Latest news with #rentalcrisis
News.com.au
16-07-2025
- Business
- News.com.au
Pet tax: Why having a pet could be costing renters $14k a year
Shocking research has revealed that pet owners are paying up to $270 extra a week - or over $14,000 a year - just to keep Fluffy or Fido at home. With rental vacancies remaining extremely low across Australia, many renters with pets are facing tough choices, including surrendering their furry friend in orders to keep a roof over their heads. The disheartening phenomenon sweeping Australian cities has been dubbed 'pet-bidding'. Budget Pet Products analysed more than 17,000 rental listings across 20 cities nationwide to reveal where pet-friendly rentals are most common, where they're scarce, and the extra 'pet tax' that renters are paying. That research found that pet-friendly rentals make up on average 15.91 per cent of all advertised properties, and cost on average of 7.51 per cent more than non-pet-friendly rentals. Conversely, some cities like Bendigo and Perth buck the trend, with pet-friendly rents actually cheaper than non-pet options, suggesting pet acceptance varies widely by location. 'We believe everyone should be able to enjoy the companionship of a pet without facing extra financial stress,' Budget Pet Products director Karla VanDepol said. 'Beyond the usual costs like food and vet bills, many renters are now dealing with what we call the 'property pet tax', paying noticeably higher rent just to keep their pets. 'This added burden makes it tough for pet owners, especially in cities like Sydney, to hold onto their beloved animals. 'Landlords have a real opportunity to make a difference by adopting more pet-friendly policies, making renting with pets a realistic option for more Australians.' Pet-inclusive rental options are significantly more available and affordable in regional cities. The most pet-friendly city was Townsville, where 27 per cent of rentals were available to pet owners. It was also cheaper for pet owners, with pet-friendly properties actually -1.81 per cent cheaper, giving the Queensland garrison city a Pet Friendly Index (PFI) of 77.75. Logan City in the Greater Brisbane regions had the second highest PFI of 75.91, followed by Darwin (74.67). But both had rent mark-ups of 3.49 per cent and 7.39 per cent respectively. Also in the top 10 most pet-friendly locations was Rockingham, Hobart, Ballarat, Perth, Toowoomba, Brisbane and Launceston. At the other end of the spectrum, major metropolitan cities such as Sydney and Melbourne show notably low availability of pet-friendly rentals, just 12 per cent and 7 per cent respectively. The top 10 least pet-friendly locations were Sydney, Newcastle, Canberra, Melbourne, Geelong, Gold Coast, Wollongong, Adelaide, Bendigo and Cairns. Sydney had the highest 'pet tax', according to the analysis. Rentals advertised as 'no pets' averaged $1077.30 a week, while rentals that were pet friendly had an average weekly rent of $1347.08 - a mark-up of 25.04 per cent of $269.78 a week. Hot on its heels was Newcastle with a pet tax mark-up of 22.33 per cent or $141.13 a week. Also in the top 10 cities with the highest property pet tax was Launceston, Gold Coast, Cairns, Brisbane, Darwin, Toowoomba and Geelong. Bendigo was the city with the lowest property pet tax, followed by Perth, Wollongon, Townsville, Adelaide, Melbourne, Rockingham, Logan City, Hobart and Canberra.
News.com.au
11-07-2025
- Business
- News.com.au
Aussie cities where rents are up to $17k a year higher than in 2020
Australia's rental crisis could be even worse than previously thought, with alarming figures revealing rents have climbed by more than three times the rises in the average Aussie's pay over the last five years. The PropTrack data laid just how much of a struggle it has been for tenants to keep up, with nationwide rents rising by $10,920 annually since June 2020. In the capitals, rents rose by $11,180 a year on average. Meanwhile, the average Aussie's pay has only gone up by about $3,000 in that time, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. And that's full-time earnings, not taking into account the wide range of people working part-time and those who are unemployed. PropTrack economist Anne Flaherty said she was surprised by the degree of rent growth since 2020. 'What really jumps out is the magnitude of the increases we're seeing and how much of people's incomes are being spent just on the cost of rent,' she said. Ms Flaherty said the rental crisis came down to the central issue of low housing supply and high demand for rental properties. 'There's a whole multitude of factors for why demand for rental properties has increased,' she said. 'Obviously population growth is a massive factor. 'But another factor is that it's taking longer and longer to save a deposit to buy your first home, which means people are being trapped in the rental market longer.' Perth experienced the highest annual rent growth since 2020, with renters forking out an extra $16,640 a year. REIWA President Suzanne Brown said the major imbalance between supply and demand in WA saw the vacancy rate fall to record lows and put 'strong upward pressure on prices.' 'This has been very challenging for tenants,' Ms Brown said. 'We have seen some self-moderation of demand as tenants seek to cope with rising prices. 'This includes an increase in tenant household sizes to share the cost burden of renting, tenants electing to buy where possible and people simply choosing to stay in the family home longer or moving back in with family to avoid the rental market.' Mr Brown said that even though the WA rental market was improving, state and federal policymakers 'could not afford to be complacent' when it comes to rental reform. Greater Sydney and Brisbane experienced the second highest growth for capital cities, with rents increasing by $13,000 a year since 2020. Meanwhile, rents in Melbourne grew by $8,580 a year, almost half that of those in Perth. Ms Flaherty attributes this imbalance to Melbourne's higher housing supply and density pre-Covid, which allowed Victoria's capital to accommodate for post-pandemic population growth. 'This is incredible evidence on the impact that higher supply has,' she said. 'One of the reasons why rent growth and home price growth has been slower is because Greater Melbourne has been relatively better than the other capitals at building new homes.' Ms Flaherty said it would be some wait before rent figures started to slow around the country. 'Our expectation is that it's going to fall short in the coming years in most markets,' she said. 'We don't think that the pace of rent growth we saw over 2022-2023 is going to be repeated, however it's very unlikely we're going to see rents move backwards as a whole. 'Having said that, we are seeing differences in different markets.' ANNUAL RISE IN MEDIAN ADVERTISED RENTS (JUNE 2020-JUNE 2025) Australia $10,920 Combined capital markets $11,180 Combined regional markets $10,140 Greater Perth $16,640 Regional WA $15,600 Regional QLD $13,520 Greater Brisbane $13,000 Greater Sydney $13,000 Greater Darwin $12,480 Greater Adelaide $11,700 Regional NSW $9,880 Greater Melbourne $8,580 Regional SA $8,320 Regional VIC $7,280 Greater Hobart $6,500 Regional TAS $6,240 Greater Canberra $5,720 Regional NT $3,276 Source: PropTrack.
Fast Company
01-07-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
How universal rental subsidies could help the housing crisis
Subsidies that ensure renters in the U.S. pay no more than 30% of their income on housing costs need to be much more widely available. [Source Image: Andrew_Rybalko/iStock/Getty Images Plus] BY Listen to this Article More info 0:00 / 9:04 If there's one thing that U.S. politicians and activists from across the political spectrum can agree on, it's that rents are far too high. Many experts believe that this crisis is fueled by a shortage of housing, caused principally by restrictive regulations. Rents and home prices would fall, the argument goes, if rules such as minimum lot- and house-size requirements and prohibitions against apartment complexes were relaxed. This, in turn, would make it easier to build more housing. As experts on housing policy, we're concerned about housing affordability. But our research shows little connection between a shortfall of housing and rental affordability problems. Even a massive infusion of new housing would not shrink housing costs enough to solve the crisis, as rents would likely remain out of reach for many households. Subscribe to the Daily Company's trending stories delivered to you every day SIGN UP However, there are already subsidies in place that ensure that some renters in the U.S. pay no more than 30% of their income on housing costs. The most effective solution, in our view, is to make these subsidies much more widely available. A financial sinkhole Just how expensive are rents in the U.S.? According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, a household that spends more than 30% of its income on housing is deemed to be cost-burdened. If it spends more than 50%, it's considered severely burdened. In 2023, 54% of all renters spent more than 30% of their pretax income on housing. That's up from 43% of renters in 1999. And 28% of all renters spent more than half their income on housing in 2023. Renters with low incomes are especially unlikely to afford their housing: 81% of renters making less than $30,000 spent more than 30% of their income on housing, and 60% spent more than 50%. Estimates of the nation's housing shortage vary widely, reaching up to 20 million units, depending on the analytic approach and the time period covered. Yet our research, which compares growth in the housing stock from 2000 to the present, finds no evidence of an overall shortage of housing units. Rather, we see a gap between the number of low-income households and the number of affordable housing units available to them; more affluent renters face no such shortage. This is true in the nation as a whole and in nearly all large and small metropolitan areas. Would lower rents help? Certainly. But they wouldn't fix everything. We ran a simulation to test an admittedly unlikely scenario: What if rents dropped 25% across the board? We found it would reduce the number of cost-burdened renters—but not by as much as you might think. Even with the reduction, nearly one-third of all renters would still spend more than 30% of their income on housing. Moreover, reducing rents would help affluent renters much more than those with lower incomes—the households that face the most severe affordability challenges. The proportion of cost-burdened renters earning more than $75,000 would fall from 16% to 4%, while the share of similarly burdened renters earning less than $15,000 would drop from 89% to just 80%. Even with a rent rollback of 25%, the majority of renters earning less than $30,000 would remain cost-burdened. Vouchers offer more breathing room Meanwhile, there's a proven way of making housing more affordable: rental subsidies. In 2024, the U.S. provided what are known as 'deep' housing subsidies to about 5 million households, meaning that rent payments are capped at 30% of their income. These subsidies take three forms: Housing Choice Vouchers that enable people to rent homes in the private market; public housing; and project-based rental assistance, in which the federal government subsidizes the rents for all or some of the units in properties under private and nonprofit ownership. The number of households participating in these three programs has increased by less than 2% since 2014, and they constitute only 25% of all eligible households. Households earning less than 50% of their area's median family income are eligible for rental assistance. But unlike Social Security, Medicare, or food stamps, rental assistance is not an entitlement available to all who qualify. The number of recipients is limited by the amount of funding appropriated each year by Congress, and this funding has never been sufficient to meet the need. By expanding rental assistance to all eligible low-income households, the government could make huge headway in solving the rental affordability crisis. The most obvious option would be to expand the existing Housing Choice Voucher program, also known as Section 8. The program helps pay the rent up to a specified 'payment standard' determined by each local public housing authority, which can set this standard at between 80% and 120% of the HUD-designated fair market rent. To be eligible for the program, units must also satisfy HUD's physical quality standards. Unfortunately, about 43% of voucher recipients are unable to use it. They are either unable to find an apartment that rents for less than the payment standard, meets the physical quality standard, or has a landlord willing to accept vouchers. Renters are more likely to find housing using vouchers in cities and states where it's illegal for landlords to discriminate against voucher holders. Programs that provide housing counseling and landlord outreach and support have also improved outcomes for voucher recipients. However, it might be more effective to forgo the voucher program altogether and simply give eligible households cash to cover their housing costs. The Philadelphia Housing Authority is currently testing out this approach. The idea is that landlords would be less likely to reject applicants receiving government support if the bureaucratic hurdles were eliminated. The downside of this approach is that it would not prevent landlords from renting out deficient units that the voucher program would normally reject. Homeowners get subsidies—why not renters? Expanding rental assistance to all eligible low-income households would be costly. The Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, estimates it would cost about $118 billion a year. However, Congress has spent similar sums on housing subsidies before. But they involve tax breaks for homeowners, not low-income renters. Congress forgoes billions of dollars annually in tax revenue it would otherwise collect were it not for tax deductions, credits, exclusions and exemptions. These are known as tax expenditures. A tax not collected is equivalent to a subsidy payment. For example, from 1998 through 2017—prior to the tax changes enacted by the first Trump administration in 2017—the federal government annually sacrificed $187 billion on average, after inflation, in revenue due to mortgage interest deductions, deductions for state and local taxes, and for the exemption of proceeds from the sale of one's home from capital gains taxes. In fiscal year 2025, these tax expenditures totaled $95.4 billion. Moreover, tax expenditures on behalf of homeowners flow mostly to higher-income households. In 2024, for example, more than 70% of all mortgage-interest tax deductions went to homeowners earning at least $200,000. Broadening the availability of rental subsidies would have other benefits. It would save federal, state, and local governments billions of dollars in homeless services. Moreover, automatic provision of rental subsidies would reduce the need for additional subsidies to finance new affordable housing. Universal rental assistance, by guaranteeing sufficient rental income, would allow builders to more easily obtain loans to cover development costs. Of course, sharply raising federal expenditures for low-income rental assistance flies in the face of the Trump administration's priorities. Its budget proposal for the next fiscal year calls for a 44% cut of more than $27 billion in rental assistance and public housing. On the other hand, if the government supported rental assistance in amounts commensurate with the tax benefits given to homeowners, it would go a long way toward resolving the rental housing affordability crisis. This article is part of a series centered on envisioning ways to deal with the housing crisis. Alex Schwartz is a professor of urban policy at the New School. Kirk McClure is a professor of urban planning at the University of Kansas. The extended deadline for Fast Company's Next Big Things in Tech Awards is this Friday, June 27, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.
The Guardian
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
As a carer, I'm not special – but sometimes I need to be reminded how important my role is
When I started watching the Disney+ show Dying for Sex, I was wary that the cancer storyline might hit a bit too close to home, after our teenage son was diagnosed with cancer in 2022. The series follows Molly (Michelle Williams) who decides to leave her marriage and pursue sexual pleasure after being diagnosed with stage four cancer. And yet while it's a difficult watch for obvious reasons, it wasn't the 'cancer stuff' that hit me where it hurts (everywhere); it was the portrayal of Nikki (Jenny Slate), Molly's best friend, who takes over as carer when Molly leaves her husband. Nikki loses her job, her relationship, her house, her own mental health. And it's very rare that we see the role of a carer highlighted in pop culture in this way. When I took my son to emergency with odd symptoms, I initially assumed I'd miss a day or two of work. That was over two years ago. My work computer still has a tab open from Googling his symptoms and a Slack message saying I'd be offline for the rest of the day. I haven't been back to the office since. And our landlord did what landlords do and landlorded so hard (increased our already staggeringly high rent) that we had to find affordable, wheelchair-accessible housing in the middle of a rental crisis while our lives imploded. What Slate's portrayal of Nikki does is give caregiving the value it deserves. We see the duality of care, how she does so imperfectly, but from a place of deep-seated love, not obligation or duty, and yet we also see the cracks form as she faces the reality of the tasks she has to perform. One day at hospital, I had forgotten to put my mask on as I walked back inside. One of our son's very senior doctors, who had only ever seen me from the bridge of my nose up, looked at my face, seemingly baffled, and said, looking right at me: 'You're not Natasha.' It took a while for me to realise there was a disconnect between how he imagined I looked versus how I actually looked without a mask. But before I registered that, there was a weird moment where it sounded like a prophecy. I was no longer me. Because that's how I felt. On many days, as the physical and mental toll renders me a hollowed-out version of my former self, I hear his words echo back to me. You're not Natasha. We deal with everything by leaning into the absurdity of our situation. And although what we have to endure individually and collectively as a family is always too much on any given day, there is grace and humour and a ridiculous number of memes. And this, I suppose, is also what I loved about Molly and Nikki's relationship. There is heartache and devastation but also beauty and laughter, and above all else, friendship. It's hard to reconcile that while as parents we desperately wish we could give our son his health back, we also feel the very real privilege of the time we get to spend with him each day that we wouldn't otherwise. My husband and I do not possess any special qualities that have prepared us for our new roles as carers. We are not special. And this is the point. There are 3 million unpaid carers in Australia. Caring for siblings, for parents, for friends, for children. Some caring for multiple people at the same time. Some do so out of choice and some have no choice. Some balance paid work, some do not. All are forced into systems that exist to seemingly help the chronically sick and disabled but actually create barriers to accessing help and place further burdens on carers and the people they care for. The 2024 Carer Wellbeing Survey found carers are being left behind in most of the key indicators of wellbeing including loneliness, psychological distress and financial hardship. Being a carer is not exceptional, though we may have to do so in exceptional circumstances. When our son was first discharged from hospital, and the reality of his complex medical needs hit, I joined a Facebook group for carers, assuming I would find some tips and tricks. But instead, each day was a barrage of posts, desperate carers asking for help. 'I'm at breaking point ... ', 'I don't know what to do ... ', 'I can't go on like this ...' It seemed I was doing everything right then: existing at breaking point was part of the job description. There is a Post-it note on my laptop placed there by my husband: 'Best Mum!' He has a habit of hiding notes around the house that I always happen to find exactly when I need them. 'Keep it up!' they say. 'You're doing so well!' I think of the doctor and the look on his face when he said: 'You're not Natasha.' I add another Post-it to my laptop. 'Remember who the fuck you are,' I write in thick black sharpie. What we're doing feels impossible. And sometimes we need to see ourselves reflected back to us (in books, on the screen) to remind ourselves that we are doing this important, beautiful, impossible thing. Natasha Sholl is a writer and lapsed lawyer living in Melbourne. Her first book, Found, Wanting was published by Ultimo Press in 2022
News.com.au
26-06-2025
- Business
- News.com.au
Canada shows Australia how to solve rental crisis: ‘Clear lessons here'
Canada's dramatic immigration freeze has coincided with a sustained fall in rents, in a move experts say presents an obvious path out of Australia's own rental crisis. Figures from Statistics Canada last week showed population growth slowed to a crawl in the first quarter of 2025. From January 1 to April 1, the population increased by just 20,107 people — statistically flat at 0.0 per cent — to reach 41,548,787, the smallest quarterly growth since border closures at the height of the Covid pandemic in 2020. It marked the sixth consecutive quarter of slower population growth, after immigration reductions were first implemented by the Liberal government last year under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his successor Mark Carney. 'Canada admitted 104,256 immigrants in the first quarter of 2025,' Statistics Canada said. 'This was the smallest number admitted in a first quarter in four years and reflects a lower total permanent immigration target for 2025. However, prior to 2022, Canada had never welcomed more than 86,246 immigrants in a first quarter (which occurred in the first quarter of 2016).' Meanwhile, national average rents in May were 3.3 per cent down from a year earlier at $CA2129 ($2381), marking the eighth consecutive month of year-on-year decreases. The monthly report from and Urbanation found asking rents were flat compared with April with a 0.1 per cent month-on-month increase. Rents for purpose-built apartments were two per cent down year-on-year to $CA2117 ($2368), condominium apartments fell 3.6 per cent to $C2192 ($2452), rents for houses and townhomes fell seven per cent to $CA2196 ($2456). Urbanation president Shaun Hildebrand said the easing was due in part to a surge in supply with new apartments being completed, a slowdown in population growth and a heightened level of economic uncertainty, The Canadian Press reports. 'The easing in rents this year across most parts of the country is a positive for housing affordability in Canada following a period of extremely strong rent inflation lasting from 2022 to 2024,' Mr Hildebrand said in a statement. Despite the easing, average asking rents in Canada are 5.7 per cent higher than two years ago and 12.6 per cent higher than three years ago, according to the report. It added that over the past five years, average asking rents in Canada have increased by an average of 4.1 per cent annually, outpacing average wage growth of around three per cent. 'We've argued all along that the explosion in population growth — to nearly 1.3 million people within a year at one point — was playing a major role in many economic issues Canadian policymakers have been struggling with,' Robert Kavcic, senior economist at Bank of Montreal, in a note to clients last week, per The Globe and Mail. 'New immigration targets set last fall are clearly now having an impact. The impact is already being seen on the ground, perhaps most vividly in loosening rental markets.' Like Australia, Canada's post-Covid border reopening led to a record surge in migration — from 2021 to 2024, the population grew by an average of 217,000 per quarter, sparking widespread concerns about access to housing and healthcare. Opinion polls in late 2024 found nearly 58 per cent of Canadians felt there was 'too much immigration', with three in four blaming immigration for housing and healthcare pressures. In October, Mr Trudeau announced dramatic cuts to Canada's immigration targets in an effort to 'pause' population growth. The country had previously planned to let 500,000 new permanent residents settle in the country in 2025 and 2026. But those targets were revised down to 395,000 next year and 380,000 for 2026. It set the 2027 target at 365,000. According to the last census in 2021, 23 per cent of Canada's population was foreign-born. Statistics Canada said that as of 2021 most immigrants were from Asia and the Middle East, but an increasing share were coming from Africa. Nearly one in five recent immigrants were born in India. Mr Trudeau said Canada needed to stabilise its population to give 'all levels of government time to catch up, time to make the necessary investments in health care, in housing, [and] in social services to accommodate more people in the future'. 'Even with the reductions starting in 2024, international migration accounted for all of the population growth in the first quarter of 2025,' Statistics Canada said. 'This was because natural increase (births minus deaths) was negative (-5,628), meaning that there were more deaths than births. This is consistent with an ageing population, a decreasing fertility rate and the higher numbers of deaths that typically occur during the winter months. Natural increase has been negative in every first quarter since 2022.' The abrupt shift in Canada's population growth has been driven by a decline in temporary residents. There were nearly 2.96 million temporary residents in Canada as of April 1, accounting for 7.1 per cent of the total population — down from a peak of 7.4 per cent in October. The number of temporary residents has dropped by 61,111 since the start of the year, led by a 53,669 fall in study permit holders. At the end of 2024, there were close to one million international students in Canada. The government in September imposed a cap on international students, aiming to slash the number of study visas issued by 300,000 by the end of 2026. It also restricted work permits for spouses of master's degree students and foreign workers. The number of people holding only a work permit remained at a high level of more than 1.45 million, after a slight fall of 5114 in the first quarter. 'Conversely, the number of asylum claimants, protected persons and related groups in the country increased for the 13th consecutive quarter, reaching a record high of 470,029 (+12,744) on April 1, 2025,' Statistics Canada notes. Mr Carney, who won election in April after vowing to address 'unsustainable' immigration, earlier this month proposed even tougher laws that would restrict some asylum claims and give authorities more power to suspend processing applications en masse. 'There's a lot of applications in the system,' Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab told CBC News. 'We need to act fairly, and treat people appropriately who really do need to claim asylum and who really do need to be protected to stay in Canada. We need to be more efficient in doing that. At the same time, Canadians demand that we have a system that works for everyone.' The Strong Borders Act would bar asylum claims made more than a year after the person first entered Canada. It would apply to anyone, including students and temporary residents, regardless of whether they left the country and returned. The bill would also require people entering Canada illegally from the US under the Safe Third Country Agreement to make an asylum claim within 14 days for it to be considered. MacroBusiness chief economist Leith van Onselen said Canada provided 'clear lessons here for Australia, where policymakers and the media continue to paint the housing crisis as a 'supply issue''. 'The latest State of the Housing Report from the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council (NHSAC) forecasts that Australia's cumulative housing shortage will worsen by 79,000 dwellings over five years,' van Onselen wrote on Tuesday. But he pointed out NHSAC's population forecasts were based on the Centre for Population's projections, 'which assume permanently high levels of immigration'. 'However, NHSAC's sensitivity analysis showed that if Australia's population grew by just 15 per cent less than forecast over the next five years, then the projected 79,000 housing shortage would turn into a 40,000 surplus,' he wrote. 'NHSAC's sensitivity analysis and Canada's experience are further evidence that cutting immigration is the only realistic solution to the housing shortage and rental crisis.' But Dr Bhanu Bhatia, lecturer in economics and business at Charles Darwin University, said that was a 'dangerous lesson to take'. 'These migration patterns that you see, in the background of that is also skills shortages,' she said. 'So if you try to control the housing [pressures] with this freeze, that then impacts our employment. Look what happened in Covid, how many shortages we saw in terms of labour. 'So I think it's a dangerous lesson. It's not going to solve our problems in the long term and it can also increase our problems in some other sectors and impact economic growth, impact our productivity, which are lagging anyway.' Dr Bhatia said in addition to skilled migration it was important to consider 'family migration and all those sorts of things'. 'If we try to freeze that, that's going to again not have a good impact on our society,' she said. 'So I think the solutions are more internal in terms of trying to build that housing capacity. We need to look at our labour force participation rate, so we're not reliant on overseas migration, how to do skills training. There are a lot of long-term structural issues the government needs to solve, rather than these short-term solutions about freezing migration. 'The migration numbers we have, they are led by a lot of economic and social logic that we shouldn't be tinkering with just to solve a housing problem.' Dr Bhatia said there was 'no denying' that overseas migration had contributed to the housing crisis but it was a 'bit of a distraction'. 'There's so many other factors — natural increases, internal migration. There's very poor planning that's been in place to accommodate [increase in demand],' she said. 'Covid was another big factor, it fuelled demand for single-family homes. Building approvals have not kept pace. It's all been driven by the market, but the government should have had some oversight in terms of how our numbers were growing, how our cities were growing, how we're going to plan for this future. It's just been very dependent on short-term fluctuations … completely profit-led.' Net overseas migration added 340,800 people to Australia's population in 2024 — or 931 new residents per day — according to figures last week from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). That's down from a peak of 555,800 in the 12 months to September 2023, and net overseas migration of 68,000 in the December 2024 quarter — after falling for five consecutive quarters — was about 7000 lower than Treasury's forecast due to fewer arrivals. The Albanese government has sought to rein in international student numbers, which make up the lion's share of Australia's net overseas migration, by increasing the student visa charge and implementing a range of integrity measures.
