Tech CEO says Australia ‘shouldbe the richest country in the world’ in scathing assessment of policy failures
Australia ‘should be the richest country in the world’ butinstead is ‘f**ked’, according to a CEO who has delivered a brutal verdict onthe government’s failures.
Australia “should be the richestcountry in the world” but instead is facing the “mother of all cost-of-livingcrises”, according to a tech CEO who has delivered a blunt assessment of thegovernment’s widespread economic policy failures.
Outspoken Freelancer chiefexecutive Matt Barrie appearedon the EquityMates podcast last week for a wide-ranging discussion covering the housing market, mass immigration, energy policy and cost-of-living.
“The country is f**ked,” MrBarrie told host Bryce Leske.
“It’s not a functional society anymore. You need people tobe able to afford to buy housing and shelter in order to have a functionalsociety. In Sydney now the median house price is about $1.8 million, which ismathematically impossible for the average person to buy the average house.”
Freelancer CEO Matt Barrie on theEquity Mates podcast. Picture: YouTube
Mr Barrie said the cost of housing “cascadesinto everything”, including wages and grocery prices.
“We have blown the mother of allbubbles, which has led tothe mother of all cost-of-living crises, which has led to huge problems in adeterioration of society, culture and values of this country, through runningthe mother of all mass immigration programs,” he said.
“And the politicians have a lotto answer for, because it’s not really working out for people coming into thecountry, either.”
Australia’s population has ballooned to27.1 million people with 388,000net overseas migrants entering in the first nine months of the 2023-24financial year, according to figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics(ABS) last month.
The latest numbers guarantee the government will blow well past the 395,000 forecast from thisyear’s budget, after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese promised to wind backimmigration to “sustainable” levels.
A record number of more than one million migrants have entered Australiasince Mr Albanese took power in 2022, with India recently overtaking China asthe top source.
Mr Barrie argued that given the declining birthrates “thereis actually no demand for additional housing in this country”.
“Zero. Nothing. Zilch,” he said.
“Which is pretty shocking I thinkto most people given the fact they’re probably hanging on for dear life tryingto rent or pay their mortgage. The demand is entirely from a completelyout-of-control, unhinged and uncalibrated mass immigration program. A massimmigration program where some months we bring 100,000 people into the country… where in a country of 26million people, there are 2.4 million people on temporary visas.”
Australia’s population hasballooned to 27.1 million. Picture: Nikki Short/NCA NewsWire
He accused Australia’s politicians on both sides of operating along-running “Ponzi scheme”, where “house prices gently drift up and wages aregently suppressed” through immigration.
“Because the politicians don’treally know how to grow the economy and grow industry, or actually really doanything other than dig up raw materials out of the ground and ship themoverseas,” he said.
“You’re running mass immigrationinto a country where there’s no jobs, other than working for the Ponzi orworking for the NDIS.”
Almost one in three jobs created in the 12 months to February were linked to the $42 billion NationalDisability Insurance Scheme, research earlier this year found.
The federal government has soughtto rein in the cost of the out-of-control scheme, which has been plagued withrorts and claims of inappropriate expenditure such as cuddle therapy, crystals,vapes, concert tickets and even African safari holidays.
“We’re in a situation right now where we should be the richest countryin the world, and we were the richest country in the world in 1900,” MrBarrie said.
“For a while, Australia was agreat place to live and we had manufacturing, for example, as a substantialportion of the GDP of this country. We made cars, we made a bunch of differentthings. We had whole supply chains for various things. And then we went intothis path of just easy relentless growth where it was just house pricesdrifting up and shipping iron ore, coal, gas and gold overseas.”
It’s ‘mathematically impossible’for the average person to buy a house. Picture: Brook Mitchell/Getty Images
Mr Barrie then recited a litany of Australia’s vast naturalresources.
“You would think that a country with 1200 years of coal supply would bean energy superpower,” he said.
“You would think a country with 28 per cent of the world’s uraniumreserves would be an energy superpower. You would think a country with 20 percent of the world’s gas exports would be an energy superpower. You would thinka country with 3.46 people per square kilometre would have cheap land and cheaphousing.”
He added Australia was third in the world for production of cobalt,fifth in the world for the production of nickel, sixth in the world forproduction of copper and has 47 per cent of the world’s lithium production.
“[We should be] an energy and electronic and mechanical engineeringsuperpower,” he said.
“We control 56 per cent of the world’s iron or exports. You would thinkthat we would be a steel superpower. We have cheap energy, we haveabundant iron ore, and we [should] elaborately transform that to become anexport powerhouse. We should be the richest country in the world, full stop. Wehave everything.”
Instead, he continued, “we havethe greatest erosion of wealth in the developed world”.
“We have a cost-living-crisisthat is the mother of all cost-of-living crises,” he said.
“We have house pricing that isastronomically expensive — it doesn’t make any sense anywhere in the world. Aterrace house in Woollahra is the same price as a cruise ship. The root causeof this is the cost of land, and the root cause of that is mass immigration. Wehave the most expensive casual wages in the world but it’s not enough to liveon because people need somewhere to live.”
Australia should be an ‘energysuperpower’. Picture: Jake Nowakowski
At the same time, the country has an energy crisis “because we stupidlyare going down” the path to renewables.
“We can’t burn coal, but every single thing we’re diggingout of the ground is being burned by China, or is being burned by Japan,” hesaid.
“It’s all being shipped overseas and burned. We’re deluding ourselvesby thinking that we are doing anything by not burning it here.”
Meanwhile, Australia is one ofthe world’s top three exporters of liquefied natural gas (LNG) alongside the USand Qatar, but now faces what industry bosses havebranded the “bizarre”prospect of being forced to import gas from overseas in the face ofskyrocketing energy bills.
“Now we’re actually going to import gas in the easternseaboard, which is ludicrous, because we don’t have a gas reservation scheme,”Mr Barrie said.
“So we have a cost-of-livingcrisis caused by input costs. We have an energy crisis through very poor energy policy where we’ll export all the raw materials to build renewable generators, which are energy negative on the energy that’s consumed to get the materials out of the ground, which ship back to us and are unreliable. As a result, we can’t run a reliable manufacturing industry in this country.”
He noted manufacturing as a percentage of GDP in Australiahad fallen from as high as 19 per cent to 5.39 per cent, “which is on par with Botswana, where you go see cheetahs, it’s on par with Liechtenstein, which is a financial haven”.
“It’s about one third of the OECDaverage,” he said.
“Literally, this country is goingto hell on a hand basket. We are 93rd in the Harvard Economic Complexity indexin terms of the complexity ofthings that we produce, how sophisticated they are, and how much people canreplicate them. Our economy in terms of sophistication and complexity is on parwith Equatorial Guinea, where they don’t have a cinema in the entire country.”
He concluded, “It is all being caused by government policy, which canbe turned around on a dime.”
