By Stephen Sanders
Leaving Anthony Albany as a world leader, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has halted Canada’s population growth to ease housing pains. Sigh, his Visit Australia was framed around Trump vs. the “middle powers.”
Australia endures historic highs in mass migration and historic declines in housing affordability. But the elite narrative is that mass migration never happened, or if it did, could not be controlled well, had little impact on housing, and was not the voters’ business.
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Dismissing these fairy tales, Canada has reduced net migration, bringing population growth to close to zero by 2025 (the bold target was negative 0.2%).
Apparently, this has reduced asking rents.
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Albanian Australia currently leads the world, as an affluent Western nation with decades of emigration, up to 1% of the population annually and more. Among the Anglosphere or Five Eyes countries, Australia is the only one that has not alleviated rent/accommodation pain by curbing mass (including poorly vetted and illegal) immigration.
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With the Iran war, our vaunted renewable energy “net zero” government was left sweating on essential oil imports and rising fuel prices.
So far, no precautions have been taken to stop unnecessary bulk migration imports, up to 1,500 people per day or close to 1,000 in terms of net migration. Should be. More so if you have a pessimistic view of Epic Fury’s results.
Australia’s global exceptionalism points to 101 silly reasons why the experiences of Canada and the Anglosphere cannot be emulated or even discussed.
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With or without Trump’s Iran attack, it was a given. Carney’s visit won’t change that.
Which Canada did.
How surprising was Canada’s U-turn? For nearly a decade, Justin Trudeau has led his nation through historic immigration highs and housing woes. Population growth briefly reached 3% per year, a metric for an African country, not a top 10 world economy.
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It was Canada in early 2024.
Trudeau’s unpopular Liberal Party faced defeat in the upcoming federal election. But in mid-2024, it turned on a dime.
His opponent promised to get tougher on immigration. That unraveled, with Carney popularly elected to replace Trudeau, and anti-Trump sentiment doing the rest. Similar sentiments fueled the Albanians in the 2025 election.
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Canada says it will see another big drop in its temporary resident population in 2026, resulting in the second year in a row of minimal population growth.
By 2027, Canada estimates that its population growth rate could be slightly below 1%. Virtually all of this growth will be due to immigration. Why do this? Won’t this make housing affordable again?
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Mind you, even 1% population growth is too “low” for Australia’s coffers. No matter who was in government, the mandarins would resist.
Carney is touring Australia.
Trudeau and Albany had a bromance, with the former praising the latter’s “immense” climate courage, whatever that means. “Growing up in public housing”, Anthony developed “hope and inspiration”. You won’t get this level of output from Carney.
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Arriving here in early March, he praised his Davos address. who argued that major powers were now weaponizing “economic integration” or globalization. Intermediate powers must respond not with isolation but with their own “variable geometries” of integration.
His speech to a joint session of the Australian Parliament was similar. With the alleged disintegration of the world order, we must bind together the two middle power “commonwealth spheres.” To ice the cake, we have to have bipartisanship on key minerals.
At the conference with our home-trained press gallery, Carney was always peppered with questions about bad old Trump (can we trust him), the Five Eyes Security Alliance, and the Iran war.
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ABC meets, how about a rules-based order? What good is it if it is never implemented? The Australian answers.
Of course, Carney spoke diplomatically about Trump. Canada and the United States have the largest bilateral trade relationship in the world, with 70% of Canada’s exports going south to the United States.
From our embedded media, Carney was never getting questions about immigration and housing, highlighting his stark difference from Albany. such as:
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How can Canada change immigration so quickly, with little social unrest and not so much interference from powerful vested interests?
How can you host large numbers of international students and other non-permanent residents? cut through Visa complications, and effectively net zero immigration?
From 2024Fares are pretty easy for the average Canadian, is there anything in it for Aussies?
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Australia will not follow Canada.
The same week Carney, the ANU professor, arrived. Jill Sheppard makes it uncannily clear why our ruling classes, fed up with mass migration, despise the majority of voters.
One needn’t worry about the “median” voter, he sniffed, or “what’s going on inside them.” [tiny] Mind”. That would be too “populist”.
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As it happens, it’s more fun to offend and lie to voters. Since Albany’s fiasco with The Voice, sledging has reached an unpleasant extreme. Bondi made it worse.
To the mutual satisfaction of the governing classes, 101 frequent immigration fads include:
There is no net migration policy, we cannot control it, it is less than coalition, it is detonation or Even Abbott’s Err, we’re catching COVID, we’re fixing the visa backlog, we’ve got immigration back to “normal,” immigration is down 40 percent, there are too many visa categories to control, and immigrants are a net budget boon anyway.
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We need immigrants to build houses and help us get to net zero, immigration keeps us young, our immigration is mainly skilled, we will tackle wage theft, immigrants are being scapegoated, immigration does not affect the housing situation, housing is always a supply issue, immigrants help us benefit Australian culture and multiculturalism.
Emissions increase and the environment can double the population growth, we must win the global talent war, immigrants are carefully vetted, we are moving from temporary to permanent immigration, we are building social cohesion, we must accept climate refugees.
To tie it all together, pro-Labor pollster Kos Samaras promotes his insidious Antipodean theory of why Australian “democracy” would lean toward or mandate more immigration.
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As gleefully reported in the Indian Sun, Samaras’ theory goes like this. There are 150 federal electorates, but Labor has 48 of the 50 “most diverse”. Here “highly diverse” has the strangest meaning – the largest majority of 1st- and 2ndn.d– Race refugees.
You can’t win “democratic” government unless you satisfy these “diverse” voters, Kos says. Too bad if the overall voting at the national level wants less immigration or an immigration freeze.
But Australia should follow Canada.
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At least as much as Trump, Australians should worry about Albanians. Recently I remarked that he would follow Gillard, written off as a “reformer” when she leaves office. Even if that bequeaths mass migration, low housing affordability, high energy costs, high levels of schooling, real wages stuck at their 2011 optimum, and continued productivity failures.
I contend that the social and economic contest in Australia is less about “left” Labor/Greens versus “right” Coalition/Tales and more about the top 20% versus the rest. They signal excellence when collecting opportunities. 21StThe identity politics of the century replaces the 20th.ThEquality politics of the century.
With One Nation polling through the roof, the party political response is not to steal its thunder and cut immigration. Instead, disenfranchised voters get to hear Albanians’ imperialist demands to lower the “temperature” and mind their “harmony”.
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In the Australian Treasury, our real GDP growth forecast for calendar year 2025 is 2.6%. But this is due to a massive population growth of 1.6% in the calendar year 2025.
For Canada, the equivalent GDP figure was “only” 1.7% but population growth was close to zero.
For Treasurer Chalmers, this artificial 2.6% means he is “winning”. If urban voters struggle to afford a roof over their heads and can’t realistically buy or rent a house apart from a life mortgage, they should tell someone who cares.
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If you remember the 2020-21 COVID border freeze, that pandemic was an unexpected opportunity for Australia to end mass migration. Of course, the Liberals and then Labor did the exact opposite to “catch up”.
The 2022-25 net migration numbers of Albanians reduced the road record by 60%.
Now the Iran war is another sudden opportunity to control our immigration. Yet the big immigration story is Iran’s soccer team.
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The upcoming federal budget is expected to continue to quarantine our rapidly growing population from economic and productivity “reforms.”
