In September 2022, the newly elected Albanese government convened the Jobs & Skills Summit with the express purpose of turbo-charging net overseas migration into Australia.
Then Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said that immigration had been the “special sauce in our national story” and wanted more.
She said that Australia had to move “away from a system which is almost entirely focused on how we keep people out to one that recognises that we are in a global war for talent”.
Then Immigration Minister Andrew Giles also pledged to speed up temporary visa processing to clear the backlog.
Giles announced that the government would invest $36.1 million in visa processing to increase staff capacity by 500 over the next nine months.
Labor lifted the permanent migrant intake by 35,000, increased the humanitarian intake by 7,000, and extended the time that international graduates could work in Australia, thereby turning ‘student’ visas into de facto low-skilled (low-paid) work visas.
The Albanese government got what it wanted: an unprecedented surge in overseas arrivals and record net overseas migration.
Labor’s first federal budget in October 2022 projected that Australia would receive 470,000 net overseas migrants over the 2022-23 and 2023-24 financial years:
Source: October 2022 Federal Budget
Instead, Australia officially received 924,800 net migrants in the seven quarters to March 2024, with around 1,025,000 likely to have landed over the full two-year period.
The May federal budget upgraded its projection for 2023-24 from 235,000 to 395,000:
Source: May 2024 Federal Budget
However, 388,200 net migrants officially arrived in the first three quarters to March, suggesting that the full year figure will likely exceed Labor’s projection by around 100,000.
Put simply, net overseas migration has blown way past Labor’s projections ever since they arrived in office. And this was deliberately engineered by Labor following the 2022 Jobs & Skills Summit.
Despite these facts, a government spokesman blamed the post-pandemic surge in migrant numbers on the “broken migration system we inherited”.
“These numbers don’t reflect the measures that came into effect in July”.
“We’ve taken wide-ranging action to bring it back to sustainable levels and we’re making progress towards that. The data shows migration is coming down even before many of our reforms take effect”, the spokesman said.
The gaslighting from Labor on immigration is unbelievable. They deliberately juiced the numbers and then waited far too long to take corrective action when it was clear that migration was out-of-control.
The 550,000 extra net migrants that landed above Labor’s initial projection all needed somewhere to live, which is why Australia is currently experiencing a rental crisis.
These are the cold, hard facts.
