The claim
The Coalition has for months sought to tie overseas migration to Australia’s housing crisis, with Opposition Leader Peter Dutton using his budget reply speech to compare the rate of net arrivals under Labor with the pace of residential construction.
Speaking on the day of the budget reply, Shadow Minister for Housing Michael Sukkar said: “There have been 265,000 homes built in the first 18 months of this government, and how many migrants do you think this government brought in over that period? About 900,000.”
In March, Mr Sukkar made similar comments in a media release and in parliament, where he claimed: “Permanent long-term overseas arrivals are outpacing the construction of new homes at a rate of four to one, with 900,000 net overseas arrivals but only 265,000 building completions since Labor came to government.”
So, have overseas arrivals under Labor outpaced the construction of new homes by four to one? RMIT ABC Fact Check investigates.
The verdict
Mr Sukkar’s claim is overblown.
In the 15 months for which official data was available at the time of the claim, the number of migrant arrivals minus departures was roughly three times the number of homes built.
However, experts consulted by Fact Check said it made little sense to compare the net arrivals figure — which includes families and children — with building completions, as not every migrant or new addition to the population requires a separate home.
More than 90 per cent of net arrivals were people on temporary visas, and roughly half of the total were temporary students.
Experts said the surge in temporary migration was the result of a pandemic-era backlog, noting that many recent students would likely return home soon and that temporary migrants such as students and working holiday makers generally do not buy houses.
Notably, Australia’s total population grew by 3.1 per cent over the same period while total dwellings grew by 1.8 per cent.
This means population growth has indeed outpaced new housing supply, but by roughly 1.7 times the rate, with part of the difference accounted for by natural increase (births minus deaths).
Sourcing the data
Mr Sukkar’s March 21 media release said his figures were for the period “between July 2022 and December 2023”.
Contacted for the source of the claim, a spokeswoman for Mr Sukkar’s office directed Fact Check to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, without specifying any particular datasets.
On March 26, however, Mr Sukkar repeated the 900,000 and 265,000 figures while citing a recent article published by the Australian newspaper.
It said the net migration total reflected official data for the year to July 2023, with the remaining six months based on unofficial estimates.
The ABS publishes official estimates of overseas arrivals and departures as part of its national population statistics. These figures, including additional details about visa types, are also included in the bureau’s overseas migration dataset.
Both datasets only contained figures up to September 2023 at the time Mr Sukkar made his May claim.
It is unclear how the estimates cited in The Australian’s earlier article were calculated or sourced. On this basis, Fact Check has assessed his claim using the 15 months of official data that was available.
What the migration data says
The ABS classifies people as “overseas migrant arrivals” and adds them to Australia’s population if they will have spent more than 12 of the previous 16 months inside the country. It applies the inverse rule for “overseas migrant departures”.
Mr Sukkar referred to “net arrivals” since Labor was elected.
ABS population data shows that over the 15 months to September 2023, overseas migrant arrivals totalled 947,100.
Over the same period, however, there were also 273,500 departures, bringing the net arrivals figure to 673,700.
Not all arrivals are ‘permanent’
Speaking in parliament, Mr Sukkar referred to 900,000 “permanent long-term arrivals”. However, the net arrivals figure includes mostly temporary migrants.
At the time of his May claim, the ABS’s overseas migration dataset showed that people arriving on permanent visas (74,530) made up just 11 per cent of net migration over the five quarters.
The majority of net arrivals were people on temporary visas (620,530), with temporary student visa holders accounting for half (343,120) of all net arrivals.
Financial year data for migrant arrivals published by the ABS shows there was a surge in people coming to Australia on temporary visas in 2022-23, following large declines during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the same year, departures remained lower than the pre-pandemic average.
However, the ABS notes: “Many of those now arriving on temporary visas … such as international students, will start to leave as their studies finish over the coming years, which will have a downward impact on net overseas migration in the future.”
According to Peter McDonald, a professor of demography at the University of Melbourne: “COVID produced a 2-3 year backlog of students and working holiday makers wanting to come to Australia who then arrived in 2022-23 along with the normal intake for that year”.
He similarly told Fact Check that a large chunk of temporary migrants were unlikely to remain in Australia for much longer.
“In 2022-23, over 200,000 persons on student, graduate and working holiday visas hopped to the 408 Temporary Employment visa, which gave them an extra two years in Australia.”
That group “will be leaving Australia to a large extent in the next 12 months so long as they are not permitted to visa hop”, Professor McDonald said.
“On the other hand,” he added, “the number of people on the graduate visa rose by about 100,000 when Labor extended the time that a bachelor’s degree graduate could remain in Australia from two to four years.”
“Most of this group will not be leaving Australia in the next couple of years.”
So, what about the building data?
Mr Sukkar argued that Australia’s migrant intake under Labor was roughly four times the number of “building completions”.
For completions data, Ray White chief economist Nerida Conisbee pointed Fact Check to the building activity dataset held by the ABS.
The dataset’s original series shows that over the same 15-month period for which migration data was available, from July 2022 to September 2023, dwelling completions totalled 217,979.
This means the ratio of net arrivals — including temporary migrants — was roughly three to one.
(The ratio remained virtually unchanged during the 18 months to December 2023, according to migration data released after Mr Sukkar’s claim, with 796,801 net arrivals compared with 264,726 dwelling completions.)
However, Ben Phillips, a principal research fellow at the Australian National University’s Centre for Social Research and Methods, told Fact Check it was “not appropriate to compare housing supply with arrivals”.
“What matters is how we match up new housing supply with the net change in the population,” he said in an email.
“The most sensible way of thinking about housing supply compared to population is by considering growth of the population compared to growth of the number of dwellings (not necessarily completions).”
Data on the total number of dwellings is available in the bureau’s Total Value of Dwellings dataset. Its preliminary estimates showed there was a rise of 195,800 dwellings over the 15 months to September 2023 — from 10,886,300 to 11,082,100.
This represents an increase of 1.8 per cent. Meanwhile, Australia’s estimated resident population increased from 26,014,400 to 26,821,600 over the same period — a jump of 807,200, or 3.1 per cent.
Viewed this way, total population growth has indeed outstripped the rate at which residential buildings were added under Labor, but by roughly 1.7 times the rate.
Not all of this population growth was due to migration, with roughly 16 per cent accounted for by natural increase (births minus deaths).
An individual house for every migrant?
Discussing Mr Sukkar’s claim, experts told Fact Check that making one-to-one comparisons of population and dwelling growth disregards the reality of how dwellings are occupied, as not all new residents need their own house.
Amanda Davies, a professor at the University of Western Australia with expertise in population growth and demographic change, said many migrants move to Australia as a family unit.
“[The] migration count includes children who are not purchasing and living in their own separate dwellings,” she said.
According to Professor McDonald, “The persons per household ratio is likely to be somewhat higher for students and working holiday makers, two groups that constitute a sizeable proportion of the new temporary arrivals in Australia”.
“In general, temporary migrants do not buy houses so their impact on the home purchase market would be very small — except insofar as investors are in the market to buy houses to house temporary migrants.”
Longer-term issues?
Dr Phillips told Fact Check that dwelling supply had not kept up with population growth, which had been very strong over the last few years, but noted that building rates began to trending downwards well before the Albanese government took office.
“I would not think that the downturn in building relative to the population is necessarily related to the switch in government, rather broader economic and housing market conditions,” he said.
Dr Phillips added: “[I]t usually takes at least 12 months for a dwelling approval to become a completion. As such, any downturn likely relates to building approvals dropping from about [the second quarter of] 2021, well before Labor came into power in May 2022,” he said.
Professor McDonald said the previous government had allowed the temporary skilled migration stream to languish, which “meant that we have become overly dependent on international students as the source of new skilled immigrants”.
Principal researcher: Ashleigh Webb
Sources
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The Australian, Home builds left for dead by migrant boom, March 18, 2024
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ABS, National, state and territory population, September 2023
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ABS, Data explorer: Overseas migrant arrivals and departures by visa group, quarterly
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AIHW, Housing market: Building activity — dwelling construction
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Grattan Institute, How migration could help fix the housing crisis, January 31, 2024
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MBA submission to the DoHA, A Migration System for Australia’s Future