Is immigration causing Australia's housing crisis?
It's demand outrunning supply — and migration is one side of that, not the whole story. Population growth is a genuine demand driver, and it sits directly in our model as a fundamental. When it runs ahead of the rate at which homes are finished, prices and rents rise before supply can react.
But blaming migration alone ignores the other half: home-building has run persistently behind the national target for years. The same population surge with adequate construction wouldn't produce this squeeze. So the honest read is a supply-demand imbalance — you can close it from either side, and policy has levers on both.
Would cutting migration fix housing affordability?
It would ease demand at the margin and relatively quickly, but it's not a complete fix — affordability is also set by interest rates, incomes and building costs, which migration doesn't touch. And migration supplies construction labour too, so deep cuts can slow the supply response. We model the direction each lever pushes; we don't take a political side.