It's not very fashionable to be strongly pro-migration these days.
Author
- Michelle Grattan
Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra
The Albanese government continues to agonise over how to rejig the program to meet its budget targets - including Net Overseas Migration (NOM) falling from about 300,000 at present to 225,000 by 2027-28.
The coming changes are being posited as major but after arguments among senior ministers, there is still no date for their unveiling.
The opposition has committed to a big cut in the intake, although it is yet to release the details and the final baseline figure won't be out this year.
Each side is reacting to strong public sentiment for a smaller intake, which is being fanned by One Nation.
Now South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas has delivered a counter view, and warnings, declaring in a speech to the Sydney Institute this week:
The correct policy response to Australia's present economic challenges and the realisation of tomorrow's economic opportunities is this:
Above all else, preserve our strong migration program.
[…] the correct political response to anti-immigration politics and populists is not appeasement.
Malinauskas warned against "the prospect of mainstream politics entering a political race to the bottom for who can cut migration numbers the most. This is not unfortunate - this is madness".
Such a race would hurt every Australian economically, and that would further undermine democratic discourse.
Malinauskas said people in leadership positions must explain how unreasonably slashing immigration would not fix problems, but actually make them worse.
He highlighted how important migration was to deal with an ageing population, as well as helping federal and state budgets.
Here's the beauty - skilled migrants arrive job ready, now - at a relatively low cost.
In 2021 Federal Treasury estimated the average Australian-born resident has a lifetime net cost to public budgets of $85,000. Net cost.
Whereas the average skilled migrant delivers a net $198,000 benefit to public budgets over a lifetime in Australia. For a single, primary-skilled migrant, that lifetime surplus rises to $415,000.
Not only is migration not a drain on our public services: migration is part of the reason governments can afford to provide those services. Skilled migrants are big net taxpayers.
In the battle to lift productivity migration was "one very big lever" for governments, Malinauskas said.
The Treasury' Centre for Population had found migration boosted innovation.
Malinauskas warned cutting the number of international students - in the sights of both sides of politics - would be an automatic cut to Australian research funding, given their contribution to financing research in the higher education sector.
Cutting [research] funding further is almost a deliberate act of self-sabotage on a powerful contributor to productivity.
International student cuts amount to an export restriction.
Imagine if we did this to the mining industry. There would be an ad on every television station and mobile phone about how we're killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
It is crazy.
We are a country whose working age population is shrinking as a share of the whole - with productivity growth slowing for twenty years - and needing international students to fund our research effort."
Malinauskas said there could be "no greater act of national economic self harm" than slashing migrant numbers for political purposes.
He acknowledged that anti-immigration sentiment has risen in Australia. But people should not react by claiming Australia was a racist country. Rather, "people are rightly worried about their economic future".
The populists' anti-immigration campaign cut through because "it is simple and easy to remember".
"For the majority of fair-minded Australians, just anxious about house prices and inflation, calling them racist - explicitly or implicitly - is just plain daft."
Malinauskas criticised both the far-left and the far-right.
Australians who are worried about the cost of living and housing, and about a better standard of living for their kids, deserve more than to being lied to by the far right - or constantly being told to apologise by the far left.
They also deserve better than parties of government embarking on a political strategy of appeasement.
Any cut to migration driven by politics rather than economics will only exacerbate the economic pressures that everyday people are feeling, which then reinforces the very economic anxieties that feed the populist campaigns.
Malinauskas lamented that no one was arguing for the migration program that had served Australia so well after the second world war.
"The targeted, calibrated, balanced, skills-based, risk-managed system we've developed over eight decades."
On Thursday, speaking on the ABC, Malinauskas captured the essence of the problem in the populist debate.
when you set an arbitrary number, you've got to work out what you're cutting to get there, rather than actually focusing on an assessment that says, 'What does the nation actually need for our own national interest?' […] and work towards that. And I think that's a far more mature approach and one that I advocate for."
Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
