‘Job Creation a Mirage’: Tech CEO Calls for 90 Percent Cut to Migration to Slow Housing Bubble

Australian tech CEO Matt Barrie says the government should consider cutting international migration by 90 percent to address the “massive housing bubble” and unemployment in the country.
Speaking at a recent event in Brisbane, Barrie, the founder and CEO of Freelancer, a freelance marketplace website with over 75 million users, said migration was the main driver behind unreasonable housing prices across Australia.
Citing housing data, he said Australian house prices have risen by 110 times since 1956 and that in some cities like Sydney, it would take a person 46 years just to save for a deposit.
“If you start saving in 20, you’ll have enough money for a deposit by the age of 70. By then, the house will have another zero on its price tag,” he told the Australian Institute for Progress.
“No longer do Australians have a fair go.”
Pointing to the fertility rate, the CEO said every Australian woman needed to have 2.1 children just to maintain the population.
However, he added that the current fertility rate was well below the above figure.
“We haven’t been above 2.1 since 1976–that’s the replacement rate,” Barrie said. “Australia’s fertility rate is 1.63 and dropping like a rock.”
Amid the decline, the CEO said the housing supply was unable to keep up with demand despite a “ridiculous amount of homes” being built each year.
“Australia has the second highest rate of homebuilding from a major country in the developed world, not just in terms of newly constructed homes and housing stock, but also in terms of per capita rates,” he said.
The above figures were still short of the target of 240,000 a year to achieve the government’s goal of building 1.2 million homes by 2029.
Barrie also cited the high number of construction cranes as evidence of Australia’s intensive building activities.
“Australia has 869 cranes on construction sites nationwide, the second-highest on record after the quarter,” he said.
“Sydney alone has 390, and the vast majority of them are for residential apartments.
“In fact, Sydney has more cranes than New York, Boston, Toronto, Washington, Chicago, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Denver, Portland, Honolulu, San Francisco, Seattle and Calgary combined.”
Barrie then concluded that migration was the cause behind Australia’s housing problem.
“Insane immigration has caused insane rises in the cost of housing,” he said.
He said there were “2.4 million people in this country on temporary visas, and over 100,000 new, permanent and long-term arrivals arriving monthly.”
The CEO gave the example of the construction industry—touted as in desperate need of workers—which added just 4,677 jobs in the past 18 months, according to data from IFM Investors.
“Builders can’t build homes at prices people can afford to pay. So where are the jobs being created in Australia?” Barrie questioned.
At the same time, Barrie said most of the jobs created were related to the taxpayer-funded National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) economy—which received billions of dollars each year from the government—as well as the international student industry.
“Only 165,000 jobs were created outside of healthcare and social assistance in this entire country in the last 18 months,” he said.
“We need to cost housing down, the cost of energy down, and stop government waste and immigration,” he said.
“The immigration system is completely out of control and being used for political purposes, not for the benefit of Australian citizens.”