Billionaire Meriton founder ‘Highrise’ Harry Triguboff is the master of manipulation.
For decades, Triguboff has persuaded politicians to implement policies favourable to his financial interests, including mass immigration.
The interview below from 2006 illustrates this point, with Triguboff arguing that Sydney’s population needed to reach 20 million by 2050, with Australia’s population at 150 million.
“You go north and we have all these reserves and you go south and you have all the reserves, and they are the best part of the coast. That is crazy. We should be building on this area”, he said.
“If they want to see trees, they can go to Katoomba, there are plenty of trees there”.
In 2010, Triguboff repeated the call, urging an Australian of 100 million.
“I’d like to see 100 million, because I believe we will have many things to do here besides drilling holes and selling coal”, he said.
“It will all have to be developed”.
In 2017, Triguboff was quoted in The AFR dismissing concerns that there might be an oversupply of apartments, responding, “I will simply bring in more migrants”:
In October 2022, Triguboff ordered the federal government to open the immigration floodgates, claiming migrants are needed to build houses for migrants:
“Our problem is we don’t have enough workers”, he said, calling for a lift in immigration. “I say we have to bring a lot of people here who want to work”.
Triguboff said that Chinese purchasers had been big buyers of local property and made up 70% to 80% of his buyers during the boom.
As such, his prosperity now depended on local Asian buyers who had migrated.
In December 2024, Triguboff said that Australia needs more immigration to prop up the construction industry:
“We need more immigration, because if we have no migrants, it’s very, very difficult [to build] … Life is so difficult in so much of the world that everybody would love to come here. Not to destroy us, they just want to come to live here. It’s a good place to live”.
This week, Meriton Group posted an article on Twitter (X) whereby Triguboff argued that “immigration is not to blame for the housing crisis”, instead pinning the blame on planning and regulation.
Twenty-five years ago, when all the economic doomsayers were screaming, “over-supply,” I could never understand it…
The government tells our people that by reducing immigration numbers it creates more opportunity for Australians in regards housing.
We have a massive underlying housing issue and it has little to do with immigration.
Immigration has been very good for the Australian economy, and more importantly, these people come and support our flailing health, building, hospitality, transport and infrastructure sectors. People who are happy to do the jobs our people choose not to do.
The government needs to address the underlying causes for our lack of housing.
Property developers are tied up in so much red tape, government costs and delays, they can no longer afford to build…
Whether it is Labor or the Coalition, the government has a lot of work to do in regards to the housing crisis. Reducing immigration numbers is not going to cut it…
Triguboff is talking his book, as usual.
Australia had one of the highest rates of housing construction in the world over the decade to 2023.
Australia also has one of the highest numbers of construction workers per capita, as illustrated below.
The reason why Australia has experienced a chronic housing shortage is because it has grown its population far more aggressively than other nations via mass immigration:
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ (ABS) population clock, the nation’s population has swelled by 8.7 million people since the turn of the century, representing a growth rate of 46%.
This is the fundamental reason why Australia has not built enough homes.
The solution to the housing crisis, therefore, must involve cutting immigration to a level that is compatible with the nation’s capacity to build housing and infrastructure.
Heck, even the Housing Industry Association admitted that the government’s failure to control immigration is a “systemic policy failure” that “compounds the challenge of delivering sufficient housing”.
Policymakers must ignore vested interests like Harry Triguboff and set policy in the interests of the ordinary residents, who are being forced to live like battery chooks by the ‘Big Australia’ mass immigration policy.
Otherwise, Australia is the real estate version of a narco-state, where the economy is run to enrich billionaire property tycoons like Highrise Harry.
