One of the most important causes of Australia’s housing affordability crisis is excess immigration over many years, and the problem with immigration is that the government doesn’t control it.

Most of Australia’s migrant intake has been outsourced to universities and colleges, who see new arrivals as customers rather than migrants.

They use “education agents” in other countries to recruit them, paying sales commissions to spur them on.

And those agents are mainly selling visas, not education. They’re a bit like legal people smugglers.

The foundations of this were laid on July 1, 2001, when two changes were quietly made to it by the Howard government.

Philip Ruddock was Immigration Minister.

Incidentally, that was nine months after the 50 per cent discount was applied to capital gains tax, leading to an immediate surge in investor demand for housing.

The foreign student changes took a few years to get going, but they certainly did get going: Between 2005 and 2008 Australia’s overall migrant intake tripled to more than 300,000 a year.

The two changes on July 1, 2001 were: First, entry from “non-gazetted” countries, including India, Pakistan and China, was opened up and streamlined, having previously been almost impossible – an echo of the White Australia Policy – and second, there was a more transparent and open pathway to permanent residency for foreign students.

An Immigration Department official at the time, Abul Rizvi, writes in his book Population Shock, that the changes were designed to “slow the rate of population ageing and push back the day that deaths would start exceeding births in Australia”.

But he goes on: “The changes were so small that the media........

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