Property developers are insisting the federal government increase immigration to pre-pandemic levels so that they can boost their profits to pre-pandemic levels.
The call comes from the Urban Development Institute of Australia, following government forecasts for a downturn in population growth as soon as the nation claws its way out of the pandemic.
According to the Treasury’s Intergenerational Report couples will be abstaining from having babies in the next forty years due to fears over the Chinese Covid-19 virus. Likewise, Australia’s isolation from the world during the crisis is also affecting the baby boom brought in from Asia and the sub-continent. Not that we buy that last bit for a minute.
For an industry whose members thrive on cramming as many people into one place regardless of where they’re from, this is the road to (their) ruin. In an age where feelings count more than science or logic, it would be monstrous for Australians not to empathise with the property developers who do so much for our people by transforming our wide-open spaces into impenetrable urban ghettoes teeming with unaffordable vertical pigeon boxes.
And if they don’t, so what, it’s rotten seeing an unhappy person; it makes you feel like giving them what they want so they’ll be happy. After all, happiness is contagious.
Leading this call to stuff our cities with Indian and Asian families is the president of the developers’ lobby group, Simon Basheer. He fears if government projections are not addressed with firm action in regards to artificially increasing our population over the next four decades, then he might be forced to send his kids to a public school, or at the very least, a non-Jewish one.
“In the short-term, we will need immigration to return to as soon as health protocols allow to rev up apartment market construction that is so crucial to balancing housing markets and improving affordability,” he said.
Likewise, we could improve housing market affordability by banning immigration, halting foreign investment, and compulsorily acquiring the property of absentee, investor landlords. And we could drastically improve the Australian skyline by taking to the acres of monstrous vertical housing with a ball and chain. Then we could replace them with the original Aussie quarter-acre dream house. But, as they say, everyone has an opinion.
Basheer doesn’t agree. He believes that would be akin to the Nazis taking over and that the government should be enacting draconian laws to prevent anybody remotely suggesting anything so barbaric.
“What the intergenerational report makes clear is that skilled migration and more robust population growth will be needed to sustain Australia’s long-term economic prosperity,” he countered pointedly.
What he means is it is the one way to ensure the long-term prosperity of him and his members. All it does for the rest of us is cause social divisions, overcrowding, under-employment, environmental alienation, mental health issues, increased crime, alcohol and drug abuse and finally wholesale anarchy like we’re seeing in the United States.
The miracle of immigration as economic policy is plain for all to see in cities like Portland, San Francisco and Chicago. Yeah, we need that.