The Housing Shortfall Is A Supply Failure

Pauline Hanson told the National Press Club migration has driven Australia into a housing crisis. She brought real numbers. Net overseas migration of more than a million people over three years. Rental vacancy near one per cent. A median city rent around $680 a week. More than 250,000 households waiting for social housing.

The pain behind those numbers is real. People are shut out of homes near their work, their family and their church. Young adults live in childhood bedrooms into their thirties. Older women, the fastest growing group facing homelessness, sleep in cars. None of this is invented, and none of it should be waved away.

Then her argument breaks. Hanson points at the migrant. The facts do not support her, and the faith she invokes runs against her. Scripture is direct about blaming the stranger for a wound the comfortable have made.

The Pain Is Real, The Blame Is Wrong

Start by granting what is true. The rental market is brutal. A queue past a quarter of a million households is a moral emergency. Around 130,000 people sleep rough on any given night. A Christian response begins by refusing to look away from that.

The accusation is the problem, not the grief. When a politician names the newest arrival with the least standing as the cause, the accusation lands on the person with the fewest defenders in the room. Scripture has a name for blaming the powerless for the failures of those in power. It calls this bearing false witness against your neighbour (Exodus 20:16, NRSVue). The migrant family in the rental queue is your neighbour, beside you in the queue, not ahead of you by some trick.

The queue is real. The cause is not the person beside you in it.

What The Numbers Say

The accusation also fails on the evidence, and the evidence matters, because false witness is still false even when it feels true.

Over the decade to 2024, the number of homes grew faster than the population, and prices still rose around 70 per cent. During the pandemic, Australia shut its borders, migration turned negative, and prices rose about 20 per cent anyway (Masters, 2025). Remove the migrant almost entirely and the crisis kept climbing.

The reason sits closer to home. A house sells for what the buyer borrows, so cheap credit lifts prices without building a single extra home. Tax settings rewarded buying the house already standing rather than building the next one. Builders went broke in record numbers, not from weak demand but from fixed-price contracts and rising costs, which is a supply failure, not a population one. Migration adds to the pressure at the edges, mostly on rents, because new arrivals rent first. It is one strand among several, not the cause.

So the honest finding is plain. The shortfall is a failure of supply, tax and public investment. The stranger did not build this failure. We did.

Do Not Oppress The Stranger

The Hebrew scriptures return to one command more often than almost any other. Protect the foreigner. ‘You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt’ (Exodus 22:21, NRSVue). The word translated alien is the Hebrew ger, the resident foreigner who has come to live among you. It names the person Hanson points at.

The command repeats because the memory behind it is hard-won. Israel knew displacement from the inside. ‘You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt’ (Deuteronomy 10:19, NRSVue). The duty to welcome rests on the experience of having needed welcome.

Jesus sharpens it to a test of the nations. ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me’ (Matthew 25:35, NRSVue). The Greek word for stranger there, xenos, sits at the root of the word we now spell xenophobia. The tradition Hanson claims puts the stranger at the centre of its judgement, and not as a threat to be repelled.

Woe To Those Who Join House To House

If scripture protects the stranger, it also names the real culprit with force. The prophets aim their anger at the hoarding of houses and land.

‘Ah, you who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is room for no one but you’ (Isaiah 5:8, NRSVue). Micah names the same sin and the people it crushes. ‘They covet fields, and seize them’ (Micah 2:2, NRSVue), and houses too, taken from the householder and the people.

Read this against the modern market. Tax settings turned housing into a vehicle for accumulation, where the comfortable buyer adds a second and third property, claims the loss against wages, and waits for the tax-free gain. The home becomes an asset to stack, not a place to live. Isaiah saw the result three thousand years early. Room for no one but you.

The Land Is Not Yours To Hoard

The deepest claim runs underneath the law itself. ‘The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine’ (Leviticus 25:23, NRSVue). With God, the text says, the people are only tenants and resident aliens. The Jubilee vision built restoration into the economy, so housing and land would not concentrate forever in the hands of a few. Whether ancient Israel kept the Jubilee is debated. The moral logic is not. Housing is not a pure commodity to be cornered. It is shelter held in trust.

Set this beside what the states did. Governments sold high-value public housing in job-rich, transport-rich suburbs and banked the proceeds. At Millers Point in Sydney, the sales raised around $680 million, 543 tenancies were lost, and fewer than 1,900 replacement homes had been built years later (Masters, 2025). Vulnerable tenants went to the outer edges, far from work and community, while the premium homes went to the market. This is the opposite of Jubilee. It is the permanent sale of the land, and the displacement of the poor to fund a budget line.

Sold from the job-rich inner city. The tenants went to the city’s edges. (Source: Sahlan Hayes for the BBC.)

How A Nation Is Judged

The test scripture sets is not the size of the migration intake. It is the treatment of the displaced. ‘Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house’ (Isaiah 58:7, NRSVue). The fast God chooses is the housing of the person with nowhere to go.

In New South Wales alone, 70,257 households sat on the social housing register at the end of May 2026, more than thirteen thousand of them in the priority category for people already homeless or escaping violence (NSW Department of Communities and Justice, 2026). Jesus said what we do for ‘the least of these who are members of my family’ we do for him (Matthew 25:40, NRSVue). A nation with a queue this long, sleeping in cars and on couches and on concrete, is being judged by the only measure the gospel offers.

The Comfortable Choice

So why the stranger, when the evidence points elsewhere? Because blaming the stranger is cheap. It asks nothing of the comfortable. It does not touch the tax breaks of the property investor, the planning rules of the wealthy suburb, or the public homes the states sold. It moves the cost onto people with no seat at the table.

The prophets knew this move. They reserved their sharpest words not for the poor and not for the foreigner, but for the mighty who robbed them and then dressed it up as righteousness. Naming the migrant protects the people who benefit from scarcity. It is the comfortable choice, and it is the wrong one.

House The Neighbour

The gospel does not ask who to keep out. It asks whether the person without a home is housed. This reframes the whole debate. The question is not how to shrink the queue by turning people away at the border. It is how to build, how to reform the tax settings rewarding the hoarding of homes, and how to restore the public housing the states sold.

Australia has the wealth to house its people. The shortfall is a choice, made and remade across years of comfortable policy. Scripture will not let us blame the stranger for it. The land is not ours to hoard. The neighbour is not ours to turn away. The homeless poor are to be brought into the house, and the failure to do so belongs to us, not to the newest arrival in the queue.

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Sources

Hanson, P. (2026, June 17). Address to the National Press Club [Speech]. National Press Club of Australia, Canberra.

Masters, J. P. (2025). Australia’s housing crisis: Exposing the migration scapegoat and charting a path forward. Journal of Community Applied Research, 1(5). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17214826

NSW Department of Communities and Justice. (2026). Social housing waiting list data. https://dcj.nsw.gov.au/about-us/families-and-communities-statistics/social-housing-waiting-list-data.html

Biblical quotations from the New Revised Standard Version, updated edition (NRSVue).