Evidence Australia’s housing shortage is not a “supply problem”.

June 11, 2026

Housing Minister Claire O’Neill gave a speech at the National Press Club last week in which she waxed lyrical about how Australia’s housing shortage is fundamentally a supply problem.

Below are some highlights of Clare O’Neil’s claims:

“The way to ensure Australians can afford a place is to build enough houses for everyone. Since the turn of the century, we’ve been building about half as many houses per person as we did in the decades after the Second World War. Not because the population has grown, but because housebuilding has fallen dramatically” …

“Our government is unapologetically delivering. If we want housing to be more affordable for Australians, we need to build, build, build”…

“We are a strongly pro-supply government because we see that ultimately the answer to affordability in our country is that we have to build more houses. Build more houses, build it faster”…

Ironically, under the Albanian government, actual housing construction is lower than at the peak of the last decade:

Evidence Australia’s housing shortage is not a “supply problem”.

Even so, the construction rate – 172,700 in 2025 – is higher than the construction rate recorded between 1980 and the mid-2010s.

The difference, of course, is that net overseas migration (NOM) more than doubled in the mid-2000s, meaning Australia needed to build significantly more housing to keep pace with strong population growth.

And NOM has never been more under the Albanian government, which has seen more than 1,100 net immigrants per day during its time in office:

Yet, Claire O’Neill didn’t bother to mention the word “immigration” in her hour-long National Press Club address. It was all “supply, supply, supply.”

The following chart by Alex Joiner at IFM Investors illustrates why Australia’s housing shortage is actually a “demand problem”:

If the federal government had not doubled the NOM and the pre-2005 population growth trend had continued, Australia’s population would have fallen by 3 million.

That’s 3 million fewer people who will need housing.

Ironically, as Home Affairs Minister in February 2023, Claire O’Neill admitted that Australia’s migration program was not working in the best interests of Australians:

This “unlimited, unplanned” There was a migration program. “Source of Big Problems” And there was “Huge economic and social consequences”.

“In 2007 we had about one million temporary migrants in Australia, including visitor and transit visas, today that number is 1.9 million. This astonishing change in direction has occurred without any real policy debate or discussion. It has not been through thoughtful planning and strategy, but through negligence and continental drift”. Minister O’Neill said at the time.

That was more than three years ago and Labor has presided over the biggest migration boom in the country’s history, led by an explosion in temporary visas, 700,000 more today than in January 2023, O’Neil laments: