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By Stephen Johnson, Economics Reporter For Daily Mail Australia 15:19 29 Mar 2023, updated 01:16 30 Mar 2023

Concerns are growing over how Australia will cope with a record level of permanent migrants entering the country as the nation continues to battle a housing and rental crisis.

The Albanese Government is reportedly planning for a total of 650,000 new migrants to settle here by mid-2024.

Combined with estimates for next year, this means a total of 1.2million extra people will be living Australia in June next year compared to five years earlier.

The floodgates are being opened to skilled migrants, international students and those coming for family or humanitarian reasons, even though Sydney and Melbourne - home to more than half of those who have come to Australia in the last 20 years - have ultra-low one per cent rental vacancy rates.

SQM Research managing director Louis Christopher said surging immigration would make it even harder for people looking for a home to find accommodation, with weekly rents in Sydney soaring by 25 per cent during the past year compared with 22 per cent in Melbourne.

'We still remain very concerned for the situation in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane where most international arrivals first land,' he said.

'The surge in net overseas longer term and permanent arrivals relative to new residential property supply is ensuring extremely tight rental conditions remain with our two largest capital cities.'

Australia's rental crisis is so critical that some families are being forced to live in tents because there is a severe shortage of long-term accommodation.

Kailaeb Vescio-Stanley, who has been sleeping in a Brisbane park with his dad for more than two weeks, told Sunrise host David Koch about the impact it was having on his life.

'I see a lot of people doing it rough, and the majority of the people I see doing it rough in parks are actually teenagers,' he said on Wednesday.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson was so fed up she tweeted her disgust at plans to see net overseas migration surge to 650,000 - which is the amount coming during 2022-23 and 2023-24 combined.

Australia's two biggest cities settled 56 per cent of new migrants between 2000 and 2021.

Sydney became home to 29.3 per cent of new migrants, compared with Melbourne's 26.6 per cent share.

Perth took 12.1 per cent of migrants, compared with Brisbane's 9.7 per cent and Adelaide's 5.6 per cent share.

Regional Queensland, which includes the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast, took in 5.8 per cent of migrants.

This includes 350,000 for this financial year, following an influx since Australia reopened in December 2021.

'Labor's record high immigration is literally forcing Australian families to live on the streets and winter is coming,' she said.

'We have an unprecedented housing and rental crisis. We dont have enough homes for everyone in Australia.

'Australia is in serious trouble.'

The accommodation shortage problem is widespread with Sydney having a rental vacancy rate of just 1.3 per cent compared with 1.1 per cent in Melbourne, 0.4 per cent in Perth and 0.5 per cent in Adelaide.

Brisbane's rental vacancy rate stands at just 0.8 per cent, SQM Research data showed.

Sydney and Melbourne housed 56 per cent of Australia's new migrants between January 2000 and August 2021, new Australian Bureau of Statistics data showed.

Australia's net annual immigration in the year up to September 2022 stood at 303,700 people - a 15-year high - taking the overall population above 26.1 million.

This was the biggest overseas increase since late 2008, and included skilled migrants, family reunions and international students.

The number of immigrants was also significantly higher than the October budget forecast of 180,000 for 2022-23, and the 235,000 level projected for 2024-25.

1881: 2.3 million

1918: 5 million

1959: 10 million

1981: 15 million

1991: 17.4 million

2004: 20 million

2013: 23 million

2016: 24 million

2018: 25 million

2022: 26 million

Australia's population surpassed the 25million mark in August 2018, 24 years earlier than predicted in Treasury's 2002 Intergenerational Report.

The 26million milestone was passed in 2022, even though Australia remained closed to immigration in 2020 and 2021 because of the pandemic.

The immigration surge is also coinciding with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese facing obstacles to his plan to build 30,000 homes under its Housing Future Fund.

Labor's plan to build new social and affordable homes during the next five years has met opposition from the Greens, whose support the government needs in the Senate to get the legislation passed.

A bill to establish the $10billion fund is being put to a parliamentary vote this week but Brisbane-based Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather, who holds the minor party's housing portfolio, is opposed to the program investing money in shares.

'Our point is for the millions of people in this country who need an affordable home, for the hundreds of thousands on the wait list for social housing; their lives shouldn't be dependent on whether or not a gamble on the stock market goes well - imagine doing that for schools or hospitals?' he said.

Migrants to Australia who have already moved their lives Down Under fear the latest massive surge in immigration will throw the current housing crisis into fresh chaos.

Estimates show that 950,000 people will be added to Australia's population from overseas in the five years leading up to June 2024, with 350,000 in this financial year alone.

It will be the biggest-ever surge in net population growth over two years at 650,000 people, overshadowing the previous record of 577,000 in 2008 and 2009 under Kevin Rudd.

But even recent migrants to Australia are questioning where the newcomers will live.

Colombian Alejandro Atehortua, 27, spent two months looking for a home until she was forced to share a single room with her friend in a unit with four other people in Redfern in inner-city Sydney.

'I still have to pay $250 a week for that - we're paying $1,400 a week for the three-bedroom unit with bills on top - and we all share one bathroom,' she said.

'Everything is old and the kitchen and toilet are all old-fashioned and unrenovated. It's just a ridiculous situation - but you don't have any choice.'

MsAtehortua is a fully-qualified dentist in her native Colombia but can only work as a dental assistant in Australia because of strict local medical standards.

Australia's two biggest cities settled 56 per cent of new migrants between 2000 and 2021.

Sydney became home to 29.3 per cent of new migrants, compared with Melbourne's 26.6 per cent share, the Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showed.

Perth took 12.1 per cent of migrants, compared with Brisbane's 9.7 per cent and Adelaide's 5.6 per cent share.

Regional Queensland, which includes the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast, took in 5.8 per cent of those new migrants.

She combines that with a job as a disability carer to make ends meet while living in Sydney, recently named the second most expensive city in the world for property.

But she said her South American accent has proved a magnet for racists, which she encounters almost every day.

'When people hear my accent and see my skin, or even when they hear my name, it happens' she said. 'My English is not good and sometimes people are just rude.'

But despite the drawbacks, there's still nowhere else in the world she'd rather be after living in Australia for the past four years.

'I really like it,' she admitted. 'It's really safe here compared to my country. I love it. I'd really love to stay here.

'I want to become a dentist here, but it's really hard and really expensive and so is getting permanent residency.'

Cousins Gagan Malhotra, 23, and Amid Bhadia, 27, are international students working as concierges at an apartment block in Pyrmont near the CBD which is packed every weekend with people hoping to rent one of the units.

And they discovered a darker side to the housing crisis on Tuesday when they saw council staff clear away desperate homeless people from a small parkland area opposite their work.

'They were normal people - not down-and-outs - who were living in tents because they couldn't find anywhere to rent,' said Mr Malhotra. 'They can't find a house.

'We need people coming in to Australia because there are jobs to fill - but we can't afford the people. There's nowhere for them to live.

'Even the properties that are available are so expensive - people are paying $900 a week for two rooms because there's nothing else available.

'The number of homeless people is rising in the country as a result.'

But they had nothing but praise for Australia and said they'd never personally suffered any racism since arriving in the country four years ago.

'The only racism I've ever seen is towards Aboriginal people,' said Mr Malhotra.

'We were in a bar once and the white people there were discriminating against the Aboriginal people there, telling them it was not their country.

'They were very angry. It didn't make me feel good because in our country we don't do that racism thing.

'In India we have multicultural people: all caste, creeds everywhere.'

The pair said when they first arrived before the Covid pandemic, they struggled to find work.

'We had to search a lot and they were paying a lot less money,' said Mr Malhotra.

'The bosses were exploiting people and paying under the minimum wage because new migrants didn't know any better.

'Now though companies like UberEats and Menulog are very good for new arrivals. They support them very well and they can live a decent reliable life thanks to them.

'This is a regular job for people now and it pays well enough - but not for rent. These people are still having to share maybe three people to a room to get by.'

For chai caf waitress Prerana Thapa, 19, the hardest part of moving from Australia has been leaving her parents behind in Nepal, and cleaning up after herself as a result.

'Moving here hasn't been that easy,' she told Daily Mail Australia at the chai caf where she works in Harris Park in western Sydney.

'It's sometimes been tough for me without having my parents doing everything for me.

'I didn't do housework at home - my parents would do it for me, so that's been hard.

'But otherwise everything here is good. The Australian boys are adventurous, which I like - with their surfing and watersports and things like that.

Girlboss Meryanne Sammak, 32, may have Lebanese heritage through her parents - but even just a visit to her family's homeland has little appeal.

'My mum came here when she was two or three and my dad was born overseas,' revealed the beauty business boss with a upmarket salon in Belmore in Sydney's west.

'Because we're born here, we don't feel like migrants. In my mind we're fully Australian.

'But we keep in touch with our heritage through food and religion - all the kind of stuff that brings us together.

'I've never been to Lebanon. It would be beautiful, I'm sure - but life just gets ahead of you.'

She said she would welcome the coming influx of migrants to the country.

'Everyone started somewhere,' she said. 'Everyone's come from somewhere.

'So I'm very accepting of it.'

'It's not as exciting as Nepal though. Everyone is so busy and not as free as they are in Nepal - but I like it here.

'People are very welcoming and it's very multicultural so you can try different foods and meet different people...and the beach lifestyle here is amazing.'

Three generations of Greek migrants admitted they still feel like they don't belong, more than 50 years after their family first arrived in Australia.

'In Greece, we're the Australians and in Australia, we're the Greeks,' admitted new mum Sabrina Mantzios, 27, from Belmore in Sydney's west.

'I see myself as more Australian and can barely speak Greek. I think with each generation the cultural contact gets a little bit more lost and left behind.'

Her motherNatasha Halias, 53, grew up on a tobacco farm near the Victorian border where her migrant parents worked before a brief return to Greece until they settled in Sydney.

'They came her for the opportunity to make some money and originally intended to return to Greece for good - but the life here was so good and Greece was so tough, they decided to stay in Australia,' she revealed.

'There was just so many more opportunities here compared to Greece in the 60s and 70s.'

She said the sudden rise in migration would put pressures on the the new arrivals as well as the nation's housing stock - but she said the first generation of migrants were always a tough bunch.

'They don't have anyone to fall back on - my daughter here knows she will always have a roof over her head with us if she ever needs it,' said Ms Halias.

'But new migrants don't have that. They work very, very hard to make lives for themselves when they arrive - and that's good for the economy.

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Sydney and Melbourne taking the most migrants as immigration set to surge by 650,000 - Daily Mail