Immigration

The mix of Australia’s international student enrolments has shifted dramatically during the last two decades. In the January-April period of 2005, 288,579 overseas students were studying in Australia, according to the Department of Education. China (63,635) led enrolments, with India (24,642) coming in a distant second.

Last week, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released monthly data on permanent and long-term arrivals, which suggested that net overseas migration (NOM) may have surged back over the first half of 2025.

When the latest Q4 2024 net overseas migration figures were released by the ABS in June, they revealed that annual rolling net migration had fallen to 340,800.

Net overseas migration into New Zealand has collapsed to a 2½-year low and is tracking around half the historical average.

After experiencing a reprieve last year, the latest net permanent and long-term arrivals data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) suggests that net overseas migration (NOM) has surged back in 2025.

Last week, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan posted the following video on Twitter (X) claiming that the government is “delivering more social homes in Pascoe Vale”.

International education is purported to be Australia’s fourth-largest export, valued by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) at $51 billion in 2023-24.

When the sun set on 2023, Canada had one of the highest migration rates in the world, welcoming over 1.24 million new migrants over the calendar year, or 3.2% of the population.

Recently the topic of the total proportion of the population made up by migrants has been making headlines in the United States, Britain and parts of Europe.

In a recent article in ‘The Economist’ it was argued that the rise in unemployment and decreasing wage growth was the result of cuts to immigration in nations such as Canada, Britain and the United States.

Amidst the ongoing debate surrounding the right level of migration for Australia, I thought it would be interesting to look into how population growth is playing out at a state based level.

Once upon a time, the immigration intake into Australia was a mostly benign issue, with the intake as a proportion of the population largely ebbing and flowing in a relatively limited range, consistent with the underlying conditions present in the economy.

In a recent speech to the Queensland Parliament, Mermaid Beach Liberal Party MP Ray Stevens called for the return of vagrancy laws in order to prosecute the “presumably homeless people” increasingly cropping up in his electorate in “some of the most sought after locations anyone could wish for—absolute beachfront”.

Master Builders Australia (MBA) has used a submission to the Productivity Commission to argue that the federal government should provide tax incentives to builders who meet industry standards.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released data on permanent and long-term arrivals for the month of April.

The “Stats Guy”, Simon Kuestenmacher, is a well-known immigration shill.

One year ago, AMP chief economist Shane Oliver estimated that Australia’s cumulative housing shortage was in excess of 200,000 dwellings.

Melbourne’s population was about 3.5 million people at the turn of the century.

I’ve long argued that water is the ‘elephant in the room’ of the immigration debate, something policymakers and pro-Big Australia supporters never acknowledge.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ (ABS) population data has become a lottery. The population estimates in the Q3 2024 and Q4 2024 national accounts releases (here and here) differed wildly from the official quarterly population statistics released a few weeks later.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) valued education exports at $51 billion in 2023-24, suggesting a massive benefit to the Australian economy.

The latest data from the Department of Education shows that there were a record 1,095,298 international students enrolled in Australia at the end of 2024, an annual increase of 13%.

CBA senior economist Stephen Wu created the following chart showing the divergence between various population measures: According to Wu: Next week’s National Accounts release (4/6) will contain an updated estimate of population growth, which is driven by net overseas migration (NOM).

Nick Reece, Melbourne’s Lord Mayor and prominent promoter of mass immigration, believes he has the solution to the city’s housing crisis and failing economy: more migrants and international students.