Why the Indian Diaspora is Not to Blame for Australia’s Housing Crisis
By Jitendra Deo
Chief Executive Officer
JD Group Australia
The Australian housing crisis is the barbecue stopper of the decade. Renters are queuing around the block for mouldy apartments, first-home buyers are being perpetually locked out of the market, and political pressure is boiling over. In the desperate search for a quick fix, a familiar and highly convenient target has emerged: immigration, and by extension, Australia’s rapidly growing Indian diaspora.
It is a seductive narrative for those seeking simple answers to complex problems. More people arriving means fewer houses available, right? It sounds like simple math. But this reductionist logic is not just intellectually lazy; it is a dangerous misdirection. The Australian housing crisis was not packed in the suitcases of recent arrivals from Bengaluru, Punjab, or Gujarat. It is a homegrown disaster, brewed over three decades of systemic policy failure, tax distortion, and political cowardice.
To understand the true roots of this crisis, we must look away from the arrival gates of Sydney and Melbourne airports and instead examine the nation’s tax code and planning laws. For over twenty years, structural incentives have transformed the humble Australian home from a fundamental human right into a speculative financial asset.
The real architects of the crisis are policies like negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount. These mechanisms heavily incentivized multiple-property ownership for domestic investors, artificially inflating demand and locking a generation of young people out of homeownership. While investors were handed tax breaks to hoard existing properties, governments at all levels simultaneously walked away from their responsibility to build social and affordable housing. We stopped treating housing as infrastructure and started treating it as a stock portfolio.
Add to this the chronic bottlenecks in construction, restrictive local zoning laws that empower “NIMBY” (Not In My Back Yard) councils to block medium-density urban infill, and the monopolistic practices of land banking by major developers. Successive governments have watched this supply-demand imbalance widen since the late 1990s. Blaming a skilled IT professional or a nursing student arriving in 2024 for a structural deficit that began a generation ago is completely absurd.
The reality is that the Indian diaspora, now Australia’s largest overseas-born demographic, is walking into the exact same crisis as everyone else. We are the renters paying exorbitant weekly rates. We are the young families saving desperately for a deposit while the goalposts continuously shift.
More importantly, migrants are an integral part of the solution. The Australian economy relies on targeted migration to offset an aging population and fill critical skills shortages. Migrants are overrepresented in the very industries essential to building our way out of this deficit, from civil engineering and architecture to logistics and essential trades. Halting migration to “fix housing” would be akin to cutting off a leg to lose weight. It would trigger a recession, stall major infrastructure projects, and collapse the higher education sector, all without laying a single new brick for affordable housing.
Why, then, is the diaspora being blamed? Because scapegoating the “other” is politically expedient. It demands nothing of our leaders. It requires no courageous tax reforms, no bruising battles with wealthy local councils over housing density, and no massive public investments in social infrastructure. Pointing the finger at migrants allows policymakers to shrug off decades of their own neglect and channel the very real economic anxiety of the public toward a visible minority.
As a community, we must push back against this narrative firmly and factually. The Indian-Australian community is not a burden on the housing market; we are active, tax-paying contributors to the Australian economy and society. We must join forces with all Australians locked out of the housing market to demand genuine reform. We need equitable tax policies that favour first-home buyers over seasoned investors, streamlined zoning laws that allow for sensible urban growth, and a massive revitalization of public housing.
The housing crisis is a national emergency that requires a national, policy-driven solution. Blaming the newest arrivals will not build a single home, but it will fracture the multicultural fabric that makes modern Australia so successful. It is time for our leaders to stop looking for scapegoats and start doing the hard work of structural reform.
