Barnaby Joyce has blamed Australia’s migration surge for intensifying the housing crisis, declaring the Albanese government’s handling of population growth “completely botched” as One Nation doubles down on its controversial plan to slash net overseas migration.
The former Nationals leader, now a One Nation MP, says Australia cannot solve housing affordability simply by building more homes while continuing to add hundreds of thousands of people to the population each year.
Joyce has also moved to shut down confusion over One Nation’s headline migration figure following days of contradictory explanations from within the party.
His position is that net overseas migration should not exceed 130,000 a year — and that figure is not intended to become 230,000 after another 100,000 migrant workers are added.
‘It won’t go past 130,000’
Speaking to News Corp, Joyce was unequivocal about the number.
“The net overseas migration — the NOM — is 130,000,” he said.
Joyce stressed that One Nation was not merely aiming for the figure while leaving open the possibility of significantly exceeding it.
“It won’t go past 130,000,” he said, adding that the party would conduct a comprehensive stocktake.
The clarification matters because One Nation has spent much of the past week defending itself against claims that its migration policy is considerably less restrictive than voters had been led to believe.
Joyce says housing debate ignores demand
Joyce’s central argument is that Australia’s housing debate has concentrated too heavily on supply.
Governments routinely talk about increasing construction, releasing land, accelerating approvals and bringing more tradespeople into the country.
Joyce says that addresses only one side of the equation.
The other is the number of people competing for those homes.
“People always talk about the supply factor in houses, but they don’t recognise the demand factor,” he said.
For Joyce, rapid population growth means governments are effectively chasing a moving target.
Even if construction increases, housing shortages can persist if population growth continues to outstrip the capacity of the market to accommodate it.
Joyce compares migration surge to ‘two Gold Coasts’
To illustrate his argument, Joyce pointed to the more than one million people added through overseas migration during the years following 2022.
He compared that increase with adding the population of roughly two Gold Coasts to Australia.
But his argument was not simply about population.
Those additional people require housing and also use roads, hospitals, schools and other infrastructure.
Joyce argued Australia had effectively added “two lots of Gold Coasters” without simultaneously constructing the equivalent of two new Gold Coasts.
His contention is that population growth was allowed to accelerate much faster than the infrastructure and housing required to support it.
The latest ABS numbers show migration remains a major source of growth
Official Australian Bureau of Statistics data provides important context for Joyce’s argument.
Australia’s population reached approximately 27.8 million at the end of December 2025.
It increased by 412,500 people, or 1.5 per cent, over the preceding 12 months.
Net overseas migration contributed 301,000 of that increase.
Natural increase — births minus deaths — contributed another 111,500.
That means overseas migration accounted for the majority of Australia’s population growth over the year.
But migration has already fallen from its post-pandemic peak
There is another side to those figures.
Australia experienced an exceptional migration surge after international borders reopened following the pandemic.
Net overseas migration subsequently began declining.
The latest annual figure of 301,000 is therefore considerably below the extraordinary levels recorded during the post-COVID rebound.
That decline is relevant when assessing claims that migration is continuing to accelerate unchecked.
The political argument has increasingly shifted from whether migration is falling to whether it is falling quickly enough.
Albanese says Australia is heading towards 225,000
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says the government’s migration trajectory is moving towards net overseas migration of 225,000 in 2027–28.
He has described that figure as the destination of Labor’s current migration strategy.
That would still leave a substantial gap between the government and One Nation.
Joyce and Pauline Hanson are advocating 130,000.
If both sides delivered their stated numbers, One Nation’s figure would be 95,000 lower each year.
Albanese says the opposition parties are throwing around numbers
The Prime Minister rejects the suggestion that reducing migration is as straightforward as announcing a NOM number.
He argues Australia requires skilled migration to fill essential workforce shortages, including in aged care, agriculture and construction.
That last category creates an obvious difficulty for any government attempting simultaneously to slash migration and accelerate housing construction.
More homes require more workers.
If Australia does not have enough construction workers domestically, reducing skilled migration too aggressively could make it harder to increase housing supply.
Albanese has accused both One Nation and the Coalition of throwing around migration numbers without sufficiently explaining how they would be achieved.
Joyce says tradies are not the problem
Joyce rejects the idea that One Nation’s reduction would prevent Australia from recruiting the workers it genuinely needs.
He argues skilled tradespeople are not responsible for the bulk of the migration numbers he wants reduced.
Instead, One Nation is targeting areas including international students, their dependants and temporary graduate visa holders.
The party also says it wants a more targeted skilled migration program.
That distinction is essential to Joyce’s argument: reduce overall population growth while preserving migration that addresses genuine workforce shortages.
There is a catch: NOM is not simply a visa quota
The increasingly heated political debate over 130,000 versus 225,000 disguises an important technical problem.
Net overseas migration is not simply the number of foreign nationals the government decides to admit.
The ABS calculates NOM according to movements in and out of Australia’s resident population.
Broadly, a person is added to the population when they remain in Australia for at least 12 months during a 16-month period.
A resident who spends the required period overseas can similarly be subtracted.
That means NOM includes movements governments cannot completely control through visa settings.
Australians themselves are included in NOM
This is one of the most commonly misunderstood aspects of the debate.
Australian citizens can contribute to net overseas migration when they return after living abroad.
ABC analysis published on Wednesday noted that overseas migrant arrivals during 2024–25 included approximately 64,000 Australian citizens.
Another 53,000 were New Zealand citizens.
Australians do not need a visa to return home, while New Zealand citizens have distinctive migration arrangements.
A government can tighten international student or skilled visas, but it cannot impose an ordinary immigration cap on Australian citizens returning to Australia.
That makes a hard NOM cap difficult to guarantee
The technical definition creates an important question for One Nation’s promise.
If 130,000 is an absolute ceiling on NOM rather than a target, the government would need to continually adjust the migration categories it can control in response to population movements it cannot.
For example, an unexpected increase in Australians returning from overseas could push NOM higher unless fewer people were admitted through controllable visa streams.
Likewise, an increase in Australians leaving the country could reduce NOM without any change to government migration policy.
That does not make reducing NOM impossible.
It does mean an exact annual ceiling is more complicated than simply issuing 130,000 visas.
One Nation has already been caught in that distinction
The complexity exploded politically during David Farley’s appearance on ABC’s Insiders.
Farley, One Nation’s newly elected MP for Farrer, initially reiterated the party’s 130,000 NOM position.
But he then discussed migrant workers needed in agriculture and other sectors.
Asked about additional workforce programs, Farley agreed they could amount to at least another 100,000 people.
That created an apparent figure of about 230,000.
Farley conceded the raw number would therefore be “not too different” from Labor’s.
Hanson immediately intervened
Pauline Hanson moved quickly to reject that interpretation.
She insisted One Nation’s position remained a substantial reduction in net overseas migration to 130,000.
Joyce subsequently did the same.
He said there would not be another 100,000 migrants simply added on top of the 130,000 figure.
Joyce characterised Farley’s explanation as a “rookie mistake”.
The episode nevertheless exposed how difficult it can be to translate a politically powerful migration slogan into the technical mechanics of population statistics.
The PALM scheme adds another complication
The Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme has become part of the dispute because regional employers depend heavily on workers from Pacific nations and Timor-Leste.
Many work in agriculture and other industries facing severe labour shortages.
Joyce argues short-term PALM workers should effectively be set aside when considering the party’s NOM argument because people who do not remain long enough to meet the ABS residency rule do not become part of NOM.
But PALM participants who do satisfy the duration test can affect the figures.
Again, the distinction depends not merely on visa category but on how long an individual is actually present in Australia.
Housing is where the political argument becomes powerful
For most voters, however, the technical definition of NOM is unlikely to be the central concern.
Housing is.
Australia has struggled with a chronic shortage of homes while rents and purchase prices have increased dramatically in many cities and regional centres.
Higher population growth adds demand to that constrained supply.
At its simplest, more households competing for a limited number of homes put upward pressure on prices and rents.
That gives Joyce’s argument an intuitive political appeal.
Migration is not the only cause of the housing crisis
But treating migration as the sole explanation would oversimplify a much larger problem.
Australia’s housing shortage reflects years of insufficient construction and multiple structural constraints.
Planning rules, land release, construction costs, infrastructure, financing, labour shortages and building-sector productivity all influence supply.
Interest rates affect borrowing capacity.
Tax policy can alter investment incentives.
Population growth then interacts with all of those constraints.
Reducing migration can reduce demand growth, but it does not itself build additional homes or resolve the underlying barriers preventing enough homes from being constructed.
Joyce says Albanese got the sequence wrong
Joyce’s criticism of the government ultimately comes down to sequencing.
He argues Australia accepted rapid population growth without first ensuring the country possessed the housing and infrastructure capacity to accommodate it.
In that formulation, the problem was not simply immigration itself.
It was allowing population to increase before housing, hospitals, schools and roads were ready.
That is why he describes the government’s approach as “completely botched”.
Migration has become One Nation’s strongest political territory
The renewed focus is hardly accidental.
Recent research consistently shows migration is particularly important among One Nation supporters.
While cost of living remains the dominant concern across the Australian electorate generally, immigration stands out as one of the issues that most clearly differentiates Hanson voters from supporters of other parties.
That gives One Nation a powerful incentive to keep the issue at the centre of national debate.
It also makes the Farley controversy unusually damaging.
A party can more easily survive confusion over a peripheral policy.
Confusion over its signature issue is considerably more dangerous.
The argument is now about whether voters believe the number
Joyce’s latest intervention therefore serves two purposes.
First, he is making the case that rapid migration has intensified Australia’s housing shortage and that reducing demand must accompany attempts to increase supply.
Second, he is trying to remove any remaining ambiguity around One Nation’s position after a difficult week.
The message he wants voters to hear is simple: 130,000 means 130,000.
The implementation would be considerably more complicated.
Net overseas migration includes students, skilled workers, temporary visa holders, returning Australians, New Zealanders and other movements across the border. Cutting it sharply is possible through policy changes, but guaranteeing an exact ceiling requires much more than announcing a number.
Housing has turned migration from an abstract debate into a household issue
That may ultimately explain why the argument is resonating so strongly.
Migration statistics once appeared remote from everyday life for many Australians.
The housing crisis has changed that.
When renters compete at crowded inspections, young Australians struggle to accumulate deposits and families watch property prices move beyond their reach, population policy becomes tangible.
Joyce is betting voters will connect those experiences directly with migration.
Albanese is betting Australians will accept a more complicated argument: that migration must fall, but skilled workers are also needed to build homes, care for an ageing population and keep essential industries functioning.
With One Nation promising a 130,000 ceiling and Labor pointing towards 225,000 by 2027–28, migration and housing are rapidly becoming inseparable political battlegrounds — and Joyce’s “two Gold Coasts” attack is designed to make that contest impossible for the government to ignore.
