Treasury’s Intergenerational Report (IGR) projects that Australia’s population will swell by 13.1 million people (+50%) over the next 40 years, with 74% of this growth to come from net overseas migration (NOM), which is projected run at an average of 235,000 annually from 2025-26 onwards.
If achieved, this would mean that Australia’s population would grow by the equivalent of adding a Sydney, Melbourne plus Brisbane to Australia’s current population.
It would also mean that Australia’s population would grow at exactly the same pace as experienced over the 20 years to 2020, which saw the nation’s population swell by 6.5 million people, with Sydney and Melbourne each adding around 1.6 million and 1.8 million people respectively over that time.
Amazingly, the main lobby group for Australia’s developers – the Urban Development Institute of Australia (UDIA) – does not believe that this rate of population growth is enough and wants the federal government to increase NOM even more to make up for the COVID ‘losses’:
The 2021 Intergenerational Report makes clear Australia’s short and long-term prosperity depends on a robust plan to restore rates of immigration and population growth…
“In the short-term, we will need immigration to return as soon as health protocols allow to rev up apartment market construction that is so crucial to balancing housing markets and improving affordability…
“Apartment markets will remain weak… until net overseas migration returns to pre-pandemic levels or above”…
“This report provides a stark warning that we will need to not just return to pre-pandemic immigration rates, but arguably increase them to close the gap caused by the pandemic”.
This special pleading highlights how mass immigration is a tool used by governments to fatten and enrich the property industry and big business.
These rent seekers privatise the gains from growth, while ordinary residents’ socialise the costs and have their living standards trashed.
Indeed, the mass immigration program has lost public support because it was so badly managed over the 15 years leading up to COVID.
