After Labor’s Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil touted “the biggest drop in migration numbers in Australia’s history, outside of war or pandemic”, Treasurer Jim Chalmers claimed that Peter Dutton’s modest proposal to lower the permanent migration intake to 140,000 for two years would “cost the budget tens of billions of dollars”.
“But even the kinds of estimates that you see are conservative, because it is not possible to fully capture the damage that Peter Dutton would do to the skills base of this country, to our hospitals, to our building sites”, Chalmers said in an interview with the ABC Insiders program.
“These are the sorts of things he hasn’t thought through”.
