There are two primary reasons why the federal government loves ‘Big Australia’ immigration. First, immigration boosts the overall economy, as measured by headline GDP. Running a high immigration strategy enables the government to claim that it is an effective economic manager, even when per capita GDP growth is negative (as it currently is) and individual
It is clear that Australia is on the verge of another house price boom. As illustrated below by Alex Joiner from IFM Investors, both Cotality’s and PropTrack’s dwelling value series lifted strongly in August, continuing the run of strong results. “If you’re struggling to afford a home, the only worse news than the Cotality dwelling
Asian share markets are starting the trading week in very mixed fashion with Chinese stocks leading the way while Australian shares have pulled back with the absence of a lead from the US as they have a long weekend. The fallout from the Friday night decision that the Trump regime’s tariffs are actually illegal (do
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand has slashed the official cash rate (OCR) by 2.5%, with another 0.5% of cuts expected by the end of 2026. As Justin Fabo of Antipodean Macro illustrates below, the decline in the OCR has cut the cost of new mortgages, which should have raised housing demand and driven up
Westpac with the forecast. • Australia’s recovery stalled over the first six months of 2025, with the economy expected to have grown 0.4%qtr in Q2 and just 1.3%yr in six-month annualised terms – way below the RBA’s updated trend estimate of +2.0%yr. • The extent of the pull back in public demand has surprised on
This is amusing to watch. Australia’s largest east coast exporter, Australia Pacific LNG in which Origin Energy owns a 27.5 per cent stake, is arguing for sweeping reforms that would rewire the domestic market and impose stricter obligations on rival producers to prioritise local buyers. By contrast, Santos — operator of the Gladstone LNG project
Australia is suffering from a chronic housing shortage because, for two decades, population demand via excessive immigration has run ahead of housing supply. The following chart from AMP chief economist Shane Oliver illustrates that after immigration more than doubled and annual population growth surged by 150,000, Australian housing became structurally undersupplied: Oliver estimated that Australia’s
In the years since the pandemic first arrived on Australia’s shores in early 2020, the government has taken on a greater and greater role as a driver of economic activity. In the past five and a half years, day-to-day government spending as a proportion of GDP has risen by 4.2 percentage points above the pre-Covid
This speaks for itself about Labor. Former Labor premiers Daniel Andrews and Bob Carr have accepted invitations to a Chinese military parade where Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un are also guests of honour. Andrews and Carr were included in a list of names released by the Chinese foreign ministry of
The Australia Institute (TAI) used to talk sense on immigration. In 2015, TAI published an excellent research paper calling for a national debate on Australia’s future population: Since the Sydney Olympics in the year 2000 the population of Australia has grown by 25 per cent. In fact, since the Sydney Olympics, Australia’s population has grown