Living paycheck to paycheck and crammed into Chinese-style high rise ... trends now

EXCLUSIVE

Dick Smith fears today's young people will have no savings and be forced to live in Chinese-style high-rise apartments unless immigration is urgently slashed.

Younger voters are the group least likely to criticise record-high immigration, even though they are the most likely to be locked out of the housing market, unable to buy or even now rent.

Mr Smith, who has nine grandchildren, said 'woke' young voters are more likely to back the Greens and believe all critics of high immigration are racists.

But the veteran businessman and philanthropist says they need to understand the connection between a surging population and climate change.

The entrepreneur, who turned 80 last month, fears homes with a backyard in Australia's capital cities will no longer exist by 2050.

He said the national population will have almost doubled to 50 million by then - and housing will have become even more 'catastrophically' unaffordable.

For young people now, that would mean a future living in overcrowded conditions like China, even if Australia's annual population growth pace slowed to 1.6 per cent, down from 2.5 per cent now which is the highest levels since the early 1950s.

'Basically, we're doomed; we're going to increase our population to staggering numbers,' he told Daily Mail Australia. 

'Jammed into high-rise like China, many very poor and who just live pay packet to pay packet and have no savings at all.

'Mainly capital cities, basically, will be like Shanghai. 

'The beautiful houses with a block of land for the kids to play in the front yard and have a cubby house, that will go forever.

'Every house will be knocked down and replaced with high rises.' 

Mr Smith has also blamed the ABC for young people being less likely to criticise high immigration, even though they are suffering in the housing market as a result. 

'The people at the ABC, being a bit lefty, you would think would support having a population plan,' he said.

'The ABC never, ever suggests we should have a population plan because then you'd have to talk about our high immigration levels, and in the ABC, if you talk about limiting immigration, you must clearly be racist.'

Mr Smith argued most young voters, obsessed with climate change, had failed to make the connection between a surging population and unaffordable housing - because of the ABC.

'We have one great hope, and that's the ABC; it's independent, it should be able to tell young people that you can't have endless growth and we need to have a plan,' he said.

'But they don't say it. I can understand why the young people wouldn't link population growth to unaffordable housing because they're never told about it.'

Mr Smith suggested young campaigners against high immigration could make the link between rapid population growth and higher carbon emissions, with Labor and the Greens both committed to a 43 per cent reduction by 2030.

'Younger people have been so frightened by what could happen with climate change,' he said.

'But there's no leader out there saying, "If climate change is caused by human beings, if we double the number of humans in our country, we're going to have double the problem".'

Unaffordable housing 

Sydney's median house price of $1.4million is so expensive, someone would need to earn $293,578 a year, and be among the nation's top 1.5 per cent of income earners, to be able to buy on their own and avoid mortgage stress.

'It's a catastrophe,' Mr Smith said.

The Greens had commissioned those figures from the Parliamentary Library but the party's 32-year-old housing spokesman Max Chandler-Mather last month told the ABC's Q+A program criticism of high immigration was a 'distraction'.

Mr Smith revealed his friend Bob Brown, a former Greens leader, admitted his party was reluctant to advocate lower immigration because it didn't want to be regarded as racist.

'It's quite incredible, the Greens have no population policy at all,' said Mr Smith.

'I once had a discussion with Bob Brown about this and he said, "Yes, they should have a policy but they don't and they're not game because once again, people would try and distort it that it must be racist".'

A record net 548,800 migrants moved to Australia in the year to September and Mr Smith wants that slashed to 75,000 a year, where it was until the late 1990s. 

'That's not going to happen - I can tell you we won't be reducing immigration, we will be going to catastrophic population levels which

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