Former Prime Minister John Howard performed a ‘bait-and-switch’ on the Australian people whereby he scapegoated and slammed the door shut on the relatively small number of refugees arriving into Australia by boat all the while stealthily shoving open the door to economic migrants arriving by plane.
The ultimate result was a massive lift in Australia’s net migration intake, which surged from the mid-2000s and pushed population growth to roughly twice long-run norms.
In Howard’s first three years in office, Australia’s annual net overseas migration (NOM) averaged just 86,000 people a year. In his last three years in office, NOM averaged 188,000 people a year, and has remained turbo-charged ever since:
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