Leith van Onselen

I have an impersonator. Please note that posts from @Leithivo are fake.

Net long term and permanent arrivals on a rolling 12 month basis charted against in growth in asking rents YoY from Cotality (lagged 3 months). Speaks for itself really.

@leithvo has covered this issue extensively over the years and was recently interviewed by SBS on this topic. Link to that segment below. There are also all manner of articles on this by Leith at Macrobusiness.com.au If they are looking for something more mainstream to share, I recommend this report from KPMG which covers the balance of housing supply and demand. kpmg.com/au/en/insights… They conclude that even prior to Covid we were already not building enough homes by quite a large margin, this divergence between their analysis and say those of various Treasury's is due to the fact that they factor in changing household demographics, while others overwhelmingly do not. I hope that proves to be assistance. youtube.com/watch?v=JPQAym…

Yes supply needs to be increased that’s the denominator, it’s slow moving and faces headwinds from far too much bureaucracy, high costs and now higher interest rates. But there’s the numerator, demand in the form of population growth - if the pandemic showed us anything you can move that quite quickly should you desire to do so.

This is a completely reasonable position yet I can't imagine anyone from the major political parties saying something like this, let alone making an argument to changes our immigration policies to something resembling this.

Compare @leithvo’s answer to the Director of the ANU Migration Hub Professor, Alan Gamlen. He doesn’t have one. He calls you stupid, appeals to his authority, and puts up a straw-man argument. Alan, we 51.5% of our population was either born overseas or has a parent born overseas. We have the highest immigration in the OECD. People are imagining things. This isn’t normal.

'ANU elites tell Aussies to ‘suck it’ on immigration' macrobusiness.com.au/2026/03/anu-el…

Wow! Mask off moment for the woke lefties at the Universities re migration. Essentially fuck what the average voter wants on the migration debate and they’re glad big business has money and power to sway the public conversation to keep net migration high. Maybe the should ask themselves WHY big business likes high migration because I’ll tell them. It adds to more supply of labour which pushes down wages and there’s no need for big business to innovate or change to compete and grab market share if there’s just more people to sell their products too. It’s Heaps funny what people in politics will say when they think only people that agree with them are listening. It’s exactly what Abul Rizvi did when confessing he ramped up migration himself in the early 00’s against the public’s wishes AND the property industry does the exact same thing on their podcasts about screwing renters and fucking everybody that isn’t an investor.

Without overseas migration Sydney would have a shrinking population. Now lets say in a decade a new estate is being built, it needs roads, schools, hospitals and other infrastructure. The vast majority of the cost of that infrastructure would be attributed by Treasury to the migrants who expanded the population and drove its construction, right? No. It gets attributed across the entire population and the actual migrant share is reduced based on the duration of their total expected time in Australia. So the vast majority of a rail line out to a suburb that wouldn't need one without migration is attributed to the existing populace. This is why the modelled benefits of migration by Treasury dont actually hold water. They dont hold up to basic logical scrutiny. Far more on this in detail from @leithvo linked below. macrobusiness.com.au/2024/06/the-mo…

Have a listen. One of these people understands energy. One is captured by an ideology, and is incapable of processing new information that challenges their priors. Make your mind which is which.

Wasn’t the government essentially able to stop migration straight away during the pandemic? Why couldn’t they therefore control things more than they did once the borders re-open? They issue visas, everyone who comes to the country has to pass through passport control.

@RizviAbul Why do you attack anyone with an opinion on migration and attack any political party other than the one in power that got people so resentful towards migration?

The Australian Labor government labels peoples who want lower migration levels as "extreme". And they won't even look at whether high migration levels are increasing house prices - turning a blind eye to what is happening in Canada and NZ.

I don't mean to alarm anyone, but I have strong evidence to suggest that the growth in the supply of homes relative to the growth in demand dramatically impacts real rents.... I don't know what to think now, I've been told so long that demand wasn't a thing in Australia.....

Abul Rizvi was a senior official in designing an immigration policy that endures today. He was the First Assistant Secretary of the Migration and Temporary Entrant Division when the Bondi Terrorist arrived in Australia on a student visa. If Sadik Akram had not been granted a student visa, and then a permanent visa, 15 Australians might still be alive.

Timely reshare. Perspectives on immigration from an erudite Australian born Jew, nearly a year before the Bondi attack. And oh boy… that Rizvi interview with @JosephNWalker will mark a turning point in the Australian political consciousness about immigration.

We have been told by elements of the LNP and Labor that we don't have "mass migration". Well here is a little snippet from the 2003 report from the ABS projecting Australia's population for the next century. In Chapter 4 "It also previews some more extreme population scenarios analysed". The most "extreme" net overseas migration scenario the ABS could conceive of at the time? Net overseas migration at 200,000 out to 2051, which was double their baseline projection. If the baseline played out as projected, the population in 2051 would be 26.4 million, over 1m people fewer than the population today. If the most "extreme" net overseas migration played out, the population would be approximately 26.3 million today (this also includes a significant rise in life expectancy and a TFR of 1.6 all the way out to 2051). Is that "mass migration"? I leave it for you to decide. Source: ABS Population Projections 2002 to 2101.

In Q4 2000 it took 12 years of net migration to that point to add 1,000,000 people to the population. As of Q2 2025 it took 2.5 years. This has both fueled economic growth but also put pressure on the provision of housing, infrastructure and services.

Are we being careful enough about who we let in? My piece for the @australian quotes former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Immigration, Abul Rizvi theaustralian.com.au/commentary/are…

Today's labour force suggest that population growth is no longer decelerating. It was not correct to ignore forward indicators such a long term movements data.