‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ (1988). Based on a novel by Milan Kundera. The year it was released – Australia’s bicentenary – Australian recorded a Net Overseas Migration inflow of more than 150 thousand, for the third and last time in the 20th century. Australia is on track for more than double that this year, and has run immigration at approximately 240 thousand per year since 2005.
After a heavy week of Population Ponzi spruiking saw the lobbying move into hyperdive over the weekend…….
Big Australia? We could double the size of our cities and they’d still be small
Michael Koziol, Sydney editor
January 14, 2023 — 5.00am
In the lead up, during the ‘dead zone’ as Koziol refers to it, there was a wave of Population Ponzi spruiking in the Ninefax, Guardian and ABC. All ahead of the population statement. Almost every piece had comments blocked or turned off. All presented the population surge as a fait accompli and none of them asked any questions about it, particularly:
- Why do we want a population increase if all we are doing is living of the redistributed income of commodities? How will Australia be ‘better’?
- What are we actually doing to diversify the economic base?
- What does immigration at the level Australia runs it imply for economic competitiveness?
- What does immigration at the level Australia runs it imply for carbon emissions?
- What does immigration at the level Australia runs it imply for house prices and rental costs?
- Who actually benefits from running immigration at the level Australia runs it?
None of these issues ever get addressed in the Population Ponzi spruiking pieces.
So lets go into this one…….
It’s the policy that dare not speak its name. “Big Australia” – that Kevin Rudd-era shorthand which did little more than recognise our country’s climbing population – is a phrase you don’t hear much these days. But it’s happening anyway. Or at least, the government would like it to.
The Population Statement released last week – in the dead news zone of the first week of January – contained little of surprise. We’re still on the same trajectory as ever, with the national population due to reach 30 million in 2033, slightly delayed by the pandemic.
He is right about that. Our politicians can’t bring themselves to be square with the people who vote them into power about Australian immigration volumes, and why we have them at those levels. He asserts the government wants them, and the facts underline this. And every time it is asserted or underlined, the gulf between Australia’s electors on the one hand, and the one hand, and the media and their elected representatives on the other, widens.
He refers to the Population Statement released by the Centre for Population – which is part of Treasury – yep – 30 million by 2033 or pick any other target you like 39 million by 2061 which was last week’s touted aim.
There was no mention of why these numbers were chosen or how they help this country better the life for the people currently in it.
Is that a Big Australia? Not especially, and not when that population is also getting older, with the average age projected to be 40.1 years by then (it was 38.4 in 2020-21). The fertility rate is expected to keep declining, from 1.66 babies per woman to 1.62.
Is that a big Australia? Well, it’s a big carbon footprint, and a big greenhouse gas emission. It is a big house price stimulus, and given the way we do it a big shaper of our university and vocational education sector. It is an even bigger requirement to find a narrative away from our economic model of redistributing, via the federal, government the revenues generated by selling off the national bequest or growing things on top of the ground – which employ about 3% of Australians. It is an even bigger risk that the Australia of the future, finding itself as it did in the early 1980s bereft of those commodity revenues, needs to make an ‘adjustment’ and wonders why it has – courtesy of the immigration volumes we have – amongst the worlds most expensive people, energy, internet and land costs.
That is a big Australia. A big Australia not being accountable to itself or to future Australians.
What does Koziol think is big? Lagos, Mexico City, Moscow, Chennai or Shenzen?
This is a difficult subject for politicians to broach. But as the pandemic recedes and migration resumes, the federal government is cautiously reopening a conversation about population and Australia’s long-term future.
It is one of those topics about which many voters have views; these are views not necessarily based on any insight or knowledge, but on the traffic jams they sit in every day or the housing market they can’t afford to enter. Ageing is itself a tricky word; older people don’t appreciate being cast as a burden on the country or economy. And lifting the fertility rate is like turning around the Titanic.
Currently the only observation to be made its that our government – which replaced the most reviled government in Australian history just 8 months ago – is running away from the entire subject, having used a ‘jobs and skills summit’ in September to ratchet up the immigration volumes again, in the face of a lived experience of Australians having gained better likelihood of pay increases in the 2 years immigration was halted than they have in a decade.
Ageing may be a tricky word but immigration is trickier, and thinking immigration is the only cure for ageing in an age of Artificial Intelligence and automation, and an economy living inside a bubble created by government policy, is pure casuistry.
The voters have views based on the lived experience. That lived experience drives a wedge between them and our politicians and media. They have plenty of insight because they are living the lived experience. They deal with the casualization and the costs, they know that AI is replacing people fairly rapidly, rendering immigration largely redundant, they know about the future pensions burden because they are paying it already, and they know they don’t have children as much as they used to because their lives are financially stressed by housing and the same corporates quick to claim without any evidence whatsoever that there is some form – any form – of labour shortage in Australia.
Glib specious assertions like ‘crippling shortages’ or of future ‘white papers’ don’t provide any basis for confidence that Australians and their regularly observable wishes are going to be acknowledged when it comes to immigration volumes. Australia’s government doesn’t either.
Either we are growing the population to craft a balanced competitive global economy providing meaningful income outcomes and opportunities for Australians or we are growing the population to avoid addressing the economic policy failures of the past and to kick the responsibility for fixing that into the arms of future Australians – who appear destined for flat incomes, expensive houses, casualised employment and a media sector where no one can hear their screams when it comes to immigration.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers drew attention to this while releasing the population report. He tipped his hat to Liberal predecessor Peter Costello for putting fertility on the agenda with the famous baby bonus. While that’s not something the government is considering, it hopes to drive up the fertility rate by easing the cost of childcare. “Cheaper childcare is a more responsible baby bonus for the 2020s,” Chalmers says.
Chalmers was a senior staffer to then treasurer Wayne Swan while Rudd was copping a backlash to his Big Australia enthusiasm, and he recalls the difficulty their government encountered. After all, when Julia Gillard took over as prime minister in 2010, one of her first acts was to explicitly disavow Big Australia and instead talk up “a sustainable Australia”.
Just for the record Costello is the Chairman on the publisher of this article, and Chalmers and he would ostensibly be from opposite sides of politics, although on the subject of immigration Australia is a one-party state. Cheaper childcare is a bandaid solution. Certainly, it is part of the solution, but without Australia setting a path to a diverse globally competitive economy with low-cost inputs – all aggravated by its current immigration volumes – then more women in work will not do too much, apart from making mortgages rents or bills potentially easier to service assuming that those big corporates don’t enhance their cut.
It was a message targeted squarely at suburban voters in marginal seats. Gillard said the people of western Sydney would find Big Australia laughable.
In the years since, people have shied away from the term. Days after Labor won the 2022 election, The Conversation’s chief political correspondent, Michelle Grattan, asked Chalmers if he was a Big Australia guy. “Nobody uses those terms,” he said, going on to sing the praises of immigration.
Someone needs to tell Mr Chalmers that plenty of ordinary Australians do use those words – even some recent migrants sold the pup of moving to the developed world and now mired in feeble incomes, workplace rorts, expensive housing, crowded roads and infrastructure, and ever greater infrastructure building.
Immigration worked well for Australia up until about 2005, when Australia had had an average immigration intake of about 80 thousand per annum for the previous 30 years. It was well worth singing the praises of then. It has ceased being a positive for many Australians – recent migrants included – since about then, as governments have said one thing but kept the population Ponzi tap running at about 240 thousand per year ever since. Immigration has ceased working for Australia some time ago.
In remarks to the Melbourne Institute in November, Business Council of Australia boss Jennifer Westacott said of the federal government’s jobs and skills summit: “I don’t think it’s about a Big Australia; it’s about a better Australia, a more prosperous Australia and a frontier Australia.”
The government is slowly building its narrative, one that Chalmers hopes will have more nuance than previous efforts. It splashed $4.7 billion on cheaper childcare in the October budget, and lifted the permanent migration intake to 195,000 a year from 160,000. Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil also commissioned a review of the migration system, with an interim report due by February 28.
Jennifer is the Head of the group representing Australia’s inwardly focused, economic bubble dwelling big business, for whom more migrants mainly represent more people to skim – via retail, via telcos, via banks and mortgages – and more people equals more profit, while the costs and risks get loaded onto future Australians.
God only knows what she means by ’frontier’ but ‘better’ and ‘more prosperous’ for her and the organisations she represents means more people and more money for large companies – not necessarily the incomes they pay. If she means ‘frontier’ of any form of industry then she needs to think, as does the Government, about land, energy, internet, and people costs – all aggravated by the Population Ponzi.
The childcare splashes and the reviews commissioned are deployed as distractions from the immigration issue, a reason to talk about it later rather than now, or maybe even not at all.
The BCA’s submission to that review calls for the government to increase the cap beyond 195,000 and set it at a percentage of Australia’s population, rather than a fixed number. Chalmers did not dismiss the idea on Friday, saying he was up for the discussion.
Immigration set as a percentage of population means exponential growth in the number of migrants.
Would Jim care to ask or discuss the idea with any ordinary Australians? The ones paying the house prices and the energy bills and the handling the road trips or the queues at schools and medical facilities? Or the ones living in suburbs cleared of shade, or backed up to freeways, to fit in more people, or those which will be first to implement water restrictions when El Nino returns?
The treasurer sees parallels between the Big Australia debate and the lacklustre, over-simplified discourse on COVID-19 that pushed people into “let it rip” or “lock us up” buckets.
“Getting this right shouldn’t be hostage to old debates and labels and language,” he tells me. “We’ve got a welcome opportunity here to make good policy changes about our population settings, and we’d be mad to miss it.
Immigration actually does have a narrative similar to Covid. Australians did the right things for a couple of years and then had Gladys Berejiklian and Scott Morrison decide they were going to let it rip without ever acknowledging it to them. Australia had gone down the path of creating a broad-based economy, and cashed it in for a Mining boom, as the exposed economy foundered on the rocks of an inflated currency and palsied energy policy, all papered over by a ramp up of immigration volumes. Australians now have an ALP government letting Immigration rip without articulating why it needs to be so.
“As is often the case, there’s a false binary represented to people which is ‘let it rip’ or ‘we are full’, when in reality population policy is absolutely central to economic policy and to our future, and it demands foresight and nuance and clear-headed and considered thinking.”
The biggest single driver of that false binary is the population Ponzi proponents themselves. They will be the first to assert that any reducation in immigration volumes or any suggestion of returning it to its long-term average is tantamount to ‘ending’ immigration. In addition to ‘foresight and nuance and clear-headed and considered thinking’ Immigration policy requires honesty about where Australia is heading as an economic entity and what the costs and benefits and risks are.
Is the idea that we either have heavy immigration or we age in penury a false binary? Is the idea that we are ‘racist’ if we question immigration volumes a false binary?
Migration is already rebounding faster than anticipated. Treasury predicted net overseas migration, which includes temporary arrivals, would return to a pre-pandemic average of 235,000, but the May budget is likely to show the figure is running significantly higher.
Yes the population Ponzi tap is running at more than 300 thousand per annum, all excused by the idea that we have a ‘shortage’ of some occupations somewhere – though nobody can say where, other than we have a shortage of people willing to work for peanuts with obnoxious employers in the hospitality and crop picking sectors – or that we are in ‘competition’ with other countries for more immigrants, or that we need to ‘catch up’ for those who didn’t come in during the Covid experience. The government which would have people believe immigration was being lifted to circa 195 thousand for this year, is running it at about 50% more than that.
It’s understandable if political leaders are reluctant to champion the Big Australia cause explicitly, given what’s come before, but perhaps they should reconsider.
The pandemic has called into question some pretty persistent myths about the effects of migration. No less a figure than Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe has pinned some blame for low wage growth on high immigration. But for two years we had effectively zero migration, and wages remained flat.
So those wages remaining flat…… That would have been off the back of record fiscal stimulus in the form of JobKeeper? Would they have fallen if there was no JobKeeper? And how does that actually stack up with any form of chronic ‘skills shortages’? Those flat wages would actually suggest there wasn’t much of a shortage anywhere wouldn’t they? And there certainly has been some form of incomes growth or better access to work, for particularly low skilled or no skilled work of the casualised kind Australia offers these days. Is this what we need to stamp out with a ramped-up immigration volume? The RBA Governor acknowledged undeniable fact, and the reason he did so was because it simply wasn’t credible to continue denying it any longer, and trying to do so was simply eroding RBA credibility.
And as plenty of others have noted, the absence of migrants competing for housing did not seem to make a dent in property prices – indeed, they shot up while our borders were closed, before their current correction.
That would be the self-referencing false binary for anyone unaware thinking that immigration is the only dynamic affecting house prices.
House prices went up because that is all Australians do with money, and when the Morrison government shoved money into the hands of the wealthier masquerading as Covid sabbatical subsidies, of course they speculated in house, especially while the RBA was slashing rates and flagging lower for longer – until inflation arrived. The treatment of mainly younger first home buyers by banks in the wake of the RBA Guidance is a neon light for the risks younger Australians could wear if the Population Ponzi founders on the rocks of collapsing commodity revenues and we haven’t crafted a competitive global economic player in the meantime.
Further to that, Australians are overwhelmingly positive about immigration, and growing more so.
The Scanlon Foundation, which does quality annual research on this topic, has found Australians’ concerns about immigration and population growth have essentially disappeared. Just 1 per cent of those surveyed named those issues as the main problem facing Australia in 2022, down from 7 per cent in 2018.
The proportion of people who say the number of immigrants accepted into Australia is “too high” has almost halved, from 44 per cent in 2018 to 24 per cent in 2022. Those who believe immigrants make Australia stronger rose from 63 per cent to 78 per cent. And those of us who say immigrants are good for the economy increased from 74 per cent to 87 per cent. That’s a consensus in anyone’s language.
The key reference point for his Scanlon Foundation reference is the chart here (page 45 of the report he links to).
Sure, Immigration Growth and Population concerns have reduced from 7% to 1%. But if you wrap Economy, Environment, Housing Affordability, Health and Hospitals, and Immigration/Population all together – seeing as they are all directly reflective of population growth – then concern has risen from 49% to 67%. Failing to mention that in his piece trashes Koziol’s credibility. Similarly the observation that the proportion of Australians saying immigration is too high has fallen would be directly attributable to having had about 2-3 years of very low immigration, where lots of Australians have actually gained better work and improved remuneration outcomes. The question becomes of what happens with the next year’s surveys.
Moreover, why has Koziol ignored the myriad of recent opinion polls (including from his own paper) showing Australians categorically reject a return to ‘Big Australia’ immigration? Or he could just read the comments from his own paper’s readers, which are always overwhelmingly against mass immigration whenever the topic is spruiked.
And if “Australians are overwhelmingly positive about immigration, and growing more so”, then why did all sides of politics deliberately refuse to mention immigration during the recent election campaign? Surely doing so would have been a vote winner?
Former senior Immigration Department official, Abul Rizvi, explained the reality of the situation to Koziol’s paper in May 2022: “If the prime minister were to come out and say, ‘I’m going to increase my migration program to 190,000 per annum as assumed in my budget papers’, he’s gone, 100 per cent. He’ll never say it – and neither will the opposition”.
Kind of contradicts Koziol’s immigration propaganda, doesn’t it?
Of course, someone can say they welcome immigration while also fretting about its impact on the capacity of their local school or the speed of their commute. Newspaper articles about population are inevitably accompanied by photos of crowded beaches or roads, fuelling the association.
Koziol would presumably be aware that newspapers do that to retain a sense of them having awareness of the lived experience of their readers. Maybe he doesn’t get out of Sydney enough, or go to the beach enough.
The “news” from the Population Statement that Melbourne will soon overtake Sydney as Australia’s biggest city should not have shocked anyone because it has been on the cards for almost 15 years. In that time, only the due date has changed: from 2060 to 2053 to the late 2030s and now 2031.
(It’s also worth noting that while the pandemic delayed the inevitable by a year or two, it hardly derailed Melbourne’s ascendancy. Whatever you thought about Victoria’s lockdowns and Daniel Andrews’ enforcement of them, the idea he did permanent damage to Melbourne’s reputation was laughable and only ever advanced by non-serious people with axes to grind.)
In reality, Melbourne may become our biggest city even sooner. While the headline figures compare Greater Sydney (5.23 million) to Greater Melbourne (4.93 million), these definitions include places most people wouldn’t class as being part of their city, such as Gosford or Warburton. On the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ tighter and much more sensible UCL (urban centres and localities) map, Sydney sits at 4.7 million and Melbourne at 4.59 million. There’s basically nothing in it.
Next up comes Koziol’s ‘look over there’ moment. A little bit of intercity burley into the water so we can take a break from thinking about immigration – a bit of anti vaxxer hatred, Dan worship, and a moments cogitation about Warburton and Gosford (both nice places) to leaven the moment.
These are geographically huge, sprawling, low-density places. Any honest debate about Australia’s population and our cities ought to remember we are one of the most sparsely populated places on the planet, and even though we’re also one of the most urbanised, our cities are far from dense by global standards.
Greater London has 9 million people in its 1572 square kilometres, a population density of about 5700 per square kilometre. The Sydney UCL is 2194 square kilometres, with a density of 2142 per square kilometre, and the Melbourne UCL is 2881 square kilometres, with a density of 1593 per square kilometre.
You could double the population of our big cities and vastly improve them. That’s because the great irony of the population debate is that the things most people worry about with a bigger Australia – strained infrastructure and services – would only improve with a higher and denser population.
That’s how you get more regular buses, closer shops, better trains. Of course there are chicken-and-egg problems as the transformation occurs – the jobs and infrastructure don’t always line up at the right time – but in the grand scheme of things, more people equals more amenity.
That leavening becomes a whole cake. The reader who has made it this far is probably not yet wondering if Australia really wants cities as crowded as London, but they should do – because that is what Koziol is suggesting. The Poms move to Australia for a reason don’t they? How about better amenity with less people? Or isn’t that possible?
And if “strained infrastructure and services – would only improve with a higher and denser population”, then why did our major cities’ infrastructure worsen so badly during the past 20 years of extreme immigration? Shouldn’t infrastructure have improved as Melbourne and Sydney added 1.5 million and 1.2 million people respectively? I call bullshit.
Chalmers says that for too long, people have seen population policy as “choosing one thing from a menu”, such as migration or workforce participation or training, when all of those things need to work in tandem.
Add fertility to that mix, too. It would be a brave government that radically cranks the levers in the Big Australia direction. But for big ideas to really work they need champions who can sell them.
It’s a testament to the country’s enduring appeal that, despite advertising itself as a hermit kingdom for two years during COVID, once the doors reopened, people are coming in droves. A bigger Australia ought to be something we celebrate and pursue, and a young government is in a fortunate position to do just that.
Koziol concludes with the Chalmers panegyric, seemingly with a straight face and inexplicably not mentioning what he said in the first paragraph about Immigration being an unmentionable for our politicians. If they can’t mention then why would the population hesitate to think whatever they like, and if that is based in the lived experience they receive why should we discount their thoughts about it?
He concludes with a straight out sales pitch. All in all yet another Population Ponzi spruik without a shred of narrative, a fact to support the contentions, or a concern for Australians of the future – whether they are the children of current Australians or of those migrating here now.
Another serving of bilge anyone?…..