Increasing Australia’s migration intake without improving key services will increase the strain on housing, hospitals and schools as well as inflation, councils in migrant communities have said.
The Albanese government on Friday announced at its jobs and skills summit it would lifting the migrant intake to 195,000 in 2022-23, from the current 160,000 cap, addressing calls from businesses for more skilled workers to be brought in to Australia to meet shortages. A review planned for next February would set intake levels for coming years.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, told delegates he was “making up to $575m available” to invest in social and affordable housing, with the intention to multiply the funding by attracting private capital.
But the mayor of Fairfield in Sydney’s fast-growing south-west, Frank Carbone, said his region took an outsized share of new migrants and lifting the intake would exacerbate demand on services that were already stretched.
“There’s no planning, whatsoever,” he said. “Where is the housing? People are suffering.
“There’s only so much the community can absorb without worsening cost of living.” Carbone said his region’s 10% jobless rate was triple the national average.
Increasing the migration intake was a key subject of the jobs summit in Canberra, with employer groups in particular complaining that staff shortages were holding back the economy.
The head of the Council of Small Business Organisations Australia, Alexi Boyd, said her members need access to skilled migration, but the current system was flawed as visa applications could cost tens of thousands of dollars, with the intended host firms having to wait up to two years.
“They’re not working at full capacity,” she said. “They’re not opening seven days.”
The independent federal MP for Fowler and former deputy Fairfield mayor, Dai Le, said while she supported skilled migration, the increased intake worried her.
“In recent years we have seen the settlement of nearly 10,000 refugees in the [Fairfield] area with no additional housing, no additional public transport infrastructure and no additional jobs,” she said.
“We need financial support and resources to provide the new migrants with safe and secure housing, and we need additional funding for schools to accommodate the extra children. So I want to know how will the government support us to ensure we’re well equipped to give migrants the best chance of success in their new life?”
The home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, earlier on Friday told RN Breakfast “housing was a really, really important” issue.
“One of my big frustrations with this system is that [migration] hasn’t been properly planned,” she said. “This is something that governments have previously thought about as turning the tap on, turning it off again. I don’t want to think about migration that way.
“If we are going to bring people into our country through the migration system, we need a social licence from Australians to do it, and we’re only going to get that if we address this difficult issue with housing,” she said.
O’Neil was previously the mayor of Greater Dandenong, one of the biggest areas of migrant settlement in Melbourne. Greater Dandenong council was concerned that existing housing is not sufficient to meet current demands.
In an advocacy document prepared before the May federal election, the council said it was the most multicultural and diverse municipality in the country with residents from 157 birthplaces and 64% of its 169,000 population born overseas. A significant portion of the residents were recent migrants, refugees and people seeking asylum, it said.
Greater Dandenong already had the highest rate of homelessness in the state, with 1,942 people found to be sleeping rough or in temporary accommodations at the time of the 2016 census. That was almost triple the Victorian average of 0.42%.
Homelessness remained an issue as the area faced “the challenges of low-income levels, high unemployment, unfavourable educational outcomes, a substantial rate of refugee settlement, lower levels of mental and physical health than the Victorian average and elevated crime rates,” the council said.
It said housing was becoming more expensive at a faster rate than the average for Melbourne.
“In the past 20 years, median housing prices in Greater Dandenong have more than trebled in real terms,” the council said.
