Australia

Bullshit

None of those were mentioned once at the protests. Instead you had a literal neonazi speaker (sewell), signs screaming about silent invasions, "Go Home", sovcit bullshit and general twattery.

There's a lot to be angry about. But prancing around shouting random crap with a right wing fist up your arse like a demented puppet is not the fucking answer.

Some people I know who supported the march do so because they're upset at the upcoming spare/unused bedroom tax, which aims to bring more homes on the market to lower prices. They don't care about housing people, they care about profit.

I'm also not convinced cutting immigration would help at all when it would only discourage construction, which is already below what's needed to support birthrate + people moving in from rural areas. Immigration isn't the cause of the crisis, so cutting it isn't the solution.

Import record numbers of people to make the problem worse! That's the opposite of what we should do.

And that's exactly why everyone with a brain is downvoting you. You're told (by racists) that it's immigrants taking your homes, and you believe it, without looking at the wider picture or even checking the facts.

Immigration was 10% lower in 2024 than 2023, which would definitely make it not a record, and still recovering from the massive decreases through covid. We have still not made up for those losses though covid - had it not happened, we would have seen a lot more immigrants over the last six years.

There are ~11 million dwellings in Australia - more than enough for everyone once you factor in families. The main problem is that housing has - for a long time - been an investment vehicle. This is an issue throughout the world.

Actual problems worth protesting:

• Negative gearing continues to make housing a very effective and attractive investment. Labor promised to remove it in 2019, while grandfathering-in existing homes. As a result they were crushed at the polls and lost "the unloseable election".
• Multiple home ownership is common. I know several boomers that own multiple houses that they do not rent out, you probably do too. Why the fuck do people own multiple homes and 'holiday homes' during a housing crisis. Tax it out of existence.
• Liberal and Labor governments consistently hand big incentives and payouts to the building and home loan sectors to prop up those industries, because they lobby and donate hard. Every time they do add a rebate or an incentive, housing prices increase by the same value because developers simply pocket it.
• Public housing has not kept up with our increasing population, and the HAFF is a monumental joke that the bankers managed to pull on the Australia people. If the government wants to solve the housing issue the simple solution is to build goddamn public housing, not take out a $10 billion dollar loan and then pay incentives with the interest (hopefully, if there is any after paying back the loan interest fees). $10bil of public housing would increase in value faster than sitting it in an investment portfolio too, with less risk.
• Zoning laws restrict building high apartments through the vast majority of city suburbs, and approvals of builds and plans for all builds are very slow. Streamline it, and relax apartment height restrictions.

So if you look through this list you start to realize that the problem is actually predominantly wealthy fucks. They own multiple homes, they get tax incentives to buy more homes, they lobby, they don't want tall apartments in their wealthy suburbs potentially affecting their views, and they run campaigns to vote against any changes to the status quo.

Not immigrants.

If you drastically reduce immigration, you kill the economy, because we are having kids at well below replacement rate and kids and additional people drive economic growth. Economy goes down, forget young people buying a house because they won't have a job. Add to that more than half of our doctors are first gen immigrants and you quickly see that immigration is helping Australia a lot more than hindering it - which us why these rallies that paint immigration as the main contributor to the housing crisis are dumb as fuck.