In the wake of Thursday’s obscene net overseas migration (NOM) numbers from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the new chief propagandist at the Australian National University (ANU), Professor Alan Gamlen, quickly swung back into damage control:
ANU Professor Alan Gamlen, a migration expert, told the ABC that these many and varied determinants meant NOM was not a useful way to track migrant numbers.
“You can and will find some of the country’s leading experts in this area disagreeing on what drives NOM, and that’s why it’s not a good policy target.
“It’s a derivative of an underlying basket of a bunch of different things. Derivatives are unreliable and they’re unpredictable.”
Professor Gamlen argued the focus on the surge in NOM was obscuring the fact that Australia actually has fewer migrants present in the country compared to the pre-pandemic trend, because the pandemic slump was much larger and much longer than the subsequent surge.
“NOM is going to stabilise of its own accord, and it’s going to stabilise without a need for aggressive, rollercoaster migration policy,” he said.
“The big story here is that there’s been much less migration than we expected since the pandemic started, not much more migration. And the focus on NOM has confused that.”
What lovely gaslighting. All of a sudden, NOM is “not a useful way to track migrant numbers” because it is “a derivative of an underlying basket of a bunch of different things”.
Actually, Alan, NOM is a very simple concept. It is the difference between the volume of people coming in and the volume of people going out, subject to the 12 months out of the last 16 months rule.
Every net migrant needs a certain amount of housing, infrastructure, and services, regardless of their visa type.
Only propagandists like you would try to complicate and obfuscate the issue so as to distract from the fact that this government has ramped up immigration to unprecedented levels, despite promising to run a lower immigration policy before the last federal election.
The notion that Australia “actually has fewer migrants present in the country” is more gaslighting.
Australia “lost” 107,100 net migrants over the six quarters to Q3 2021, but then gained an extraordinary 1,014,300 net migrants over the nine quarters to Q4 2023. Yet, we supposedly still haven’t caught up? Only an ANU intellectual would frame the issue like that.
Meanwhile, let’s not forget that Australia’s NOM has blown way past the Albanese government’s projections in its first budget in October 2022:
Source: October 2022 Federal Budget
Labor projected 235,000 NOM in 2022-23 and 2023-24. Instead, we received 538,400 in 2022-23 and have already received 258,300 in the first half of 2023-24.
Hence, NOM is likely to be more than 500,000 higher than Labor projected over the 2022-23 and 2023-24 financial years. Yet, Gamlen wants us to believe that migration is actually lower. You cannot make this stuff up.
Meanwhile, the imbalance between housing supply and demand continues to widen:
And the rental crisis rages on:
But according to ANU chief migration propagandist, Alan Gamlen, “move along, folks. There’s nothing to see here”.
