As the Albanese Government throws open our borders following the debacle of the global pandemic, they’re beckoning unprecedented numbers of immigrants and international students. Australians are jostling to find rental properties and are unable to meet soaring living costs. Despite defying common sense, Albanese couldn’t care less. For the government, the agenda is simply to bring in more immigrants. The story is the same all around the West, creating a pattern that has everything to do with what the World Economic Forum calls The Great Reset.
Beginning in mid-2022, Sydney and Melbourne began suffering a rental crisis. Queues to inspect mediocre apartments snaked around the block as demand for rental properties outstripped supply. In some areas, applying for a lease mirrored an auction; desperate renters outbid one another just to secure an over-priced studio with a short-term lease. Those queues continue growing, as does the misery. The problem is now nationwide.
Hitherto renters enjoyed their first period of respite in years—while space became key during the pandemic. Now they are back in the hot seat. Bear in mind, the majority of rental properties spend only five years on the market before they’re sold on to owner-occupiers, creating a vacancy flux. Even if a person is lucky enough to secure somewhere, they may get settled only to suddenly find themselves back at square one.
Exacerbating the situation, the RBA keeps jacking up interest rates to curb inflation, triggering the cost-of-living squeeze. Adding to the stress, at the end of 2022 overall job vacancies plummeted from 3.2 per to 2.8 per cent Australia-wide. In an economic maelstrom like this, the average Australian can’t maintain savings, which is the point.
The situation worsened in December after the Chinese government demanded students physically attend universities. Otherwise, their degrees would be invalidated. Qualifications from online courses are no longer recognised in China. For Australia, this portends an additional 40,000—50,000 students arriving during 2023 and weighting down our already straining rental market. This human avalanche combined with the intensification of immigration the Albanese government was desperate to introduce. As such, the prospect of just saying no to China isn’t likely.
The fact there is nowhere to put them doesn’t matter: what does is that more and more students keep arriving.
Despite ranking high globally, students regard China’s universities as inferior to western campuses. Meanwhile, China’s excuse for leaning on its students is in the interest of “social equality.” But what does that mean?
A divide occurred between wealthy students able to afford private tuition and those studying online. Into that mix, the Chinese government claimed many online courses lacked quality. Either the CCP isn’t so cluey about online education, or else it understands all too well the ramifications their ruling will have on the countries hosting their multitudinous amounts of students; especially Australia.
This raises the question: what about our social equality once the effect of Chinese students on infrastructure, housing, and the job market bites? Keep in mind, it’s not just Chinese students arriving and competing with Australians for rentals, jobs, and a seat on the train. India is the second largest source of international students with 89,570, followed by Nepal, exporting 43,000 here, and Brazil, at 26,620. China is responsible for 205,000 of these competing bodies. The total figure combined is a predicted 161,000 international students. And that’s just students.
Firstly, Albanese was scrambling to lift immigration numbers, raising the annual intake by 35,000 to 195,000. Nearly all those arrivals will gravitate to the cities. Touting the inevitable line about a “skills shortage,” Albanese then extended the post-study work visas for international students to two years for those occupations which are supposedly short of skilled workers. As if that isn’t generous enough, he granted overseas students the opportunity to work unlimited hours while studying. In other words, a student visa is now a work visa.
Tied with this privilege is a faster path to permanent residency, and thereafter, citizenship (or dual citizenship). This means rather than returning home when they graduate, a sizeable chunk of these students will become added to the overall immigration statistics via the backdoor of the International Student scam. None of this will happen slowly, either, as the government has sunken $36 million into hiring staff to clear visa backlogs and fast-track the new arrivals while doing zip about their impact.
This situation worsens with an inadequate supply of properties as landlords raise rents, to exploit the situation. International students aren’t all rich, but that won’t stop landlords and their complicit agents from regarding them so. Greed has a certain blindness.
Instead, four to six students will pool their money and lease a two-bedroom unit. A unit that was previously occupied by two to three people might’ve fetched around $700-750pw. But this is no time for decorum when money is to be made. So, a blind eye is turned to occupant numbers as they inflate the rent to $1000pw with no shame whatsoever; it’s just business.
At a time of high-interest rates when rents are climbing, student arrivals incentivise grasping landlords. And no regulation exists to prevent them from profiting at the expense of Aussies needing homes. The market is allowed to determine increases, with no caps, and only minimal protection for tenants.
Given the vast number of parliamentarians with large property portfolios, they’re not about to compromise self-interest for the sake of the sweaty masses. And this isn’t exclusively a “conservative” camp, but the Greens, Teals and Labor—the unholy trinity of virtue-signalling hypocrites who condemn large “carbon footprints” on the one hand, but whose policies towards mass immigration contribute more to environmental devastation than anything else.
Aside from access to the Lodge in Canberra, and Kirribilli house, Anthony Albanese owns a property portfolio worth an estimated $5 million. Not bad for a “battler” who’s never held a proper job in his entire life. It’s strange how that’s true of so many of those who come from the party that claims to represent the workers.
If Australians are ignored in this stream-roll towards critical overpopulation think of how little consideration is given to our native critters. The prevalence of confused koala bears—our cute national mascot—scrabbling into shops and onto streets isn’t the charming spectacle it often appears to the readers of the Daily Mail. It signifies the destruction of their natural habitat, which is being bulldozed to enlarge the urban expanse to accommodate government addiction to massive immigration.
Likewise, you can imagine the impact this has on other species such as the bird population, and even homeless snakes.
So far, since European settlement, an estimated 100 natural species have become extinct. In March 2021, the Australian government updated that list to include 13 other species gone the way of the Tasmanian Tiger.
Australians are being driven out of their rentals to make way for the interlopers. None of this is merely an accident of planning, but a dedicated agenda on behalf of a globalist-occupied political system. They are only too eager to accommodate the shekels-obsessed universities and developers like Harry Triguboff, who rubs his greasy palms every time there’s a mention of an increase in immigration. If there is any benefit to this “big Australia” it certainly isn’t to the millions of Australians who’ve been pressed into a corner ever since they tore up the rule book in the 1970s.
The media is reporting about hardship on an epic scale. ABC reported the story of Bob Davis, 72, a pensioner who lived in Waverly on Sydney’s north shore for the past three decades. Without a cooee, his tenancy agreement was ripped to shreds and he was issued a “no grounds eviction notice.”
Bob has a heart condition and knows he will struggle in the brutal rental market to find somewhere. He said, “I’ve been here so long I thought I’ll probably end my days here. It’s very difficult to just uproot and go.”
The former laundry worker added, “It’s not much, but it’s my home.”
Bob’s 87-year-old sister lives on the same block. She’s getting the boot too. No compassionate law is in place to protect our vulnerable old-aged pensioners; they’re at the mercy of the callous real estate industry, which is notoriously mercenary.
The list of outcast renters goes on. A typical strategy for unscrupulous agents, who inevitably advise their “client” that greater rent is to be had on a property in this climate, is to make the tenant an offer they can’t refuse—either fork over 40 per cent more rent or look elsewhere.
Australians are being tapped while at their most vulnerable. One couple the media reported on was slugged with a $400 hike on their existing rent just when they were planning a wedding. The wedding is off because the rent comes first—and especially for the bride, all of those expectant days of planning are now washed away in bitter tears. This won’t just affect wedding plans, but they now need to look elsewhere as they can’t afford the rent increase. But the real estate agent isn’t worried, there are thousands more where they came from.
Another couple, living in a two-bedroom Redfern rental in Sydney was made the offer they couldn’t refuse—a $400 spike or move out. Marin Peplinski told The Australian, “Even if we go to the tribunal, maybe they’ll be forced to negotiate but they can just terminate the (fixed-term) agreement. It’s just an abuse of the tenant-landlord relationship.”
The stories are cropping up daily and it isn’t just impacting the down-at-heel. Young professionals are being squeezed into rent rises that challenge their economic viability despite their advantages. Left and right, the rental gun is being put to the head of Australians, and all for the sake of globalist immigration policies speciously sold to us on the grounds of “economic benefit.” If this is a benefit, we’d hate to imagine the downside. But we can name one that’s another factor for so many struggling Aussies—the cost of energy. These hit the poor hardest.
A Current Affair reported on a mother and son in southwest Sydney, Karen and Connor, who are so affected by the cost of living that they can’t afford to turn on the air-conditioning. Instead, they’ve had to endure the heatwave by lying on the cold tiles of their floor and wiping their faces with cloths packed with ice cubes.
“The first year we used the air conditioning, the quarterly bill for Summer was about $800,” she said. “This last bill, which was the majority of summer, was $380. This summer we have had the air conditioner on once.”
No doubt Albanese would see that, shake his wizened little head and sigh, “We’re all doing it tough.” Then again, he’d probably just whip off to a Gay Pride event to demonstrate his ‘tolerance.’ Albanese’s more intent on selling us the Aboriginal voice to parliament. The coming recession is one that we simply have to have.
The crisis isn’t just a Sydney and Melbourne thing, it’s affecting the whole of Australia. The rental vacancy rate is shivering at 0.8% nationally. Sydney and Melbourne are both at a dire 0.1%, Adelaide and Perth are 0.3%with Hobart at 0.5% and Brisbane faring only slightly better at 0.8%. Yet, as much as this affects us all, those on income support are doing it the toughest. Charmaine Crowe is the Program Director for the Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS). ACOSS is an advocacy group for battlers, especially in the areas of social security. She told 7News that Australians on income support are the worst affected by the rental crisis.
“People are turning off their fridges, turning off hot water systems, to save on utility costs,” she said. “They are skipping essential medication like heart or diabetes medication so that they can meet their rent payment.”
Crowe paints a desperate picture. “For many in that situation, it’s too much and they end up living in their caravan or car. We’ve seen a huge increase in the number of older women on income support payments forced to live in their cars.”
Those on income support are paying up to 80%of their income on rent alone. The figure that suggests the typical welfare recipient lives on $40 a day doesn’t account for how that money is spent. In terms of food, it might mean under $10 a day to keep from starving. But who cares? You will own nothing and be happy, as the WEF told us.
Government at both the state and federal levels are quick to nod their heads and agree “there is a problem.” They tend to identify the problem as “a lack of available properties.” That’s no different to acknowledging that a burning house is on fire. Sir Humphrey Appleby would be proud.
When they do offer solutions, it’s always in the context of easing access for homebuyers without allowing for rental shortages. Any responsible administration would accept that their immigration policies coupled with that of appeasing the nagging universities’ hunger for OS dollars are averse to the needs and wants of the Australian people.
The double-helix of the crisis in housing and the rental market is a no-brainer. The housing sector is being squeezed by a dearth of affordable houses and spiralling interest rates. Lack of regulation means landlords can charge what they want and a lack of protection for tenants means they’ve little recourse but to shell out more on basic shelter.
Ultimately, though, a precedent is set whereby plantation rules apply, meaning, the landlord and their agent own any tenant. If they complain about sorely needed repairs they can be bumped. Even if that’s not strictly legal, the fear will be tacitly implied to every renter. As such, the quality of rentals won’t matter and agents will enable landlords to distance themselves from undertaking vital upkeep, maintenance and repairs. Mother of seven, Herbiella George found herself in such circumstances, forced to choose between a mouldy $450pw rat-infested hovel or sleeping in her car.
Her story is typical: she’d viewed and applied for over 70 properties with no success. Meanwhile, she had to make alternative arrangements for four of her children and throw away possessions ruined by the mould and rats.
“I had to give four of my children up because I just couldn’t afford them anymore,” she admitted. “There are days when I don’t even know what to put on the table. It makes me break down that I can’t give my kids the home they deserve.”
The big mistake a lot of people make is to see these issues as isolated without understanding them in terms of the bigger picture. It’s not a matter of addressing one, but recognising them holistically as the same problem.
We haven’t mentioned how the average grocery shop is costing more than ever, or that meat is being priced out of range for many, or that the shortages of staples such as eggs and certain vegetable varieties share a common irregularity with Europe and the US where they are taking the war on carbon emissions to farmers, as A-list celebrities appear in commercials encouraging the hoi polloi to “…eat ze bugs.”
The spate of inexplicable fires destroying American chicken farms and the clear intent of the corporate empire behind the WEF to use the leaders of countries in their power to initiate their “changes”, both in terms of the climate agenda and the globalist mission to eradicate national identities to bring each country within the global fold of a single world government through mass migrations of refugees and economic migrants. That is who Albanese is, a squalid little man of diabolical mediocrity—a sheep in sheep’s clothing—too cowed to step up for an Australia that he never believed in and so he unquestioningly delivers for Davos.
Albanese is at the mercy of his party apparatchiks in a plantation called Australia which the US owns by force, China owns economically, and the King of England owns on paper.
And on a final note, as we learned with COVID-19 and the vaccine mandates, America’s so-called Capitol Hill riots, the truth about Ukraine, the Russian gas pipeline, the Wuhan lab leak, Donald Trump’s Russian connections, the 2020 US Presidential Election, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and everything else—anything the mainstream media labels a “conspiracy theory” is invariably the truth. They just don’t want it leaking like the bat virus. ■