So perhaps from a simple numbers point of view, more people are likely to feel migration should be reduced when its at very high levels.

However, it might also be that the growing public controversy over temporary skilled workers could have fed into this possible shift in attitude. Some in the union movement have strongly attacked this type of migration intake, and it was a subtheme in some of the attacks on Workchoices being about driving down wages and conditions.

Other factors may also have played role. Housing affordability might be one, as you suggest, although I wouldn’t be surprised if things like water shortages and traffic congestion were a bigger factor. Possibly its an accumulation of all of these things. I’ve also seen a growing number of people using climate change as a reason to criticise migration - personally I think this is one of the weakest arguments to use from an environmental viewpoint, but climate change is the biggest green issue at the moment, so I guess it works best from that perspective.

Incidentally, at least from figures from the AIC (admittedly quite old), migrants create less crime than Australian born citizens overall, so people who think they increase crime are most probably wrong excluding weird arguments to do with long term trust etc. . Perhaps the interesting things is that there are pretty healthy cross-cultural differences between groups and that there are groups that are comparatively poorer than the Australian norm that don’t or didn’t create a lot of crime (e.g., Greeks, Sri Lankans), and groups similar to Australians (e.g., Kiwis) that create more. If we got away from being politically correct and people were worried about crime, it would be possible to select groups that create less problem in some circumstances (e.g., refugees from Sri Lanka).