COMMITTEES

Senator McKENZIE (Victoria—Leader of the Nationals in the Senate) (17:50): We often speak in this chamber about economic growth as though GDP alone tells the story of our nation's success, but GDP is not a measure of whether young Australians can own a home, start a family or build a secure life. It counts money changing hands and it counts population growth.

It doesn't count the stress of housing insecurity or the heartbreak of delaying having children because people just can't afford a place big enough to raise them. When the fundamentals of ordinary life become unattainable for the next generation, economic policy is failing at its most basic purpose. Over the past three years Labor has brought in over one million migrants.

Unless there is respite, we will approach two million in five years. This includes 536,000 in 2022-23, the highest intake in our history, and 446,000 in 2023-24. To put that into perspective, we've added the equivalent of the entire population of Brisbane in just three years but we haven't built a city like Brisbane to house, feed, employ and educate these additional people.

That is population growth on a scale that our housing market, our infrastructure, our planning system, our hospitals, our schools and our communities are not prepared for. Even in the 2024-25 budget papers, there's an admission that net overseas migration will remain above the long run average for years to come, and the result is a housing market in crisis—a market that caters for those young people who are fortunate enough to have parents or grandparents wealthy enough to help them out with a deposit.

In the early 2000s, the house-price-to-income ratio sat at around four. Today it is over eight nationally. In Sydney it is among the least affordable in the world, now exceeding 14 times the median wage.

It means teachers, nurses, police officers and clerical workers can't afford to live anywhere close to where they work. The median dwelling-price-to-income ratio nationwide was 9.6 in 2000 and has jumped to 16.4 in 2024. Economist Alan Kohler has warned that if the ratio had stayed where it was in 2000—around four—Australian families would be paying half as much for their mortgages as they are today.

Instead, mortgage repayments now chew up over 50 per cent of household incomes compared with 36 per cent two decades ago. The median Sydney house price has doubled from $680,000 in 2014 to about $1.4 million today. This is not sustainable.

It is shutting a generation out of homeownership entirely. The social impacts go even further. As Ross Gittins recently posed, have we arrested the development of our young?

Danielle Wood, Jim Chalmers' own head of the Productivity Commission, has warned that Australia is in danger of breaking the generational bargain—the promise that each generation would live better than the one before. The statistics are sobering. The proportion of young Australians not yet married has doubled from 26 per cent to 53 per cent.

The median age of first marriages has risen from 27 to 34. Among 25- to 39-year-olds, the proportion living as a couple has collapsed from over half to just one-fifth. A Deloitte analysis of the census found that more than half of Australians aged between 18 and 25 now even believe they are unlikely to ever have children.

These are not just lifestyle choices. These are economic constraints forcing people to delay or abandon entirely the most fundamental decision of adulthood. And let's be honest about who benefits and who loses.

High immigration feeds the interests of big business, which wants more workers and more consumers to keep driving that economy. It feeds big universities, which rely heavily on international student revenue. And it feeds big government, which grows larger with every extra million people to regulate and serve.

So that's who benefits. But the costs of these policy settings are borne by young Australians locked out of homeownership, by young couples delaying marriage and children and by young families struggling to pay rent or save a deposit while prices climb faster than they could ever possibly catch up on. Every child not born today is another job and another taxpayer that needs to be filled by skilled migration over the next 20 years.

We're drifting towards a society where homeownership depends entirely on whether your parents can help you out, where homeownership increasingly comes from inheritance, not from hard work, and where the idea of starting a family depends less on aspirational love than on whether you can even afford a house with a backyard. Ross Gittins, again, has written, 'A society that tells its young people they cannot buy a home unless their parents are rich is a society that's lost its way.' Herein lies the irony at the heart of the debate.

We're told we need high immigration because the birthrate is too low, but the birthrate is falling partly because housing costs are too high, because family formation is delayed further each year because young Australians can't get on with ordinary life. We're using migration to fix a problem that migration itself is making worse and that— Senator Ananda-Rajah: That's not evidence based.

Senator McKENZIE: I want to be really clear that this is not an argument against migration. Migration has built modern Australia, and, if you are not Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, then you're all migrants— Senator Stewart: Always was, always will be! Senator McKENZIE: whether your family came here five generations ago or five weeks ago.

Migration has brought the skills, diversity and energy that have made us the prosperous— Senator Ananda-Rajah: You don't get to walk both sides of the road on this. The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator Sterle ): Colleagues, as much as I'm loath to depress debate, the interjections are consistent, and I will ask that the senator be heard in silence. Senator McKENZIE: Migration in the 20th century achieved great things, like the Snowy Mountains Scheme, but it came with great sacrifice from the migrants themselves, many of whom came here to work, living in camps and dongas while they were built.

Entrepreneurial migrants from across the globe have built this great country. I was in Mandurah last weekend, speaking to two young men from the Punjab who'd chosen to buy a business in this country town in WA and raise their families there. They were excited about the opportunity that our country provided them.

They made a point of discussing with me, in this small-town conversation, the common values that they shared with Australia and that not all migrants do share those common values and want to see a prosperous, sustainable and sovereign Australia going forward and that we do need to be careful about who comes to this country, how many come to this country and where they live.

So having a rational, respectful conversation through a Senate inquiry of our economics committee, whose terms of reference are quite benign, should be welcomed. Then, if you don't agree with Senator Roberts's motion, you can bring witnesses to that inquiry and have the open debate—it's public—in a respectful way, chaired by whoever's chairing the economics committee today.

I'm sure they'd do a fabulous job. There's nothing to be afraid of in having this debate. It says more about those opposed to this motion that they're concerned that there's something nefarious about what the impact is.

Let's understand the impact so we can stop having these rhetorical arguments about the heavy migration impact that Labor's imposed on our community. I believe that migration must be calibrated to the nation's capacity—its capacity to build housing; its capacity to provide infrastructure, water and roads; and its capacity to ensure that young Australians aren't pushed aside in their own country.

Economic growth that drives GDP up while homeownership, family formation and fertility rates fall is growth that is failing the very people it should serve. The question for parliament is simple. Do we want a country where the next generation can own a home, start a family and get on with ordinary life?

If we can't deliver the basics then all of us are failing in the most basic of responsibilities that we have—to actually leave the next generation better off than the last. In Western Australia, at the National Party state conference this weekend, I said, 'When you can't expect to partner, to get a home and to have some kids and do all the normal things that have meant humanity has grown, prospered and progressed over centuries and millennia, we really do have a problem, and we shouldn't actually be scared about having the conversation, no matter how much certain senators detest One Nation.' The actual substantive motion itself is quite a sensible debate that's overdue in this country.

Instead we're turning to high immigration to actually solve the problems of a birthrate so low. There are deeper cultural problems about not being able to just get on and do regular life. We've got to solve that problem.

That's the nut we actually have to crack. Let's start first with a sensible migration number, a number that we can actually have the capacity as a country to service, so that we're not getting waiting queues in our public hospitals, so that we can deliver high-quality public education to everyone, so that you don't have to wait for an hour and half in your car to get to work because you can't afford to live near your— Senator Steele-John interjecting— Senator McKENZIE: I know WA's very different.

You've got beautiful roads over there, but come to the east coast, Senator Steele-John. If you're living in the peri-urban sections of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane because you cannot afford a house if you're a teacher, a nurse, a police officer or a bank teller, then there is a problem. I'm happy to introduce you to any of these people who struggle with this.

We need to make sure that people who share our values—such as individual liberty and dignity; every person's equal worth; freedom of faith and expression, including the freedom not to believe; the right to speak and associate peacefully; upholding the law, where we actually have one law for all citizens accountable to the courts; democratic self-government; laws made by elected parliaments, not by religious or secular codes outside democracy; the fair go of mutual respect, tolerance, empathy for the disadvantaged and a quality of opportunity for everyone; English as our unifying national language; and equal opportunities for all, regardless of where you live, your ethnicity or your national origin—and who want to help build a safe, sustainable and prosperous Australia should be welcomed.

But we should have a right and indeed a responsibility to the next generation as a country to say, 'No; those who denigrate and despise those values are not welcome here.' In a country as developed, welcoming, kind and rich as Australia, we're top of the pops for people from all over the world who seek a better life for their families. So it is beholden to those of us who hold the government benches and the immigration portfolio, who get to make these decisions, to make sure that the people that we welcome in to help us build this country share those values.

We have the opportunity to have a choice. We want people who love our country as much as we do, who believe that nation-statehood is a thing. Globalists we don't want so much.

To be a patriot of Australia, no matter where and how you've come to this place, like the young men from the Punjab I spoke to in Mandurah on the weekend—we actually want to welcome those people, and those who don't share those values can go try and live somewhere else. The National Party will be supporting Senator Roberts's motion so that the economics committee can examine these issues in a rational, calm and respectful manner.