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 looking for somewhere to live in the same market everyone else is. In southern Tasmania this week, a woman living in a tent with her dog was found by an outreach worker on a dirt track in the bush. She had not failed to look for a home. She had applied for one all the way up the coast and been turned down every time. That is not a story about one unlucky renter. It is what the bottom of a crowded rental market looks like when nobody is left to catch you.
Who is Effie?
Effie, whose real name was withheld, had rented all her life. When she was evicted, she was not worried about finding another place.
She applied for houses up Tasmania's east coast, in Queenstown, and up north. She was unsuccessful every time.
With a dog and nowhere left to try, she pitched a tent in the bush. A passer-by noticed and called the Salvation Army's Street 2 Home outreach team, which now visits her regularly.
Why isn't there enough help to find her?
Street 2 Home is the only outreach program in southern Tasmania that goes looking for rough sleepers rather than waiting for them to find a phone number online.
It covers a region with roughly 2,500 people experiencing homelessness, with a team of just three people.
The program used to run statewide. It closed its northern operation last year and its north-west operation this year, both times for lack of funding.
Is Tasmania's housing crunch getting worse?
Between 2016 and 2021, the number of homeless Tasmanians rose 45 per cent. Program lead Chris Allen says people are now arriving on the street faster than his team can get them off it, and the wait for public housing in the state has reached roughly 1.7 years.
None of that is about any one arrival. It is about how many people are chasing how few places, and what happens to the person furthest back in that line. Our housing capacity page shows how far dwelling completions have fallen behind population growth nationally.
Does cutting the intake get Effie into a house?
No, not soon, and saying otherwise would be dishonest. A reduction in net overseas migration takes years to show up in vacancy rates, and Effie needs a roof this winter.
What changes sooner is the competition. Every rental Effie applied for also had other applicants, including some of the 1,825,403 people on temporary visas here right now. That is not a claim that any one of them caused her eviction. It is a fact about how long the queue is at every single property she tried.
Fewer people in that queue would not build Effie a house. It would mean fewer applications ahead of hers the next time a place comes up.
Who is actually proposing to shorten that queue?
One Nation. Its policy would cut the temporary migrant population by 750,000 over three years, with net-negative migration during the reset.
The party says the goal is easing pressure on housing and essential services, not building more homes for an intake that keeps growing. That is the right order to put it in. A smaller queue, not a bigger waiting list.
This is why One Nation should lead the next government, with the Liberals and the Nationals in support. The Liberals have already moved toward a lower intake. The Nationals know what a stretched housing and services system does to regional towns like the ones Effie applied to. One Nation is the only one of the three that has put a number on actually shrinking the queue, rather than managing its growth.
A better-funded outreach team could have found Effie sooner. It still would not have given her a house to go to. Fewer people ahead of her in that queue would.
For the national figures behind this, see our pages on the temporary visa population and housing capacity.