Chris Richardson

But the worse that housing has become, the more of a complication that the pace of our migration has been.

Now, migration, the government has been tightening up.

But we have a system that lets you appeal this, appeal that, meaning that the slowdown in migration is occurring more slowly than the government had expected.

This financial year in the budget the other day, the government just revised up the expected net migration this year by 35,000 people.

I think 20,000 next year.

To be fair, that number is coming down.

To be really fair...

If we want to get back to a society that can be much more welcoming, as we should be, we have to be doing better on housing and a range of other fronts.

We've made the migration equation for Australia much more complex, and we can and we should do better.

Oh, yeah.

And again, that's on us.

We should be much better at building housing than we are, and we're not.

There are other complications, though.

When migrants arrive, federal governments tend to make money.

They get the taxes.

State governments tend to lose money.

They've got to build the roads and the schools and the hospitals and the like.

but it's the feds who get to make the decisions.

So they tend to make money out of it, and that has a bit of an impact.

They also like net migration to be higher, partly because it makes it less likely that the economy ever tips into recession.