost-of-living crisis, however, has not been a crisis for all. The billionaires of Australia—there are nearly 50 of them—have used their political and economic control to turn the misery of millions into new yachts and mansions. The government helps to facilitate this system through a network of tax breaks available only to the rich and major corporations. 
Tax office data show that, in the 2022-23 financial year, nearly one-third of big companies paid no tax. The top ten of those companies by total income—including household names like Qantas, Virgin, NewsCorp, Netflix and Mastercard—had a combined $56 billion in income yet did not pay a cent in tax.
This system has caused the wealth disparity in Australia to reach eye-watering levels. According to a recent Monash University report, the top 1 percent of the population now own 24 percent of all wealth, and the top 10 percent own 57 percent.
As rage-inducing as the current state of affairs is, there is nothing natural about it. The rich and powerful consciously work to ensure that society’s wealth flows to them while denying it to the workers who produce it. 
They do so because they can. The only way to begin challenging their power is by building a political force that looks to a different power—the working class. When workers go on strike, they show that, without their labour, the whole system comes grinding to a halt. This is the power that can seriously challenge the system. Building this type of political force is today’s most important task for anyone who wants to challenge the rule of the rich and build a better society.

Under Labor, workers suffer while billionaires rake it in

There’s an obvious wealth divide in Australia. Drive through or use Google street view to peruse Perth’s Cottesloe, Melbourne’s Toorak or Sydney’s Darling Point. You will find no shortage of decadent mansions worth more than any working-class person will likely make in their entire life. Walk through any capital city CBD. You’ll see flashy shops selling luxury items to the richest few alongside desperate people begging for loose change.
The <a href="https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2024/04/wealth-gap-widening-new-report-acoss">Inequality in Australia 2024</a> report, published in April by the Australian Council of Social Service and the University of New South Wales, estimates that the richest 10 percent of households have on average fifteen times as much wealth as the bottom 60 percent. Almost half of Australia’s wealth is concentrated in the top decile, and less than a fifth in the bottom six.
Home ownership, or lack thereof, is the biggest contributor to the wealth gap. This is unsurprising, given that many working-class people find it difficult to find an affordable home to rent, let alone buy. And when they do rent, they’re probably paying that top 10 percent, who own (or rather, hoard) two-thirds of all investment properties by value.
Workers who do own their home are usually still paying off the mortgage, and are therefore subject to the whims of the banks that set their interest rates. Being squeezed for cash by the banks via home loan repayments is not a problem if you own your home outright and are adding a second, third, fourth, or fifth property to your portfolio.
Inequality in Australia 2024 compares household wealth in 2023 to 2003. To put the findings bluntly: the rich are getting richer while most Australians are falling further behind them. Since 2003, the top 10 percent accrued almost half of the overall growth in household wealth. Their average wealth went from $2.8 million to $5.2 million per household, an increase of 84 percent. The bottom 60 percent went from an average of $222,000 to $343,000—a 55 percent increase.
Why is wealth accumulating at the top? One part of the problem is government policy that favours the rich.
Negative gearing and the capital gains tax (CGT) discount are the most notorious housing policies. The latter was introduced by John Howard’s federal Liberal government in 2000, but every subsequent government, Coalition and Labor alike, has defended them.
Negative gearing lets investors deduct any losses on properties they own (including interest payments on property loans) from their taxable income. This subsidises investors and shields them from needing to sell their extra houses.
The CGT discount favours the wealthy. It lets investors who profit from capital assets (investment properties are one category) halve the amount of tax paid on that profit if they hold the asset for twelve months or more. By the Treasury’s own estimates, this left more than $23 billion in the coffers of property investors in the 2022-23 financial year instead of in public hands, where it could have been used to boost social welfare or—here’s an idea—build public housing.
Both of these policies primarily benefit landlords, especially big landlords. They make it less risky and more lucrative for investors to speculate on the housing market. They create an incentive to accumulate properties and endlessly push up house prices, driving the wedge between the wealthy and the rest of us ever deeper.
Scrapping negative gearing and the CGT discount would slow down the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a minority and alleviate the housing crisis. Even better would be forcing landlords to sell homes that are vacant for too long. But none of this is likely when parliament is full of landlords. That includes PM Anthony Albanese, who this year evicted a tenant from one of his several properties so he could sell it and put the money toward the $4.3 million mansion he bought in October.
Beyond real estate, other factors in wealth inequality include savings, superannuation, and assets like cars. These are all obviously heavily dependent on a household’s income level and necessary expenditures like rent and mortgage repayments.
To address this area of inequality, the simplest solution is a real wage rise for workers. In 2021 inflation exploded ahead of average pay rises. The Consumer Price Index (CPI, how much more expensive basic goods are than a year prior) peaked at just under 8 percent at the end of 2022, while wages were growing by 3.4 percent on average, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Only this year did wages start rising more than CPI, and then only barely. 
So Australian workers have been set back by years of real pay cuts. But the Labor government doesn’t seem at all interested in doing anything to get them caught back up to where they were, let alone substantially ahead. Many of their “cost-of-living relief” policies don’t do anything about inequality. For instance, the Stage 3 tax cuts gave all taxpayers an income boost, including the rich, who gained the most.
It’s not as though Albanese’s hands are tied. His government could raise welfare payments to the minimum wage and wipe out student debt. It could give public sector workers enough of a pay rise to make up for years of declining wages, which would put pressure on private employers to do the same.
It could pay for all this by taxing the living daylight out of the rich. Undoing the Stage 3 cuts for the top earners would give the budget $148 billion extra to work with over the next ten years—turning the dial back the other way and increasing their taxes would net even more.
If we wait around for governments to be nicer, nothing will ever get better. Things meaningfully improve only when the fucked-over fight back. And the most powerful force in this category is the working class.
Workers can strike to demand higher wages. By refusing to work, they hit their boss in the only place the boss cares about: the bottom line. The recent strikes by workers at Woolworths distribution warehouses should be defended and celebrated as the path forward for winning better pay and conditions.
But as powerful as they are, strikes are rare. The leaders of the trade unions, the highest body of which is the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), have, for the most part, collaborated with governments and bosses, rather than fighting them, for decades. 
Any discussion about the working class’s declining living standards has to account for the failures of its organised leadership. Concessions can be forced, and bad policies overturned, but it takes a fight. Instead, this year, the ACTU has been helping and justifying the government’s hostile, undemocratic takeover and hamstringing of the CFMEU, one of Australia’s strongest unions.
But the main reason there’s a wealth divide in Australia is not government policy or the weakness of the trade union movement.
The main cause of inequality is capitalism itself. Capitalism is based on a tiny minority of the population owning and controlling society’s productive economic assets. Most of the rest of the population have to work for the capitalists, making their profits for them and getting paid relative scraps in return.
In capitalism, everything is commodified and organised via the market—including housing. For capitalism, houses exist primarily, not for living in, but for making money from. The housing market being rigged for landlords isn’t just because of negative gearing and the CGT discount. That housing is bought and sold on a market means it will always favour those with the most economic resources.
In a society organised around profit, workers will never get a fair deal. Every cent of profit the bosses keep for themselves is in effect stolen from the people who actually did the work. So, if we want an equal society without poverty and destitution, we need to end capitalism.

Migrants are not to blame for the housing crisis

The profiteers plundering child care

Rent freeze? No. Rent, freeze: Australia’s winter housing nightmare

Keeping up with the CEOs: capitalism’s reality show

Labor’s latest non-solution to the housing crisis

A HAFF is not a home

The biggest winner of the federal election? Capitalists

Trouble at the Whyalla steelworks

Under Labor, workers suffer while billionaires rake it in

Why do so few have so much wealth?

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