Peter Dutton vows to free up 40,000 homes in migration, foreign student crackdown, but Libs silent on target

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton claims 40,000 homes will be freed up within a year of a Coalition plan to cut back on migration and foreign students, if elected.

Mr Dutton unveiled his housing crisis policy on Sunday while visiting a development in the outer Melbourne marginal seat of McEwen on Sunday.

It involves cutting the number of overseas students to 30,000 in 2026 and reducing permanent migration by 25 per cent.

The Liberal leader said he wanted to be the “government of home ownership”, which “restores the dream” for young Australians, labelling Labor as a “wet blanket” to the economy.

“I want to be the prime minister that restores the dream of home ownership,” he said.

“First and foremost in my mind (is) how can we help young Australians with affordability and accessibility to housing.

“Australians can’t afford a home. Rents have gone up, in part, it’s because international student numbers are up by 65 per cent.”

Mr Dutton said his student cap plan would axe more than 80,000 annual foreign student commencements, in what is expected to be a financial blow to the tertiary education sector.

The plan also includes tripling the cost of student visa applications to $5000 at Group of Eight universities.

The fee for remaining international students will rise from $1600 to $2500.

Additionally, a new $2500 charge will apply to students seeking to switch education providers.

Mr Dutton said while overseas students were a “great and lucrative market for universities”, he claimed Australia’s ratio of 42 international students to one building approval did not ”stack up” in a housing crisis.

Sunday’s announcement comes after the Coalition opposed legislation last year for tailored student caps, which Mr Dutton said was “messy” and didn’t work.

The percentage cap will apply to public universities, while a consultation process will be undertaken for regional campuses to ensure they’re not adversely impacted.

The Student Accommodation Council called for a rethink of the policy, saying universities should provide a first-year student accommodation guarantee instead of cutting student numbers.

“If governments want to remove any impact of students coming from overseas to study in the rental market, they should ask universities to help students find suitable student-only housing before they arrive in the country,” the Council’s executive director Torie Brown said.

Mr Dutton also blamed record migration for driving up housing costs, putting pressure on rental markets, and making first-home ownership difficult, proposing a 25 per cent cut.

“The Government has brought in a million people over the last two years, which is a 70 per cent increase than any other two-year period in our country’s history,” he said.

“We are cutting migration because we want to put Australians first. We want Australians into homes.”

But shadow housing minister Michael Sukkar refused to name a target for net overseas migration, promising “more to say” closer to the election.

“I think I can fairly easily say … it’s going to be significantly lower than Labor, but the precise net overseas migration number will be announced in due course,” he says.

“It’s one thing to set a target, but when you’re missing those targets by hundreds of thousands, which they have cumulatively, then those targets mean nothing… So we don’t believe Labor’s targets because they failed on every target.”

The targets he refers to are the forecasts by Treasury published in each budget and mid-year update.

The number has soared to record levels after Australia’s borders reopened after the pandemic because the amount of people leaving plummeted while backpackers and students who had been barred from the country for a few years poured back in.

Governments have few levers they can pull to get net overseas migration down, but limiting international students is in the mix.

Mr Dutton had previously announced Coalition would clamp down on foreign ownership and assist young people buying a home by allowing them to access $50,000 of their superannuation.

He said another Coalition plans which would assist the housing crisis would be deregistering the CFMEU, a union he claimed on Sunday had “doubled the cost of housing” in Australia through their industrial relations agenda.

The election campaign stop in the Labor-held marginal Victorian seat marked the second in five days after appearing at the same Donnybrook housing development on Wednesday.