By Stephen Saunders
Here we go again. The ABC claims Australia “doesn’t have” a population plan. But we do – it’s massive. Can Donald Trump’s victory change that at all?
Forever, influential pro-migration stakeholders have wrung their hands in mock distress. By golly, if only we had a “population plan”. We should have an “immigration plan”.
Of course, we have a plan – Big (or Huge) Australia. Labor and Liberal are devoted to it. Could the US Democrats immigration-trainwreck tempt Peter Dutton to genuinely shift?
Treasury writes the plan, Okay?
It doesn’t matter how much cost-of-living hardship and real-wage freefall Australian households endure—the Treasurer soft-soaps them with Treasury talking-points.
Memo to the ABC: Naturally, this Treasurer maintains a national population plan. As does any major OECD economy. Despite our resources cornucopia, lazy population growth is a (the) primary driver of economic “growth”:
Australia’s low-publicity population plan requires mega (1.5-2.5%) population growth by OECD norms (0.5%), powered by immigration. This allows the Budget to assume expansive economic benefits from population growth, discounting the obvious economic and environmental costs.
This pernicious plan soft-shoes into Budget Paper 3 every year, as Appendix A.
No justification is offered. The Treasurer doesn’t discuss it. Not even on Budget night.
The Consolation Prize, at least it lights a guttering candle on the massive Treasury targets for net migration plus the resultant estimates for population growth. Of which, the “natural increase” or non-migration component is very low, currently 20% and less, and highly predictable.
The plan doesn’t even publish population growth estimates percentage-wise. DIY.
The latest Appendix (May 2024) implies population growth of about 2% over 2023–24, though the actual is more like 2.5%. That’s way higher than economic growth of 1.5% over the same period, with ABS advising a “sixth consecutive quarter of GDP per capita falls”. Ouch for voters.
Labor’s all-time immigration betrayal
In its reform agenda, Whitlam’s Labor was not so concerned with revving population growth. But Hawke-Keating Labor celebrated “multiculturalism”, openly suggesting population numbers were a fiefdom for politicians not voters.
However, mega-migration didn’t really take off until the 21st century. Net migration of 200,000 was unknown to Australia before 2007. Then we topped 300,000 the following year.
Between 2008 and COVID, spanning five Labor and Liberal prime ministers, net migration averaged rather more than 200,000, with annual population growth often 1.5% or more.
Post COVID, Albanese Labor has taken the onslaught to another level:
Labor’s near 1.5 million net-migration over 2022-25, signing sweetheart deals with BJP India as Australia’s preferred immigration partner, is radical engineering.
Point of order: It’s Albanese, not the inconvenient handful of Huge Australia objectors that’s the race-oriented disrupter. Were his 2022-25 immigration tally not six times higher than the long-term average, I for one would drop the subject.
Population isn’t merely a “wicked problem”
The Huge Australia set, especially media, economists, and Mandarins, enjoy mystifying and obfuscating the population issue as a wicked problem.
It is supposedly a complex problem that is multidimensional and achingly difficult to solve within any reasonable time frame. So sad we couldn’t help.
What they really mean is this: we’re on a nice earner to perpetuate problems at the expense of ordinary folks. Yep, as in prolonging an all-time housing unaffordability crisis.
In spades, the ABC punditry illustrates this irritating “wicked problem” trope:
“There are many dimensions to consider…a range of connected issues…projections for climate change, demographic trends, biodiversity, water usage, food security, energy, infrastructure, geopolitics, immigration, and more…some say Australia’s population isn’t much of a sustainability issue…global heating is getting worse”.
If you duck and weave like that, you’re not really espousing prudent population management, are you? You don’t really want to fix it any time before 2050.
While the real solution is as simple – and as difficult – as this. Unlike the ABC and other “experts”, start from what the voters want. Most want low migration.
The ABS is allowed to advise us indirectly that, under One Nation’s zero net-migration scenario, our population would stabilise then fall slightly, maybe after 2040.
Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics
Sustainable Population Australia or Dick Smith say that the population might stabilise over some years if net migration didn’t exceed 70,000-80,000.
There’s your rational, national, popular, population plan – sub six-figure migration.
For Election 2025, the lowest offer thus far is the Liberals’ 160,000. But was this a “core” promise?
Even that level of contraction wouldn’t be straightforward when Labor has carpet-bombed the country with way past two million temporary visa-holders, including more than three-quarters of a million “students”, just because they could.
Even the pro-migration ABC concedes that the highly visible Biden-Harris immigration-overload was probably their “major misstep”.
Just last week, our million-dollar Treasury Secretary admitted what he’s always known. Whoops, his 2024-25 migration estimate of 260,000 will “overshoot…as students attempt to stay in the country”.
Source: May 2024 Federal Budget
Overshoot? You can’t make this stuff up. That 260,000 was counterfeit the day it was first published in May 2024.
“Better planning” is a political cop-out
Five years ago, Albanese advocated a mature debate on immigration. ACT Senator David Pocock this month also claimed that Australia should have a “sensible conversation” to “develop a [population] plan”. But will David respond to the two-party plan we already have?
Albo promised lower immigration before the 2022 federal election.
The ABC article coopts respected environmentalist David Lindenmayer. “It’s crazy that Australia doesn’t have a population plan”. But second David – check the one we have.
The plan, this David continues, ought to be backed by a “dedicated, independent” body. Or even a commissioned “report” from the Academy of Science. But the Academy has long since squibbed on arid Australia’s population constraints in favour of UN climate rainbows.
Despite lower-migration advocate Crispin Hull calling for a “hung parliament”, any Australian parliament is heavily stacked for mega-migration. Just ask Senator Pauline Hanson. Her two population-plebiscite proposals were overwhelmingly rejected by a scornful Senate.
The only type of “dedicated” population planning that parliament and Treasury would readily countenance is a rubber-stamp for mass migration via Treasury’s Orwellian Centre for Population.
Finally, there’s ANU “expert” Alan Gamlen. Never mind any population “agency” let’s make one for immigration too.
Gamlen’s thought-bubble is a national migration institute. This “central, authoritative body” would counteract recrudescent “misinformation” and “moral panic” with reassuring “research”.
Research? High-minded academic propaganda, more like it. Taking at face value Treasury’s “huge return” on investment from mega-migration.
Gamlen, echoing former migration-mandarins Abul Rizvi and Peter Hughes, urges “better governance” of immigration.
He wants to rearrange the deck chairs (sorry, organisation charts) at what used to be Peter Dutton’s Home Affairs. That will fix it!
Instead of a corrupted agency rooting for “migration agents” and international immigration, suddenly we’d have a squeaky-clean outfit prioritising the welfare of Australians. Bingo.
And Dutton himself?
Don’t buy the hackneyed promise of “better planning”.
That “conversation” is code for Labor-Liberal collusion on mega-migration. Instead of just supporting voters and their standards of living – via low migration.
This article takes me back to its predecessor. In our “democracy of stakeholders”, Huge Australia can’t be remedied by democratic process. Scarcely even by “extraordinary developments”. Political unicorns, such as an environmental calamity or an exceptional leader.
I don’t know that Dutton is exceptional. Would he have the courage to defy the conventional two-party connivance? And make a dead-set commitment to beleaguered Australians to slash the immigration numbers and wind back the come-one, come-all student-migration rort?
If Trump doesn’t incline Dutton that way, nothing else will. But the odds don’t look that great, given the latter’s past immigration and political form.
