Dan Tehan (Wannon, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

At least we're getting a giggle. I haven't looked at what happened under the Spanish flu, but I have looked at what happened in Labor's October budget. They seem to have forgotten they handed down an October budget. In October they said that the net overseas migration number for 2022-23 would be 235,000. What the minister didn't want to confess to at the Press Club and didn't want to see leaked out of the meeting with the premiers and cabinet was that the net overseas migration number between October and May had gone from 235,000 to 400,000. Also, that 2023-24 number had gone from 235,000 to 315,000, so it has gone to 715,000. Once again it's really, really interesting because in the budget, did we hear the Treasurer mention the net overseas migration number? Just for the Treasurer's sake and the Prime Minister's sake I will mention it again, because when we've asked questions we haven't heard it mentioned either: 1.5 million over five years. Just to give people who might be listening to this as they're driving home in their cars—you never know, they do occasionally listen to the parliamentary network—those people sitting in their cars driving home should think about this: in the next five years a city the size of Adelaide is coming to Australia. And the thing about it is, as we saw at the Press Club two weeks ago, that there is no plan to deal with this. There is no plan to deal with the congestion, which is worse than it was before we went into the pandemic—no plan. As a matter of fact, as has been pointed out by many in this place, infrastructure spending is going down in this budget; it's being cut, so you are bringing in a population the size of Adelaide, and you are reducing your spending on infrastructure.

Housing—there is no plan for housing. Where are all these people going to be housed? There is nowhere to house them. As we have seen, the prediction is that we need an additional 200,000 houses. Where is the plan for the additional 200,000 houses? There is none. And what is it doing to rents? There is a rental crisis in this country, and we know that, for every additional 10,000 people that come in, rents will go up. We know 1.5 million will come in. What is that going to do to rents? Universities are saying to professors, to tutors, to lecturers, 'We want you to take international students in as boarders.'

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