During the height of the pandemic in 2020, current Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil declared the following from the opposition benches:
“Immigration has been the special sauce in our national history”.
“We have never, in post-colonial Australia, met any national challenge or done anything economically viable without truckloads of it”.
And “truckloads” of immigration Clare O’Neil has delivered.
As we know, O’Neil used the 2022 Jobs & Skills Summit as a Trojan Horse to ramp immigration to all-time highs.
Changes implemented by Labor to boost immigration included:
- Increasing the permanent migrant intake by 30,000.
- Increasing the humanitarian intake by 7,000.
- Spent $42 million to hire an additional 500 staff at the Department of Home Affairs to rubber stamp visas applications and clear the made-up “visa backlog”.
- Increasing the number of hours that international students can work in Australia to 24 hours a week, from 20 hours pre-pandemic.
- Increasing the number of years that international student graduates can work in Australia post-study (revoked this year).
- Easier pathways to citizenship for New Zealanders.
- More permanent visas for low-skilled workers in agriculture and aged care.
- Signing two migration deals with India to make it easier for Indians to study and work in Australia.
The results were predictable, with a record high 564,645 net migrants arriving in the September quarter of 2023, before retracing to 547,267 in the December quarter:
As shown in the above chart from Alex Joiner at IFM Investors, an unprecedented 751,500 migrants landed in Australia in 2023, nearly 150,000 more than the pre-pandemic peak.
After deliberately opening the migration floodgates, Clare O’Neil told Australians last month:
“We are significantly reducing migration levels – we are in the middle of the biggest drop in migration numbers in Australia’s history, outside of war or pandemic”.
O’Neil carried the lie on Wednesday, blaming the former government for the record migration and claiming that Labor will build a “smaller” migration system:
“The migration system we inherited was completely broken, and our goal is to build a smaller, better planned, more strategic migration system that works for Australia”.
“Our Migration Strategy outlines a clear plan to close the loopholes in international education and this is the next step in delivering that plan”.
“We need a migration system which delivers the skills we need, but doesn’t trade in rorts, loopholes and exploitation”.
If Labor was planning to build a smaller migration system, why did the May federal budget adopt the same 235,000 net overseas migration forecast as the 2023 Intergenerational Report (IGR)?
Source: 2024 Federal Budget
This long-run 235,000 NOM forecast is also the same as the 2021 IGR under the former government. It would deliver higher net migration than the 220,000 average ‘Big Australia’ NOM experienced in the 15 years leading up to the pandemic:
As shown above, there is nothing “smaller” about 235,000 NOM. It will deliver an Australian population of 40.5 million by 2062–63, which is a 13.5 million population increase in only 39 years:
Clare O’Neil created the problem of extreme immigration. Now, she is trying to gaslight Australians into believing she is “Miss Fixit” for the problem.
Don’t fall for her lies and obfuscation.
