Tony Burke, do you have a spare room? If so, I’d love to know who you’re planning to move in.
Actually, you might have a few spare rooms going. According to the parliamentary register of interests, you have six properties, four of them investments. Plenty of rooms there.
According to the Home Affairs Minister, spare rooms are where the housing crisis really lives.
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Not in the hundreds of thousands of people arriving in Australia every year. In your spare bedroom. In your empty nest. In your perfectly reasonable wish not to share a bathroom with someone you’ve never met.
It’s one of the most tone-deaf things I’ve heard a minister say in a long time. And it sums up everything wrong with the Albanese government. They simply don’t listen to, or understand, voters.
Here’s what Burke told the National Press Club last week.
“Now Australians have every right to be able to decide how many people they want to have living per household, but that also means anyone who looks at the migration program and wants to somehow say it was their (the migrants) fault — no, Australians have made a decision about how many people they want per household.”
“Post‑Covid, after we’d all lived very closely to each other, a whole lot of people decided they wanted fewer people around than had previously been there, and that may continue as a trend.
“But immigration will need to be part of the solution to help provide some space for housing supply to catch up.”
So what exactly is he saying? That we brought the housing crisis on ourselves? That if we opened our doors, took in a boarder or two and squeezed a few more chairs around the dinner table, the problem would sort itself out?
Tell that to the 26-year-old still sleeping under the posters they put up at 14 because they can’t afford to move out of their parents’ home.
Or to people who simply cannot afford to buy or rent a home.
Labor’s last National Housing Supply and Affordability Council report found the number of adults per household has been rising, hitting 2.10 in July 2025, with adult children staying in the family home longer because of the cost of living and housing.
The council also argues that adults, not children, drive housing demand.
Kids don’t go out and rent flats. So when Burke leans on average household size falling from 2.9 in the Hawke years to 2.5 today, he’s using the number that suits him and ignoring the one his own advisers say matters.
Australians haven’t chosen more space. Plenty of them have had it taken away.
And even if some of us are living in smaller households, so what? If you work, save and pay off a mortgage, shouldn’t you get to decide who lives under your roof? Or if you want to stay in the house your kids grew up in?
That’s not a policy failure. That’s a life.
Nobody should need a minister’s blessing to live alone, and nobody should be made to feel they’re part of the problem for doing it.
Meanwhile, the numbers Burke would rather we didn’t look at are sitting right there.
In the 2025 financial year, Australia’s population grew by 436,300 people, about three-quarters of it from net overseas migration, while the number of homes grew by just 173,800. You don’t need an economics degree to see the gap.
Then there’s the contradiction at the heart of his speech. Burke said the housing shortage “is not caused by immigration”. Then, in the same speech, he said migration needed to “soften up” so that housing could catch up.
I’m not sure what he is saying. If migration isn’t part of the problem, why is cutting it part of the fix?
Back in May, I wrote about Burke telling the India Link podcast that migration could help solve the housing shortage. Four months later, the line has shifted again.
First, migration was the solution. Now it’s not the cause, but it’s being cut anyway. And somewhere along the way, the blame has landed on us.
This is precisely why so many voters feel talked down to. For years they’ve been saying the same thing. Rents are too high. Houses are out of reach. Our kids can’t leave home. The roads are clogged, and you can’t get a GP appointment.
And the Government’s answer is to tell them it’s their fault for wanting a bit of room.
It’s no wonder people are drifting to One Nation. Not because they’ve all sat down and read Pauline Hanson’s policy platform, but because she at least sounds like she’s heard them.
Speeches like this one only prove her point.
AMP’s chief economist Shane Oliver put it well. Australians have made their choice about how they want to live, so the Government has to set migration levels that fit that choice, not the other way around.
He said Mr Burke had a “valid point” about household sizes, but that doesn’t mean the government hasn’t let immigration numbers run out of control relative to the number of houses we need.
“Very high immigration following the reopening of the country after the pandemic … has been a factor leading to a 50 per cent rise in house prices since 2020,” Dr Oliver said.
So Tony, about that spare room. When you’ve found someone to fill it, let us know how it’s going.
Until then, maybe stop telling Australians how many people should live under their roof, and start listening to the ones who can’t afford a roof at all.
