At 31 August 2026 there were 2,878,973 people in Australia on temporary visas. Take out New Zealand citizens, visitors and crew, and 1,825,403 remain, all competing for the same rentals as everyone else. A report out this week found that a nurse who has spent her working life caring for cancer patients can now afford only a sliver of what is on the market. She is not the only one. Essential workers doing jobs nobody disputes the value of are losing the fight for a home before anyone even gets to the question of their pay. A pay rise would help her, but it would not shrink the number of people bidding against her for the same unit.
Who is this happening to?
Silvia Laing has worked as a nurse for more than forty years, and now supports cancer patients living at home in Albany, Western Australia. Holidays are gone and so are meals out, because what is left after paying the rent does not stretch to much else. That rent is $550 a week, split with her partner.
Is Silvia the exception?
No. Allie Thompson is a social worker in inner Brisbane. The new rental she is about to move into will cost $740 a week, close to half of what she earns.
How common is this?
Thompson and Laing are not unusual. Anglicare's annual Rental Affordability Snapshot, released this week, checked what each of sixteen essential occupations could actually afford to rent, right across the country.
Nursing came out at 1.1 per cent of listings affordable. Teaching managed 3.3 per cent.
Retail workers, cleaners and social workers did worse than both. Anglicare found fewer than 1 per cent of listings within reach of their pay.
Is this just a bad year?
No, and that is the part that should worry a policymaker more than a one-off report would. Anglicare checked 48,776 rental listings for this year's snapshot. Only three of the sixteen occupations it tracks got more affordable than they were in 2025.
Why has this got worse?
Because pay has not kept up with rent, and the gap is not small. Unit rents have climbed 44.3 per cent over five years, data from real estate analyst Cotality shows.
House rents are not far behind, up 36.6 per cent over the same five years. Wages, Anglicare executive director Kasy Chambers said, have grown at less than half that pace.
Who else is renting the home Silvia needs?
Silvia and Allie are not only competing against every other Australian looking for a lease. They are also competing against the 1,825,403 people on temporary visas counted at the last count, most of whom rent rather than own. Our housing capacity page has the fuller picture of what got built against how many people arrived looking for somewhere to live.
Would building more housing fix this faster than cutting the intake?
Anglicare wants the government to build or convert more social housing, and that is a real and separate need this piece does not dispute. It is also years away at the pace Australia currently builds, and a nurse paying $550 a week cannot wait for it.
What would help sooner is fewer people chasing the same existing lease. That needs no extra brick laid. It needs fewer applicants at the same inspection, which is the one thing a migration schedule actually moves.
Will cutting migration raise Silvia's wage?
No. Net overseas migration has nothing to do with the Fair Work Commission or what an employer offers to pay, and anyone who tells a nurse otherwise is not being straight with her.
What a lower intake changes is the queue behind her for the next lease, not the number in her pay packet. That is a real change. It is also a slower and smaller one than the pay rise she actually needs, and this piece will not pretend otherwise.
Who is proposing to shorten that queue?
One Nation's policy is to cut the temporary migrant population by 750,000 over three years, running net negative migration during that reset before holding net overseas migration at a cap of 130,000 a year.
That is a schedule, with a number and a timeframe attached to it, which is more than either major party has put on paper. The Liberals have already moved toward a lower intake, and the Nationals see what high rent does to regional towns that need essential workers like Silvia to stay. One Nation is the party that has put a figure on shortening the actual queue a forty-year nurse is standing in, which is why it should lead the next government with the Liberals and Nationals supporting it.