So Peter Dutton wants to have a housing election, and his housing policy is to cut immigration to 140,000 a year and cap foreign student visas.

That’s not a housing policy, it’s just a cut in immigration.

That doesn’t mean it’s a terrible idea, since housing has become unaffordable as a result of too much demand chasing too little supply. But making it all about one of the many things that have caused it kind of betrays the real agenda, which is to whip up a bit of the old anti-immigrant mouth froth.

John Howard had the right idea. He blew the immigration dog-whistle with stern treatment of refugees while quietly doubling immigration to suppress wages – from 140,000 a year, ironically the number Dutton wants to get it back to.

Rudd, Gillard, Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison all kept the level of immigration historically high. Between the 2007 election and the start of the pandemic in 2020, net permanent and long-term migration averaged 240,000 per year.

Over the four years since the pandemic began in March 2020, net permanent migration has averaged 200,000 per year – it was a total of minus 40,000 between April 2020 and November 2021, and then 840,000 have arrived since then, which is a record annual rate of 373,000.

But to the extent that Australia’s housing crisis is caused by immigration, it was the decade between 2005 and 2015 that set us up for a crisis.

At the same time, the variable........

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