Last month, Greg Jericho posted the below chart at The Australia Institute (TAI) bemoaning that Australia’s carbon emissions are not falling and have little chance of meeting the 43% carbon reduction target by 2030:
I noted that Australia’s rapidly growing population – projected to increase by 14 million (~50%) people in just 40 years – will necessarily preclude Australia from meeting “net zero”.
Now, Matt Grudnoff has published the below propaganda claiming that “Australia is not being flooded by migrants”:
“Don’t be scared by claims Australia is being inundated by migrants”
“Lately there has been some very weird discussion about immigration. People have been claiming that it is at record levels and there have been scary looking graphs going around showing a record number of migrants in the past year. One popular AM talkback program in Sydney, today screamed “Australia is being crippled by migration.”
“Yes there has been a large spike recently but just focusing on this ignores the fact that we saw a massive fall during COVID…”
“What is happening is that net migration has spiked up because people are coming back after leaving during COVID. This does not appear to be the case of a sudden new increase in immigration, but rather the unwinding of the COVID period”.
“There is always worth having a discussion about levels of migration – and the need to ensure governments have plans inplace to deal with the infrastructure needs that a larger population entails”.
“But using the latest figures to essentially dog whistle about migrants and suggest Australia is being flooded with migrants that we cannot handle and who are to blame for any particular issue reactionaries might wish to use on any particular day is not just misguided but damaging”.
Grudnoff has disingenuously started the above chart in 2005 when Australia’s net overseas migration (NOM) had already been more than doubled versus the historical average.
Here is how the annual NOM chart looks over the long-run if we assume that NOM was 500,000 in the 2022-23 financial year (Note: NOM was officially 454,300 in the year to March before net arrivals numbers surged higher over the June and September quarters):
The reality is that Australia has been “flooded with migrants” since 2005, with current levels literally off the charts.
Moreover, the notion that NOM is merely ‘catching up’ following the pandemic is ridiculous.
Catching up to what exactly? The absurd immigration projections from Treasury pre-pandemic, which Australians have never supported?
Australia’s has already ‘caught up’ with the pre-covid trend population growth and will soon surpass it:
Moreover, there were 2.3 million temporary visas (excluding visitors) on issue in Australia in September, which was 400,000 more than the pre-covid peak:
That is well beyond ‘catching-up’, Matt Grudnoff.
Hilariously, former TAI chief economist, Richard Denniss, said the following about Australia’s mass immigration policy in April 2018 when Australia’s NOM was ‘only’ 260,000 – around half the current absurd level:
“Anyone planning an event knows that it makes a lot more sense to put the tables and chairs out before the guests arrive lest you bump into people and knock over the vases”…
“Australia’s population has grown by the equivalent of an entire Sydney since the Sydney Olympics but obviously our infrastructure has not”.
“Big business loves big population growth because with a population growing by around 2%, the fastest in the OECD, customer numbers grow by around 2% a year without even trying”.
“For our big banks, retailers, airlines, telcos and petrol companies high levels of immigration growth mean high levels of profit growth”.
“Governments love rapid population growth as well as they have come to treat new arrivals more as new taxpayers rather than as new citizens who deserve the level of public services and amenities Australians once took for granted”.
“Put simply, successive governments, state and federal, have used rapid population growth as an opportunity to cut government spending per person while bragging, year after year, about record levels of total spending. It’s a cynical trick”…
“The Australian community has never been as keen. Not because they are all racist… but because with long waits to get into hospitals, clogged roads, crowded trains and dwindling amounts of public space they simply couldn’t see the plan to accommodate even more”.
“But the public’s inability to see the plan doesn’t mean there isn’t one… Rapid population growth without a similarly rapid increase in infrastructure spending delivers better budget outcomes at the expense of worse public services”.
“Rapid population growth delivers better customer numbers without any need to deliver better customer service. And rapid population growth puts downward pressure on wages without the need to train your existing workforce”.
“If we want to continue to grow by almost 2 million people every five years then we need to start building the infrastructure they will need decades before they arrive, not decades after”.
Richard Denniss gave a similar sermon on Sydney Radio questioning Australia’s then high (but much lower than now) immigration-led population growth:
“Population growth costs a lot… If you double the number of citizens then you double the number of teachers and double the number of nurses. It’s pretty simple math”.
“But of course, you don’t have to double them if you gradually plan to lower the number of services. If you are happy for us to gradually lower the number of services in our health system, our aged system, if you are happy for congestion to gradually get worse, if you are happy for the amount of green space per person to decline, then you can do what we do”.
“But the trick is at the moment is every budget – and all governments do this – every budget the minister says “I’m spending a record amount on health”. Well, of course you are, we’ve got a bigger population than we’ve ever had before”.
“Every year has to be a record. But, their own data shows that on a per person basis, it’s just not keeping up”.
TAI also produced an excellent research paper in March 2015, which called for a national debate on Australia’s future population.
Richard Denniss’ brilliant summation of the issue in 2015 and 2018 makes far more sense than Matt Grudnoff’s ‘nothing to see here’, ‘racist dog whistling’ diatribe presented above.
Sadly, TAI has morphed from a think tank that once used sound evidence to fight the class war to a virtue signalling think tank fighting a fake culture war.
Meanwhile, Australian renters are suffering severe financial stress, being forced to live in group housing, or being thrown onto the streets by the most extreme immigration program in this nation’s history which has pushed the capital city vacancy rate to an all-time low 0.9%:
Source: CoreLogic
But we aren’t allowed to mention the giant immigration elephant trampling the working class because it’s racist, according to Grudnoff.
How disappointing it is to see one of my favourite economic think tanks turn into a fake left virtue signalling joke.
Bring back Clive Hamilton’s Australia Institute.
