ABC runs Chewbacca Defence on Immigration: Discombobulation III (The return of Tom)

After providing us with the imponderable mysteries of immigration policy and volumes last week, Tom is back with a new friend who is helping him run the ‘below forecasts’ based Chewbacca defence.

We should thank him for the entertainment.

Has there been a surge in migrant arrivals? The answer may not be so straightforward

By political reporter Tom Crowley

Just on that headline, the actual answer to the question is comprehensively straightforward: there has been a massive increase in arrivals of either migrants or students who come here primarily because they gain migration rights and, as Tom showed last week, are often still here a long time after they complete their studies.

So anything that posits anything potentially not straightforward is pure spurious nonsense.

Australia today has 352,000 fewer people than expected because of the pandemic migration slump, according to an ANU professor.

The figure cuts against talk of a post-pandemic migration surge, which has been the subject of much political attention.

Pure bull. Australia’s population is up, massively up, and getting higher every minute. The only people for whom Tom’s figure ‘cuts against’ anything are the mathematically challenged.

The good people at McCrindle have summed things up nicely for us, and Tom.

Based on Treasury’s Intergenerational Report 2002 forecast, Australia’s population was only projected to be 23.4 million by this point. The 2002 report also forecasts a national population of 25 million in 2037. However, this milestone was reached 19 years early, in August 2018. In these forecasts prepared in 2002, Australia’s population growth was projected to slow into the 2000s from 1.2% at the turn of the Millennium, to around 0.6% in the 2020s, 0.4% in the 2030s, and just 0.2% in the 2040s. However, instead of slowing growth, the population growth has accelerated over recent years. In 2023, Australia’s population has increased by 2.4%, setting a new numerical annual population increase record of 624,100. In the Treasury’s 2002 population model, Australia’s population was to hit 25.3 million by the end of the projection period in 2042. The latest population milestone of 27 million has been reached more than 30 years ahead of the 2002 forecast. Even based on the updated forecasts of the 2007 Intergenerational Report, such has been the recent acceleration in Australia’s population growth, the 27 million milestone has arrived 13 years early.

When will Australia reach 28 million people?

If the growth of one new Australian every 50 seconds persists, the next million could take less than 2 years (one year and 214 days to be exact – 2024 is a leap year), with the 28 million milestone arriving on the 25th of August 2025.

Lets go back to Tom

The Coalition has blamed that surge for pushing up house prices, and the government has sought to reassure that the numbers will soon fall, after net migration topped a record half-a-million people last financial year.

Naughty Coalition. But let us just hold there for a moment to touch base with Tom.

Tom, is there anyone anywhere not identifying that Australian immigration volumes are a factor in housing price and rent increases?

Is there a single person in Australia (or anywhere else) who seriously thinks that adding an additional million people over 2 years post Covid is not a significant contributory factor in Australian real estate costs?

But Professor Alan Gamlen, director of the Australian National University’s Migration Hub, said any surge was still dwarfed by the ‘slump’ that preceded it, when arrivals dried up thanks to border restrictions.

“Concern [about the surge] is misplaced,” Professor Gamlen said in a short paper published this week.

“Most people think [it] means we have unusually high volumes of migration. But it’s the exact opposite.”

Enter Alan, the long term Population Ponzi spruiker. Unlike the McCrindle people, who have rightly identified that Australia is generations ahead of the 2002 population growth targets, Alan is seeing us lagging on the growth targets from a later ‘forecast’:

Alan thinks the one way moonshot parabola forecast approach to immigration volumes is the way to go. Would he propose we need to wipe out people because initial Covid forecasts weren’t lived up to? Would he propose that a decade’s worth of overshooting RBA wages growth forecasts should be caught up?

Most people think we have unusually high volumes of immigration because we do and they are more than double and often triple any previous intakes, Alan.

Migration still well below Coalition-era trend

Professor Gamlen’s analysis breaks down the net migration figure into its two components — arrivals and departures — and compares each to the ‘business as usual’ trend set before the disruption of the pandemic.

Arrivals fell dramatically below trend during the pandemic. They have now returned to just above the trend, but nowhere near enough to make up for the pandemic shortfall.

Compared to the pre-pandemic trend, the slump in arrivals was 732,000 during the pandemic, but the surge by June 2023 was only 46,000.

“The down-spike was much, much larger than the up-spike,” Professor Gamlen said.

“Arrivals haven’t grown … [They] rebounded to just over … where we previously expected them to be by now. A bit high, but not crazy high.”

Who knows what these cats are smoking? But the data is pretty clear. Until 2005, Australia averaged a NOM of about 80,000 per year. Then from 2006, John Winston H, then Rudd Gillard, then Testostertone Tony, Malcolm, and ScoMo slapped it up to average of about 220,000 per year over the next 15 years.

Albo and the current crowd of Ponzinomicalists ran it at more than 340,000 in 2022 and 550,000 in 2023.

As soon as people started wondering what was going on, the Opposition Leader (Dutton) pointed to the government with accusations of immigration flatulence, completely hypocritically seeing as he was a cabinet Minister in three of the previous governments.

Alan’s chart is a little bit of sophistry when you look at a longer term chart. Annotated for additional clarity.

On the other hand, departures spiked briefly when the pandemic hit as many temporary resident went home. But they soon dropped below trend, after the Morrison government decided to extend temporary visas to encourage people to stay.

Those visa extensions often lasted for several years, so the number of migrants leaving Australia remains low. The result is 334,000 fewer departures than expected since the pandemic began.

But, gents, the actual number of people in the country at this moment is massively up on what it was a year or two ago – can we agree on that?

“[The] extensions have not all expired yet. As a result, departures are still at historic lows,” Professor Gamlen said.

The lack of people leaving props up the net migration figures. But the departure slump isn’t as big as the pandemic arrivals’ slump, so putting the two together the result is 352,000 fewer people in Australia compared to the pre-pandemic trend.

“Over the past four years, there have been way fewer arrivals, way fewer departures, and way less NOM than we previously expected we’d have by this time. We’ve had a lot less migration, not more,” Professor Gamlen said.

Who ‘expected’ fellas? The housing industry? The retail sector? The infrastructure planning people in every state?

The people in the burbs—those who vote—don’t expect anything vis-à-vis immigration except that the government they elect will handle things with regard to amenity of those already in the country, and implicated in that is the idea that if the amenity isn’t happening, the idiots in Canberra will tone the numbers down.

Is that such a problem to understand?

Could temporary migrants be capped?

Net migration figures are not yet available for the financial year that is about to finish, other than the first quarter. But the government’s expectation, laid out in the federal budget, suggests the surge will not catch up with the slump.

The budget expects net migration of 395,000 this year, roughly 100,000 over expectations but not enough to cover the gap. After that, it expects migration to return to normal levels.

These numbers are predictions, not targets. The government does not typically have a target for net migration because it does not control the main entry pathways.

So the fact they are predictions and not targets means there is no gap? ……and this article then makes no sense (at any level)?

And Tom, you are missing the point. Governments don’t have targets for immigration because if they did, then everyone would like input into what that target was—every year. Tom has placed his foot on the landmine that maybe our governments don’t have immigration targets because they might become accountable for them.

Just imagine having an immigration debate every year

Meanwhile, having ostensibly shot down his own theory about government not having any control over immigration last outing, Tom brings the idea back for another dusting off—how entertaining!

It does control permanent migration numbers, but this is only loosely related to the net migration since most people who receive permanent visas are already here on temporary visas.

The main temporary pathways are not capped, including international students, temporary workers and backpackers.

So, Tom, are you suggesting that introducing a cap for students, temporary workers and backpackers may help tone down the numbers? And it would be a government that brought that about, yes?……..a government that has no control over immigration, yes?

But the government now plans to cap international students on an institution-by-institution level.

We need to do some work on Tom’s comprehension and ability to work with numbers and data…… a government that has no control over immigration, yes?

It also plans to reduce the number of ‘long-term temporary’ workers in the country with a new migrant worker program focused on permanence for those with desirable skills – although an early consultation list raised eyebrows by failing to include many construction workers despite the substantial shortage in that industry.

By Jove that sounds like government control of immigration numbers, Tom.

The Coalition also wants to cap international students but has offered conflicting accounts of whether it has a specific net migration target, and how it would achieve such a target.

It sounds like the Opposition is getting in on that government control of immigration angle, Tom.

But Professor Gamlen warned that high net migration was important over the long term for demographic reasons.

“Without these added people, Australia’s population would rapidly age and shrink, with too few working age people to support our large elderly population, leading to a rapid economic decline known as a ‘demographic winter’,” he said.

Tom closes out with Alan warning about ageing and shrinking populations and ‘demographic winter’ – one wonders if that would stalk the streets like Godzilla.

As usual, they ignore the fact that migrants grow old too. So, ramping immigration now to reduce population ageing will merely push that ageing onto future generations, worsen shortages of housing and infrastructure, and damage the natural environment.

Over to you Tom. Thanks for the Chewbacca Defence.