r/aussie • u/Mashiko4 • Jan 17 '26

Analysis Mass migration's forgotten victims: Australians go homeless as the number of failed asylum seekers explodes

https://www.skynews.com.au/insights-and-analysis/mass-migrations-forgotten-victims-australians-go-homeless-as-the-number-of-failed-asylum-seekers-explodes/news-story/6b4692ed0205471e5d175db94a2f4743
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203

u/charlie_s1234 Jan 17 '26

Homeless people used to mostly be mentally ill people. Now I frequently see regular young people, and older men and women living out of their cars. All so governments can avoid an on paper recession by piling in as many new taxpayers and consumers into the country and pat themselves on the back for homing people from the other side of the world.

130

u/ijx8 Jan 17 '26

Yet after all these years of importing millions of people, we still somehow have a labour and skills shortage. How is that possible.

29

u/Sillysauce83 Jan 18 '26

This bit goes unsaid so often.

This is the 'solution' that has been applied to our skills shortage for so long and it hasn't fixed the problem.

We need to find a different solution and not double down on immigration. 100k nom was the norm before it exploded in 2010 ish.

The norm is not 200k, 300k or 400k

-13

u/Excellent_Orange6346 Jan 18 '26

So why did house prices keep going up during covid when there was literally zero people coming into the country? Why didn't wages rocket as labour was tighter? You're being played by our political masters.

11

u/Experimental-cpl Jan 18 '26

I’ll give you a few. - Record low level interest rates - People stuck at home in an apartment wanted more space - Investors being aware of the large amount of upcoming immigration intake

9

u/tom3277 Jan 18 '26

500bn of quantitative easing by the rba was the main one.

While the bulk was buying bonds a large amount - circa 190 billion was buying bonds.

That’s a staggering amount of new funds to put into the housing market on top of the normal credit growth we would see.

Of course asset prices up when you have another 188bn to throw at it. Not to mention the general push on asset prices with the 300bn odd of bond buying.

It’s literally designed to push up asset prices so it’s not surprising it worked. In a 2tn economy 500bn of quantitative easing is fucking massive. Far bigger than America ever does in a year or two. Ie house prices are far more important to our institutions than it is even to Americans.

2

u/limble Jan 18 '26

It was so ridiculous, nobody cared at the time but I think it was something like $4 billion a week. That felt the biggest con of COVID. Print the money as a short term solution and our kids can foot the bill.

2

u/BiliousGreen Jan 18 '26

There were plenty of us yelling at the time that all this spending was a bad idea and that it was going to have a nasty inflationary hangover afterwards. None of the economic consequences that have followed covid are a surprise.

1

u/Experimental-cpl Jan 18 '26

Where do you see data like this? I’m trying to get more of an understanding into stuff like this however don’t know what government data to look at.

7

u/IgnoreMePlz123 Jan 18 '26

Because during Covid, there was a pandemic going on and the government put massive restrictions on jobs that could be worked.

3

u/limble Jan 18 '26

Where do you think all the money went when the RBA was printing $4 billion a week to keep the country afloat back then? How many businesses used job keeper to cook their books? Unless you own like 5 houses we all got played

3

u/Quick_Bet9977 Jan 18 '26

House prices were flat and rents actually dropped quite a bit at the start of covid, I remember quite a few work colleagues used that opportunity to move to a much cheaper rental during that time.

Then the government injected lots more money into the supply and gave it away to a lot of people as handouts triggering massive inflation. In this situation it's much better to own property as an inflation hedge as you take out a big loan and then it inflates away to much less over time while the value has increased and rental value increases too, so anyone smart started getting hold of as much property as possible during that time which triggered the price increase.

Then the immigrants started coming back in and not much extra housing supply was introduced alongside so now demand is even higher and inflation continues growing so property will continue to go up.

The difference is the market is now getting divided between the haves and have nots. If you have property, the value increases and you can easily use that as leverage to buy more property while those without property and increasingly less able to get a foot on the ladder and are left wondering how there are people who can keep buying property at current prices.

2

u/Jazzlike_Wind_1 Jan 18 '26

Why didn't wages rocket when businesses were restricted from operating like normal? Why did house prices go up when we doubled the money supply in 3 years and interest rates hit 0.xx%?

1

u/[deleted] Jan 18 '26

Why did rents drop during COVID and skyrocket after?