Lies, Damned Lies, and the Legacy Media

To paraphrase the famous saying, there are lies, damned lies, and the legacy media. Especially when they know their chosen Goldstein is right.

When Pauline Hanson barnstormed the National Press Club last week, you just know the legacy media pundits had their pre-written scripts ready to begin swingeing the One Nation leader as soon as they left the free buffet. Their jeremiads since have been entirely predictable.

This piece from the ABC is typical.

Pauline Hanson began her National Press Club speech last week by saying the key issues were immigration and housing.

To support the idea of linking them, Hanson quoted the Housing Industry Association (HIA): “The underlying problem we have is trying to fit 11 million households into 10 million homes.”

But that’s not true. The latest count from the ABS is that there are 11,495,200 homes in Australia, while the number of households is 10.9 million.

Except that Hanson was quoting the HIA precisely.

The actual quote from the HIA's chief economist, Tim Reardon, was: “Australia is essentially trying to fit 11 million households into 10 million homes.”

So, Hanson’s quote is true: she quoted exactly what the source she cited said. They’re also pettifogging over what is clearly intended as rhetorical flair, as if that somehow completely disproves the point. But, as Reardon himself elaborated:

Those numbers are “not intended as a literal count of households and dwellings”.

“Rather,” he said, “it is a simple way of describing a housing market where underlying demand for housing exceeds the number of homes available in the locations, types and price points that people wish to occupy.”

That the ABC is reduced to quibbling about an error margin as if it’s some kind of gotcha, shows what desperate liars they really are.

It gets worse.

In the press release that contained the quote Hanson used, the HIA also said: “Australia needed to build more than 250,000 homes last year just to keep pace with demand growth and begin reducing the housing shortage. Instead, we commenced construction of just 196,000 homes.”

The ABC claims this is not true, either. But their rebuttal never actually addresses her argument. And they end up conceding that she (or rather, the HIA) is in fact correct.

Reardon says that the figure of 250,000 is an estimate of how many houses need to be built each year to improve affordability – that is, to generate a surplus that keeps prices down.

Much further down the article, the ABC grudgingly concedes even more of Hanson’s point.

The housing shortage, mainly caused by the surge in immigration between 2022 and 2024, will take years to clear at the current level of housing surplus, even if Treasury’s long-term migration forecast of 225,000 a year proves correct.

What’s more, even if the nation’s governments and housing industry bodies succeed in making housing more affordable, most people own a house and don’t want it to stop appreciating in value.

And on top of that, the tax reforms in the budget to help improve housing affordability have made everybody unhappy, even after last week’s changes, because they increase the tax on business gains as well as property taxes.

So, Pauline Hanson is substantially correct on every point. No wonder the ABC are so infuriated.