Burke says the quiet part out loud: Immigration and housing are linked

The sands have shifted rapidly in Australia’s migration debate and Labor has belatedly sniffed the wind.

Last year the vanquished Liberal leader Peter Dutton was being assailed by party moderates for saying loudly that the high migration was contributing to elevated rents and property prices.

Liberal senator Andrew Bragg said, in the wash-up, that Dutton’s message had hurt the Coalition badly in its election thrashing. “We love multicultural Australia,” Bragg said, and “we’re not wanting to make people feel unwelcome.”

An example of Dutton’s rhetoric came in a budget-in-reply speech in which he said Labor’s “poor management of migration” had helped cause “congestion on our roads and pressure on services”.

The notion that the housing crisis was driven solely by a lack of housing supply had become a shibboleth in the left. Until Home Affairs Tony Burke stood up at the National Press Club.

“Immigration will need to be part of the solution to help provide some space for housing supply to catch up,” he said on Thursday, as Labor aims to neutralise the political issue driving voters to Pauline Hanson. “We’re both improving supply and reducing demand.”

“The housing shortage we have is not caused by immigration, but immigration needs to be part of the solution.”

It wasn’t the only striking admission from Burke, who left Labor flailing for six weeks after the last-minute delay of his speech.

The minister blew the whistle on a bipartisan, two-decade miscalculation since John Howard liberalised Australia’s migration rules in the early 2000s.

“Effectively, the decision that Australia took when we had a demand-driven program was to say that if employers can get the workers that they need and our educational institutions can get the students who are willing to pay, and we get the business, then infrastructure and housing will take
care of themselves,” he said.

“That is no longer the experience of Australians. That is no longer the view of Australia.”

The failure to maintain public confidence in the program, displayed in a litany of opinion polls, has created a void that’s been filled by an opportunistic populist who feels so unrestrained as to outrageously suggest that none of Australia’s 800,000 Muslims are good people.

A 2024 study in the Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance found that every one per cent rise in immigration led to between 1.8 to 3 per cent rise in support for far-right parties across 4500 electoral results in Europe.

Former Labor adviser and migration expert Henry Sherrell last month called for a ceiling of one per cent population growth from immigration. Australia exceeded that figure in half of the last 20 years, much more than peer democracies, but just once in the 50 years before that.

Burke called out the use of the term “mass migration”, which some bad-faith conservatives on the right have co-opted but it has increasingly been used by mainstream figures like Opposition Leader Angus Taylor.

Labor hopes its intervention in the migration debate will finally cauterise the political problem and show it’s alive to voters’ concerns. Labor knows it cannot win back Hanson’s hardcore supporters, but Albanese’s primary vote has taken a hit and Labor thinks it can recover about 5 per centage points on its primary vote through sustained work to persuade voters they’ve listened.

Its opponents will cast Burke’s measures as half-arsed and focused too heavily on backpackers, a cohort One Nation and the Coalition do not view as a problem.