The decision follows a raft of actions since 2023 to end COVID-era concessions for foreign students and workers in Australia that helped businesses recruit staff locally while strict border controls kept overseas workers out.

Concerns over immigration

“There are about 10% more international students in our universities today than before the pandemic and about 50% more in our private vocational and training providers,” Education Minister Jason Clare told a press conference, while adding, “The reforms are designed to make the international student sector better and fairer, and this will set it up on a more sustainable footing going forward.”

International education is one of Australia’s largest export industries and was worth A$36.4 billion ($24.7 billion) to the economy in the 2022-2023 financial year. However, polls have shown voters’ concerns about large influxes of foreign students and workers putting excess pressure on the housing market, making immigration one of the potential major battlegrounds in an election less than a year away.

Net immigration hit a record high in the year to September 30, 2023, surging 60% to a record 548,800, higher than the 518,000 people in the year ending June 2023. Australia boosted its annual migration numbers in 2022 to help businesses recruit staff to fill shortages after the COVID-19 pandemic brought strict border controls, and kept foreign students and workers out for nearly two years.

However, a new report asserts that there is no basis for blaming international students for an undersupply of housing or rising rental fees in Australia. Research commissioned by the Student Accommodation Council, a peak body for the country’s purpose-built student accommodation sector (PBSA), found no alignment between the return of international students to Australia and rents increasing.

Instead, the report mentions, “Rents began rising in 2020, when there was no international student migration and most students had returned home. Between 2019 and 2023, median weekly rent increased by 30%. Over the same period, student visa arrivals decreased by 13%.”

The research further found that international students make up only 4% of all renters in Australia. Domestic students compose 6.2%, and the remainder are non-students. Also, the majority of international students do not live in the houses. Only 3% live in detached houses suitable for couples or families, while 74% live in PBSA (Purpose Built Student Accommodation) close to universities.

The Student Accommodation Council attributed the housing crisis in Australia to “a complex web of supply and demand drivers, including the rise of smaller and solo-person households, intrastate migration, rising construction costs, planning delays and a trend to re-purposing second bedrooms into home offices, amongst others.”

The study has pointed out a great need for increasing the supply of PBSAs, since vacancy rates in major Australian cities are currently around 1%, and rental prices have been climbing for months.

The Student Accommodation Council also mentioned that looking at the pipeline of new PBSA currently (7,770 new beds), there will not be enough supply to ease pressure on the rental market from international students by 2026. That would only be accomplished if there were 84,000 beds ready by that time.

Provinces feel the pinch

New data has revealed that the province of Victoria is grappling with an unprecedented property crisis, with more people in housing stress than any other part of Australia. Housing advocates have urged the government to urgently act on social housing, pointing out that the state needs over 6,000 new homes each year for the next decade.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reported that “the top 10 months on record for people in housing stress visiting specialist homelessness services all belong to Victoria.”

“Victoria’s numbers are critical, with approximately 30% more individuals in housing stress and seeking assistance compared to New South Wales or Queensland. This is the face of Victoria having the lowest amount of social housing as a proportion of total housing stock in Australia, with just 2.9% of dwellings being public or community housing,” CityHub reported.

“These unprecedented levels of housing stress will increase homelessness unless we act urgently to build more social housing,” Council to Homeless Persons CEO Deborah Di Natale told the media.

Post-COVID housing stress has been especially intense in Queensland. Brisbane property prices have climbed by 65% since the beginning of the pandemic, almost doubling the Australian capital city average (34%).

According to new data released by CoreLogic in June 2024, Brisbane now has the second-most expensive housing in the country, behind Sydney. Prices rose by 1.4% in May, with the median property price hitting $843,231. Across the state, new tenancy rents have gone up by 45% in just four years. Adjusted for inflation, that’s a 23% increase in real terms, much more than the residents’ income growth.

Soaring rents have squeezed people on lower incomes particularly hard. As per the City Futures Research Centre, UNSW Sydney, the share of new lettings at rents low-income households can afford has slumped from 23% to 10% of all private tenancies since 2020. And less than 1% of available Queensland rentals in March 2024 were affordable to a single person earning minimum wage or a pensioner couple. These conditions are pushing some people into homelessness, with “tent cities” appearing across Brisbane.

To combat this, the provincial government has started a flurry of constructive housing policymaking. Queensland has begun to reverse a long-term decline in its social housing stock, apart from boosting homelessness funding and services. However, the sector called “Social Housing” has been in a long-term decline across Australia. Investment has been minimal since the 1990s. By 2021, social housing was down to barely 3% of all occupied dwellings in Queensland.

However, in the past five years, due to the increasing state investments, the number of social housing dwellings has begun to grow. The Queensland government pledged in early 2024 to add 53,500 social housing units by 2046, expanding the stock of public and community housing by 73%.

Compatible with this target, a medium-term goal is to expand annual output to 2,000 units by 2027-28, a fourfold increase in the late 2010s. Adding 2,000 social housing units a year by the late 2020s would reverse the sector’s historic decline. If sustained over time, it would begin to expand social housing back towards 5% of all housing, where it once was.

All eyes on policymakers

The 2024-25 Federal Budget has unveiled a series of initiatives aimed at bolstering housing supply and supporting the construction sector. The government will collaborate with states, territories, and local governments to introduce reforms enhancing housing supply and affordability as part of the National Housing Accord over the next six months.

Key measures to incentivise housing supply include reducing the withholding tax rate for eligible managed investment trust fund payments attributed to newly constructed properties. Additionally, the capital works tax deduction (depreciation) rate for newly constructed build-to-rent developments will increase from 2.5-4% per year, potentially unlocking 150,000 new rental properties over the next decade.

The National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation’s liability cap will be raised by $2 billion, facilitating more lending to community housing providers for social and affordable housing projects. Furthermore, $350 million over five years has been committed under the National Housing Accord to support the delivery of 10,000 affordable homes by states and territories.

The government is also in discussion with states and territories to make an additional 300,000 TAFE and vocational training places fee-free, focusing on industries like construction to develop a skilled workforce.

The Anthony Albanese-led government’s task is straightforward: To deliver “1.2 million new, well-located homes” and to achieve this target, the authorities need to build 240,000 new homes each year, or 20,000 a month. However, the last time Australia got even close to building 240,000 new homes in a single year was 2017, when the country built 223,563 housing units.

As per property analyst Cameron Kusher, in 2017, the interest rate back was a pleasant 1.5%. In 2024, the same ratio stands at 4.5%. Even though new homes get built at a rapid pace, who will buy them in a high interest rate regime? Plus, construction companies, especially the mid-tier types that build medium-density apartment buildings, are shutting down their shops. By March 2024, according to ASIC, 1,913 construction companies had so far gone bust, three times as many as at the comparable point in 2021/22.

Banks aren’t financing these companies the way they used to. Some of these ventures also got involved in fixed-price projects during COVID, and now can’t afford to implement them. Also, due to the high interest rate regime, building materials have become about a third more expensive than they were before the pandemic. There is a significant shortage of tradies, partly due to a decrease in apprenticeships. In 2012, there were 376,800 apprenticeships, but by 2020, that number had fallen to just 134,800. Additionally, Australia’s tradie workforce is ageing and overworked.

Poorest Australians hit hardest

The 2023 Rental Affordability Snapshot by Anglicare surveyed 45,895 rental listings, only to find affordability crashing to record lows. The social advocacy organisation is now calling for more social housing to end the shortfall of 640,000 homes, apart from advocating for better protections for renters, including an end to no-cause evictions and limits on unfair rent increases, and tax reforms to make housing more affordable.

Although post-COVID factors like Aussies’ preference for more space, the return of international migrants, and rising interest rates, can be blamed for the above-mentioned distressing trend, for Rachel Ong ViforJ, ARC Future Fellow & Professor of Economics, Curtin University, the rental affordability crisis pre-dates COVID, as affordability has been steadily declining for decades, with successive governments failing to make shelter more affordable for low-to-moderate income Australians.

“At the lower end of the rental sector, the growth in the supply of social housing persistently lags behind demand, trending at under one-third the rate of population growth. This has forced growing numbers of low-income Australians to seek shelter in the private rental sector, where they face intense competition from higher-income renters. At the upper end, more and more aspiring home buyers are getting locked out of home ownership,” Ong ViforJ noted.

As per another study, more Aussie households with higher incomes are now renting out their spaces. Households earning $140,000 a year or more (in 2021 dollars) accounted for just 8% of private renters in 1996. By 2021, this tripled to 24%.

According to Ong ViforJ, this trend is crowding out lower-income households who are now facing a shortage of affordable homes to rent.

While current policies focus on supply, more work is needed including fixing labour shortages and providing greater stock diversity. However, the housing affordability challenge is not solely a supply problem. There is also a need to respond to the supercharged demand in the property market.

“An overheated market will undoubtedly place intense pressure on the rental sector because aspiring first home buyers are forced to rent for longer, as house prices soar at a rate unmatched by their wages. Yet, governments continue to resist calls for winding back the generous tax concessions enjoyed by multi-property owners,” Ong ViforJ commented.

The main help available to low-income private renters, the Commonwealth Rent Assistance scheme, has been poorly targeted with nearly one in five low-income renters who are in rental stress deemed ineligible, while another one in four receive it despite not being in rental stress.

Experts are pitching the theory of filtering: A market-based process by which the supply of new dwellings in more expensive segments creates an additional supply of dwellings for low-income households as high-income earners vacate their former dwellings.

Proponents of filtering argue building more housing anywhere, even in wealthier ends of the property market, will eventually improve affordability across the board because lower-priced housing will trickle down to the poorest households. However, the persistent affordability crisis faced by low-income households and the rise in homelessness are crucial signs of filtering not working well as a parameter to produce lower-cost housing.

As per Leith van Onselen, Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super, Australia has one of the largest construction workforces in the world relative to its population. Citing independent economist Tarric Brooker, Onselen stated that Australia completes more homes per capita than almost anywhere in the developed world. However, when the population is constantly growing at such a large rate, “even a world-beating level of construction still can’t keep up.”

Australia’s structural housing shortage has more to do with demand, and excessive levels of population growth, than an inability to build housing. To prove his point, Onselen cited the massive rise in Australia’s net overseas migration (NOM) from the mid-2000s. In the 15 years to 2004, Australia’s NOM averaged 91,000 a year. But in the 15 years to 2019, Australia’s NOM averaged 220,500 a year, representing a 142% increase in annual NOM.

Even over the last four calendar years (2020–2023), Australia’s NOM has averaged 245,500 per year. Population growth across the major cities has been extreme, with Melbourne (1.7 million) and Sydney (1.35 million) experiencing the strongest growth in numbers terms and Brisbane (60%) and Perth (59%) recording the strongest growth in percentage terms.

According to Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) projections, Australia’s population will grow to 43.9 million people by 2071, representing an increase of around 16.5 million from the current population of 27.4 million. As per Onselen, this is the equivalent of adding another Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Hobart, and Canberra to Australia’s current population in only 48 years.

“It would also require the construction of at least 7.5 million homes accounting for demolitions to accommodate the projected population surge. It is also worth pointing out that it took Australia 212 years to reach a population of 19 million people in 2000. Yet, the population is officially projected to grow by another 24.9 million people in only 71 years! Melbourne (9.5 million) and Sydney (8.4 million) are projected to have larger populations than Australia’s entire population in 1950,” he noted further, while concluding that the country will never be able to build enough homes as long as its population grows like “an out-of-control science experiment.”

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“Cellphones are a drug, and kids are wired to get addicted,” Idaho’s Boise County Sheriff Deputy Dave Gomez told USA Today over the phone.

Gomez has been a school resource officer for the past 11 years and says he has seen the problems with students and smartphones get worse every year.

In July 2024, the Los Angeles Unified School District Board, overseeing approximately 1,000 schools, approved a resolution to create a policy banning student use of cellphones and social media platforms in public schools. This decision joined a growing trend across American districts, states, and cities. Although the policy is set to be implemented in 2025, it will not take effect until then.

Finding the rationale

Recently, US Surgeon General Dr Vivek Murthy called for warning labels to be added to social media platforms, similar to the health warnings that appear on tobacco and alcohol products.

Jennifer Jolly talked about a case from Wilmington, North Carolina, where a person named Leigh Hicks allowed her daughter to use an iPhone just before the sixth grade. Hicks used Apple’s parental controls and set strict ground rules around her daughter’s iPhone. Still, within a year, her daughter, in the words of Hicks, “Was completely and totally consumed by that smartphone and social media, and it absolutely changed who she was. She got maybe like 23 write-ups in school. She would sneak into my room at night and use my face or my finger to unlock the phone in the middle of the night. It was a horrible experience.”

Hicks had to get rid of the phone. Now, her almost 16-year-old daughter is starting 10th grade with a Lively Jitterbug Flip2 phone, a device marketed mainly to senior citizens for simple calls and texts.

Virginia-based first grade teacher Allison Graves also regretted giving her daughter an older-model iPhone just before the seventh grade. Despite her locking down her daughters’ phones, apart from setting Apple screen time limits and turning on content, privacy and app download restrictions, the child managed to have TikTok on it.

Graves eventually replaced the device with a Bark phone built specifically for kids. The phone’s uniqueness lies in the fact that it can be modified with features as kids mature.

Many schools from Seattle to St. Louis are adopting a no-cellphone policy, and several states are also implementing measures to keep phones out of schools. Even states such as New York and California are considering similar policies. As of August 2024, 11 states either restrict cellphones in schools or have policies that encourage schools to do so from the beginning of the school day until the end.

Nearly three-quarters of high school teachers and one-third of middle school teachers in America are now saying that smartphone distractions are becoming a significant problem in their classrooms, according to a Pew Research Centre survey released in June.

Another study released last fall by Common Sense Media shows that 97% of kids use their phones at school. The average student gets about 60 notifications during school hours in a single day and spends 43 minutes, about the same length as a full class period, on their phone.

Extent of the menace

Nearly three-quarters of US high school teachers say smartphones are a major distraction in the classroom, according to a Pew Research poll conducted in November 2023.

“High school teachers are especially likely to see cellphones as problematic. About seven in 10 (72%) say that students being distracted by cellphones is a major problem in their classroom, compared with 33% of middle school teachers and 6% of elementary school teachers,” the survey reported.

As per the Pew report, high school teachers are especially likely to see cellphones as problematic. About seven-in-ten (72%) say that students being distracted by cellphones is a major problem in their classroom, compared with 33% of middle school teachers and 6% of elementary school teachers.

Overall, 82% of American teachers say their school or district has a cellphone policy of some kind. Middle school teachers (94%) are especially likely to say this, followed by elementary (84%) and high school (71%) teachers.

However, as the study covered the views of a few American teenagers (back in 2023), 95% of the respondents said they have access to a smartphone. Even as some policymakers and teachers see downsides to smartphones, these teenagers tend to view the devices as a more positive than negative thing in their lives overall.

“Seven-in-ten teens ages 13 to 17 say there are generally more benefits than harms to people their age using smartphones, while three-in-ten say the opposite. And 45% of teens say smartphones make it easier for people their age to do well in school, compared with 23% who say they make it harder. Another 30% say smartphones don’t affect teens’ success in school,” the report noted.

Hearing out the experts

Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and author of “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” said his research has identified a strong link between smartphone use and declining mental health.

“To the teachers and administrators I spoke with, this wasn’t merely a coincidence. They saw clear links between rising phone addiction and declining mental health, to say nothing of declining academic performance,” Haidt mentioned, as he continued, “A common theme in my conversations with them was: We all hate the phones. Keeping students off of them during class was a constant struggle. Getting students’ attention was harder because they seemed permanently distracted and congenitally distractible.”

In February 2024, British communications regulator Ofcom found nine in 10 youngsters in the United Kingdom own a mobile phone by the time they are 11. The regulator further said more should be done by social media companies and caregivers to protect children from harmful online content.

Daniele Harford-Fox, principal of Guernsey’s Ladies College, located in Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands in the English Channel near the French coast, told the BBC, “I absolutely think mobile phones, in under-16s particularly, should be banned in schools. Social media companies are creating algorithms that are keeping us addicted to our phones and we are seeing this dramatic rise in mental health and wellbeing problems in young people. So for me, there is no question that for eight hours of the day at least I can protect children from that exposure and I am going to do it.”

Harford-Fox added that since controls had been put in place at her college, things took a positive turn, with students experiencing “more play and connection” between themselves.

Liz Coffey, executive principal of the Secondary School Partnership in Guernsey, said the island’s four States-funded high schools have enacted a similar policy.

Dr Carmel Corrigan, Jersey’s Children’s Commissioner, however, is among those who think the time for banning smartphone technology has passed.

She said that there’s a “huge amount of positive things” smart technology can be used for, from improving “safety, educating and forming social contacts”.

Does banning smartphones in schools work?

Marilyn Campbell, professor of early childhood and inclusive education in the Faculty of Education at Queensland University of Technology, and Elizabeth Edwards, associate professor in education at the University of Queensland, Australia, carried out a “scoping review” of published and unpublished global evidence for and against banning mobile phones in schools. The findings were published in March 2024.

The research covered 1,317 articles and reports, including dissertations from master’s and PhD students, written between 2007 (when the smartphone was first introduced) and May 2023. The authors also identified 22 studies that examined schools before and after phone bans. These studies covered schools in approximately 12 countries.

From their initial research, Campbell and Edwards said they found only weak evidence for the benefits of banning smartphones in school.

However, Policy Exchange, a British educational think tank, published a study in May 2024, titled “The Case for a Smartphone Ban in Schools,” a study which reportedly showed a clear correlation between an effective phone ban and better school performance.

Opinions on how to address the impact of smartphones and social media vary considerably. Some oppose an outright ban on using smartphones in schools, saying removing critical communication devices from schools will not address the root of the problem.

“I don’t think bans solve the thing that we’re trying to solve, which is trying to get our kids to understand when it’s appropriate to use phones and when it’s not,” Keri Rodrigues, president of the US-based National Parents Union, told Al Jazeera.

However, Daisy Greenwell, co-founder of Smartphone Free Childhood in the United Kingdom, a parent-led organisation that focuses on the responsible use of smartphones with children, said she backs curbs on smartphone use.

“We feel like childhood is being colonised by Big Tech in a way that we’ve not, as a society, spoken about with each other enough,” Greenwell told Al Jazeera, as she added, “Teachers are telling us the biggest problems that they face in school come from the smartphones and the social side and social problems that it causes amongst the pupils.”

While experts and education sector stakeholders argue that banning smartphones in schools can mitigate distractions and enhance focus, the move may also deprive students of valuable learning resources and essential communication tools.

“School’s the same for 120 years, where kids go nine to three, have long holidays, sit at desks and have to regurgitate what the adults tell them to learn, basically all over the world. We’re blaming kids for falling academic standards, we’re blaming the rise in mental ill health, we’re blaming the rise of cyberbullying. Oh, well, it all must be the fault of the mobile phone,” Marilyn Campbell said.

As per the experts, a balanced approach, involving regulated use and clear guidelines, may be the most effective way to harness the benefits of smartphones while minimising their drawbacks. The general recommendation of Campbell and Edwards, who carried out the scoping review in Australia, was to leave it to individual schools to determine smartphone use and to focus on helping children use smartphones positively.

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