The Australia-India Migration and Mobility Partnership Agreement reconfirms that Australian Prime Minister Albanese stands for an 'Excessively Big Australia', according to Sustainable Population Australia (SPA). Voters are coming off third best.
Last week, Prime Minister Albanese and Indian counterpart Narendra Modi signed the Australia-India Migration and Mobility Partnership Agreement, which aims to make it easier for students, academics and professionals to live, study and work in each other's countries.
SPA President Ms Jenny Goldie says the agreement does not include caps on numbers of visas offered, making it impossible to keep Australia's migrant intake to a sustainable level.
The Agreement allows for five-year student visas, with no caps on the numbers of Indians that can study in Australia. Indian graduates of Australian tertiary institutions on a student visa will be able to apply to work without visa sponsorship for up to eight years. The Talented Early Professionals Scheme will allow 3,000 of India's "top" graduates and early career professionals to work and stay in Australia for up to two years, able to then apply for a permanent skilled visa. Spouses will have unlimited work rights; and three-month visitor visas will be available to Indians for family or business purposes with no caps on numbers.
Ms Goldie says the reciprocal agreements for Australians applying to work and study in India do not begin to balance the open door policy for Indians coming to Australia.
"While we welcome Indians, these measures only lower the bar for less skilled people, non-genuine students and those who don't find jobs in skilled areas, to fill up migration quotas. They'll generate more cries of skills shortages and higher immigration.
"The whole Agreement is going to lead to massive population growth in Australia. At a minimum, it places a diplomatic barrier in the way of any future contraction of immigration to sustainable levels. This we don't need in light of continuing biodiversity loss and likely reduction in carrying capacity from climate change," says Ms Goldie.
"Australians were not consulted about this gifting of our sovereignty, with only peanuts in return. Even now the text of the agreement has not been made public.
"We need a consistent policy across all nationalities," says Ms Goldie. "Treasury's dogmatic endless-growth policy simply dismisses the real-world environmental and social factors. We are already seeing a rental crisis in Australia that can only worsen with more people, whether born here or immigrants. Investment in social housing is critical to ending the housing crisis but, while population continues to explode, it alone will not solve the problem.
"Meanwhile, our biodiversity continues to suffer because of encroachment on other species' habitats by urban expansion and other human activities," says Ms Goldie.
"We are anticipating 400,000 net overseas migration (NOM) this financial year and 315,000 in the next. This is more than three times the twentieth century average. This is bad enough but the Australia-India Migration and Mobility Partnership Agreement only makes matters worse.
"Indians are more than welcome in sustainable numbers, but they must not be made instrumental in deteriorating social and environmental conditions in Australia."
