The immigration-driven population surge is not working

Poor policy on a number of fronts means there are dark economic times ahead, and the hoped-for surge from increased immigration is not working.

Our jetsetting Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese.

The economic future is looking increasingly ominous.

We are headed – sliding seemingly inexorably, with an almost permanently physically absent PM and a figuratively absent Treasurer – into a summer of serious discontent.

We already have a cost-of-living and housing crisis – with the Reserve Bank’s Cup Day rate hike excruciatingly tightening the screws just that little bit, yet seriously, more for those with a home loan; and let’s not forget the battered small and medium businesses either.

While we are simultaneously sliding towards recession. In short: inflation plus recession; what used to be called ‘stagflation’.

Although that term seems positively mild compared to what we could be headed for, when we add on the likelihood, if not the certainty, of ‘brown’ and ‘black’ outs, courtesy of the ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ minister for destroying our energy system Chris Bowen.

Actually, correction, sliding from the per capita recession we are already in, into a full-on conventional recession.

The one ‘positive’ thing the Albanese-Chalmers government has done is to open the immigration floodgates – with something close to one million migrants to flow into the country in the first two years of its term.

This is supposed to be the core underpinning of a growth economy – with migrants both filling the much-needed jobs, especially in the services sector, and also adding to demand.

Joined with the massive infrastructure spending.

The actual – short-term economic – consequences of the migration boom are complex and contradictory.

Clearly migrants are putting some downward pressure on wages growth.

That’s good for fighting inflation, but punitively bad for worker wage demands to match the cost-of-living crisis caused by that very same inflation. And at the same time, their spending is adding to the inflation.

But the one big and undeniably thing that can be said, is that the ‘Big Australia’ momentum is clearly not working economically.

Over the June half, the economy grew by less than 1 per cent.

But in per capita terms, after accounting all those extra people, the economy actually shrunk by 0.6 per cent. And over the whole 2022-23 year it grew 0.3 per cent smaller.

Bluntly, simply, ‘more people’ is not growing The economy; it is making everyone poorer.

And, the really ominous thing to bear in mind, the Albanese-Chalmers government is only just getting started on its range of economically destructive policies.

These range from destroying our energy system to undermining productivity more broadly and re-regulating, strangulating, our industrial relations system.

While they plough on with pouring people into Melbourne and Sydney, and sucking tradies and building materials into the big infrastructure builds that have been so destructive for builders and the building industry to get houses built and built cheaply.

The bad news, the bad reality, could come with a rush, running down to Christmas and into the New Year.

Albanese and Chalmers should be reminded of what the ‘Winter of Discontent’, in the UK over 1978 and 1979, did to that Labour government.

But I sorrowfully doubt that anything is going to save the 26m of us from their actions. Not this summer. Not, over what’s left of their term.

Originally published as The immigration-driven population surge is not working