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While I appreciate your concern for Australia's future, I categorically reject your attempt to scapegoat immigrants for our housing crisis - a narrative that obscures the real culprit: structural supply resistance within local government.

Georges River Councillor Ben Wang with members of Hurstville Public School P&C at their democracy sausage sizzle at the 2025 federal election. Picture by Jim Gainsford.

In your National Press Club address, you weaponised Salvation Army statistics to frame immigration as national decay. As a local councillor, immigrant, and Multicultural Ambassador for The Salvation Army, my life directly refutes this divisive rhetoric.

Immigrant Journey

You cite your small business background to validate your economic views. With respect, given your close political friendship with mining billionaire Gina Rinehart - who provides your party with policy advice and campaign funding - you must know today's economy is globally interconnected. Immigrants contribute enormously to Australia's competitive edge.

Your platform relies on a simplistic, antiquated image of immigrants as consumers of wealth rather than its builders. My own story tells a very different truth-one shared by hundreds of thousands of multicultural Australians. I arrived in Australia as a skilled technology migrant, equipped with a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in Computer Science. For over two decades, I have worked at the intersection of high-tech and finance, leading IT infrastructure teams for a major Australian bank. My wife and I settled in Hurstville in 1998 to raise our family, instilling in our son the traditional values of hard work, education, and civic contribution. He grew up to become a doctor, working daily on the frontlines of the Australian healthcare system to care for people of every imaginable background.

This is the true cycle of immigration in Australia. We do not arrive to take; we arrive to build, invest, pay taxes, innovate, and save lives.

Using Salvation Army statistics to advocate for an exclusionary, monocultural society fundamentally misinterprets who keeps Australia's charitable heart beating.

Frontline of charity

Through the Georges River Association, we have actively mobilised the diverse community of South Sydney to look after our most vulnerable, raising nearly $100,000 for the Salvos. Our volunteer network- comprising dozens of multicultural families - has contributed hundreds of hours of service to the Red Shield Appeal, including over 50 volunteers providing roughly 600 hours at the Sydney Olympic Park Royal Easter Show and Hurstville Station. The funds providing crisis housing, food hampers, and domestic violence support to struggling Australians do not come from a monocultural monolith; they are raised by, donated by, and distributed by the exact multicultural communities that you seek to marginalise.

True charity requires rolling up your sleeves to solve structural hardship; it does not mean picking through statistics to find an excuse for division.

Hurstville Blueprint

You previously pointed to my community to stoke fear, publicly claiming Hurstville was 'swamped by Asians' buying up housing. However, Hurstville proves the solution is building smarter cities, not cutting population.

Rather than causing a housing shortage, Hurstville is actively solving it. We support a high residential density of 149 persons per hectare, yet our infrastructure is highly optimised. Because housing is clustered around major transport hubs, an incredible 69 per cent of Hurstville City Centre residents commute via the public rail network. To put this staggering efficiency into perspective, across New South Wales, only 1.7 per cent of the workforce commutes by train. Hurstville absorbs massive housing demand efficiently without creating urban sprawl or traffic gridlock.

An open challenge

If other suburbs adopted this transit-oriented model instead of resisting development through bureaucratic NIMBYism, the housing crisis would be vastly reduced.

The remedy for a housing shortage is to expand our capacity to build, and our diversity is our greatest economic and social asset.

Because I respect your genuine concern for Australia's future, I believe this conversation deserves a public platform. I formally challenge you to an open, public debate. Let us stand before the Australian people and debate the facts about immigration, housing supply, and the true future of our nation. I am ready to defend the true fabric of Australia-are you?