By Stephen Saunders
Leaving Anthony Albanese as a world outlier, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has stymied Canada’s population growth to ease the housing pain. Sigh, his Australian visit was all framed around “middle powers” vs Trump.
Australia endures historic highs in mass migration and historic lows in housing affordability. But the elite narrative is that mass migration never happened, or even if it did, it can’t be well controlled, it has little effect on housing, nor is it the business of voters.
Defying these fairy stories, Canada has slashed net migration, inducing population growth near zero for the year 2025 (the bold target was negative 0.2%).
Visibly, this has reduced asking rents.
Albanese Australia is currently the world outlier, as a wealthy Western nation persisting with decades of over-migration, up to and exceeding 1% of the population per annum. Among the Anglosphere or Five Eyes nations, Australia’s the only one that hasn’t eased the rental/housing pain by curbing mass (including poorly vetted and illegal) immigration.
With the Iran war, our proudly renewable-energy “net zero” government sweats over necessary bulk-oil imports and soaring fuel prices.
Thus far, there’s no cautionary talk of pausing the unnecessary bulk-migration imports, up to 1,500 persons daily or near 1,000 in net-migration terms. There should be. More so if you take a pessimistic view of Epic Fury’s outcomes.
Aussie world-exceptionalism invokes 101 silly reasons why the Canadian and Anglosphere experiences can’t be emulated and aren’t even discussed.
With or without Trump’s Iran strike, it was a given; Carney’s visit wouldn’t change this.
What Canada did
How surprising was Canada’s U-turn? For nigh on a decade, Justin Trudeau had pummelled his nation with historic immigration highs and housing grief. Population growth briefly hit 3% per annum, more the metric of an African nation, not a world top 10 economy.
This was Canada in early 2024
Trudeau’s unpopular Liberal party faced a drubbing in the upcoming federal election. But in mid-2024, he turned on a dime.
His opponent promised to be even tougher on immigration. That unravelled, with the eminently electable Carney replacing Trudeau, and anti-Trump sentiment doing the rest. Similar sentiment boosted Albanese at Election 2025.
Canada says 2026 will see another large reduction in its population of temporary residents, resulting in a second consecutive year of minimal population growth.
By 2027, Canada has estimated its population growth rate might reset to a bit below 1%. Virtually all this growth would be driven by immigration. Why even do that? Might that not sour housing affordability again?
Mind you, even 1% population growth is too “low” for the Australian Treasury. No matter who was in government, the mandarins would resist that.
Carney visits Australia
Trudeau and Albanese had a bromance, the former praising the latter’s “immense” climate courage, whatever that means. “Growing up in public housing”, Anthony generates “hope and inspiration”. You won’t get that level of effusion from Carney.
Arriving here in early March, he surfed the kudos of his Davos address. Which argued great powers were now weaponising “economic integration” or globalism. Middle powers should respond, not with isolation, but with their own “variable geometries” of integration.
His speech to a joint session of Australian Parliament waxed similar. With the global order allegedly breaking down, we two middle-power “Commonwealth realms” should band together. To ice the cake, we’d have a bilateral on critical minerals.
In conference with our house-trained press gallery, Carney was always going to get questions about bad old Trump (can we trust him), the Five Eyes security alliance, and the Iran war.
Fulminates ABC, what about the rules-based order? What use is it if it’s never enforced? responds The Australian.
Of course, Carney spoke diplomatically of Trump. Canada and the US have one of the largest bilateral trading relationships in the world, with 70% of Canadian exports going south into the US.
From our embedded media, Carney was never going to get questions about immigration and housing, which highlighted his glaring difference from Albanese. Like:
How could Canada turn immigration around so quickly, with little social unrest and not that much backbiting from powerful vested interests?
Hosting large numbers of international students and other non-permanent residents, how could you cut through the visa complexities, and effectively net immigration to zero?
Since 2024, rentals are a much easier afford for average Canadians, is there anything in this for Australia?
Australia won’t follow Canada
The same week Carney visited, ANU prof. Jill Sheppard slipped and made it uncommonly plain why our governing classes scorn the voter majority fed up with massive migration.
One need not worry about the “median” voter, she sniffed, or “whatever is happening in their [tiny] brain”. That would be too “populist”.
As it happens, it’s more fun to diss voters and lie to them. Since Albanese’s failure with The Voice, the sledging has reached unpleasant extremes. Bondi made it worse.
For mutual gratification of the governing classes, the 101 repetitive immigration fibs include:
Net migration isn’t policy, we can’t control it, it’s lower than the Coalition, it’s Dutton or even Abbott’s fault, we’re catching up for COVID, we’re fixing the visa backlog, we’ve got migration back to “normal”, migration is down 40%, there are too many visa categories to control, and anyway migrants are a net gain to the budget.
We need migrants to build houses and help us get to net zero, migration keeps us young, our immigration is primarily skilled, we’ll deal with the wage theft, migrants are being scapegoated, migration doesn’t impact the housing situation, housing is always a supply-side problem, migrants help us to decentralise, and multiculturalism is a unique Australian advantage.
Emissions growth and environment can decouple from population growth, we must win the global talent war, migrants are carefully vetted, we’re shifting from temporary to permanent immigration, we’re building social cohesion, we must take in climate refugees, blah blah.
To tie it all together, pro-Labor pollster Kos Samaras promotes his insidious antipodean theory of why Australian “democracy” would or must lean towards high immigration.
As reported gleefully in Indian Sun, Samaras’s theory goes like this. There are 150 federal electorates, but Labor holds 48 of the 50 “most diverse”. Here “most diverse” has a most peculiar meaning – the biggest majorities of 1st- and 2nd-generation migrants.
Says Kos, you can’t win a “democratic” government unless you appease these “diverse” electorates. Too bad if nationally the voting aggregate wants low immigration or an immigration pause.
But Australia should follow Canada
At least as much as Trump, Australians should worry about Albanese. Recently I remarked, that he will quite likely follow Gillard, written up as a “reformer” when he leaves office. Even if he bequeaths mass migration, low housing affordability, high energy costs, highly stratified schooling, real wages stuck at 2011 levels at best, and the continuing productivity fail.
The societal and economic contest in Australia, I claim, is less about “left” Labor/Greens vs “right” Coalition/Teals and more about the top 20% versus the rest. They signal virtue while hoarding opportunities. 21st-century identity politics supplants 20th-century equality politics.
With One Nation polling through the roof, the party-political response isn’t to steal its thunder and slash immigration. Instead, disenfranchised voters get to hear Albanese’s imperial demands for them to lower the “temperature” and mind their “cohesion”.
At the Australian Treasury, our real GDP growth is estimated at 2.6% for calendar year 2025. But that’s propelled by huge population growth of probably 1.6% in calendar year 2025.
For Canada, the equivalent GDP figure was “only” 1.7% but the population growth was close to zero.
For Treasurer Chalmers, that artificial 2.6% means he’s “winning”. If citizen voters struggle to afford a roof over their heads and can’t realistically buy a house as distinct from a life mortgage or afford to rent, they should tell someone who cares.
If you recall the 2020-21 COVID border freeze, that pandemic was an unexpected opportunity for Australia to wind back mass migration. Of course, Liberal and then Labor did the exact opposite, to “catch up”.
Albanese’s 2022-25 net-migration tally dwarfed the daunting Rudd record by 60%.
Now the Iran war is another sudden opportunity to curb our immigration overreach. Yet the big immigration story is Iran’s football team.
Expect the upcoming federal budget to continue to quarantine our rapidly growing population from the economic and productivity “reforms”.