This is a short YouTube interview with Jim Penman responding to a Daily Mail headline that framed him as blaming immigration for Australia’s housing crisis. Penman clarifies he attributes the housing crisis mainly to restrictive zoning (illustrated by US city price comparisons), supports skilled immigrants who create businesses and jobs, and expresses concern about integrating unskilled refugees. He also discusses his Jim's franchise network: about 5,500 franchisees, a roughly 50/50 mix of migrants and native-born trainees, and an estimated total workforce engaged of roughly double the franchisee count.
Questions this video answers
$330,000 (US dollars) (as stated in the interview).
$1.4 million (US dollars) (as stated in the interview).
Around 5,500 franchisees (as stated in the interview).
Jim estimates "maybe double" the franchisee count — roughly ~11,000 (implied by "maybe double that").
About half and half (approximately 50% migrants, 50% native-born).
Chapters
So Jim, there's a Daily Mail article that went, I guess viral during the week with your, with your comments in there. But it was a lot more to it than what was, was quoted. They put it down to the end, so we wanted to just address it. And I'll start off real quickly with the headline because this is what obviously got people reacting to it, which was Jim Smelling founder blames immigration for housing crisis and reveals how he wants to fix it was the headline.
Well, actually it's not really what I said at all. The reason for the housing crisis is because of restrictive zoning laws. And it's quite obvious if you look at places like the States, Houston's got an average house price of $330,000. San Francisco's got 1.4 million. That's US dollars, those four times as much. Why? Same country, different zoning. So that's the main reason for the housing crisis. Actually, I don't, I don't have a problem. I think immigration is great for this country, but I think it depends on what kind of immigration. What we need is skilled, enterprising people who can launch businesses like so many of my franchisees. We've got so many great franc in Jim's group who are building great businesses, doing work that Australians need, employing lots and lots of Australians to do it, doing great things. Where I think they've got to be more careful is in taking unskilled refugees from wartime poverty stricken countries. They don't actually integrate very well and then you get problems with violence and gangs and murders and all kinds of stuff which we shouldn't have to do. So I think immigration is great for Australia. We need to allow enough houses to put them in. But I think you also need to be very careful about bringing the wrong kind of people in who can't flourish in this country.
Yeah, because the way the article was written was they obviously snuck in that stuff you're saying sort of towards the end and they led off with the other sort of part to generate clicks, which is a bit. We appreciate the Daily Mail and any mainstream sort of outlet giving us the attention. But I know you just wanted to jump on and clarify that because it obviously went pretty, pretty viral online.
Yeah, well, I'm a great favourite. So many of my best people, the leaders in Jim's group are immigrants. My wife is an immigrant. She employs more than 20 Australians. I mean she does great things to the economy. She runs our conference center. She's a builder. She's setting up a great tourist venture which will revitalize local Communities. This is an immigrant. We need people like that. We need more of them. We need the right people now.
Yeah, because you mentioned that as well. In training, obviously in training we have a lot of new migrants come into training as well as people who've been here doing a corporate job for many years and they shift across. So it's a big bit of a mix. What would you say the mix is in training roughly these days?
I'd say it's about half and half.
Yeah, it's around 50. 50 I reckon.
Yeah, yeah. We've got a lot of new immigrants and wonderful people, wonderful men and women and we get lady born Australians too. You tend to go by divisions. Mowing. Things like mowing and fencing tend to attract the native born Australians. Immigrants tend to go into things like cleaning and laundry and so forth.
I think the point you made before is really, really important, is that they employ a lot of people. I know some of the cleaning franchisees who might have 20 employees or 15 or 10. And that's a really important thing to point out.
Some of our top guys turning over millions of dollars a year. They have quite substantial teams. A major employer of Australians, I was.
Going to say as well. With how many numbers do you estimate? So we got around five and a half thousand franchisees. So how much in total do you reckon Jims would employ or engage?
Maybe double that.
Double that? Yeah.
It's hard to. It's hard to say. A lot of people work independently. Quite a few have offsiders and some of them have very, very large teams. You've got some franchisees who actually have multiple franchises. They have franchises in mowing, in cleaning, in pest control, in different divisions and they are real entrepreneurs.
We just want to clarify that because sometimes the media can take stuff out of context and they've obviously got a job to do with engaging clicks and you would have given a lot more information than what was left off with. And people can read that as a glance and just get into the headlines.
They put it in the article, but.
I just thought it's down the bottom.
As if I was against immigration. And I'm most certainly not. We've done so well. I'm an immigrant myself in a certain sense.
You technically are, yes.
I was born in the uk. Well, there we are. I'm not proud of that. My mother was Australian so I'm not really a whinging pom, but all the same.
Yeah, but we just want to make that really clear. So thanks for jumping on with that one, Jim as well.
