World-beating migration rate is quickly changing our country
A cursory look around the world, and most certainly the historical record, suggest this is an empirically contestable proposition to say the least, yet it can’t be denied Australia has had a remarkable and enviable record at integrating a huge number of people from many different cultures and backgrounds.
That success might yet be tested if the challenges to social cohesion in Europe are anything to go by, where protests against mass immigration have erupted alongside the rise of sometimes unsavoury political parties determined to stop the flow.
ABS figures show that in 25 years the number of Australian residents born in mainly non-English-speaking countries has more than doubled to 6.6 million. Meanwhile, Australia’s native-born population grew by just 27 per cent.
Whatever the impact of such booming diversity on social cohesion, it appears set to be a boon to Labor, potentially locking the Coalition out of office for many years. Labor pollster Kos Samaras, director at RedBridge Group, recently pointed out that “85 per cent of the Indian diaspora voted for the Labor Party at the last election”.
“The figures sit alongside a paradox: socially and culturally conservative (Indian) communities still vote for Labor. They are socially conservative, aspirational, small-business entrepreneurs, and they’re voting for Labor,” he told The Indian Sun, an Australian local newspaper for the Indian community.
This year Indian-born residents are expected to exceed a million on the back of accelerating immigration from South Asia since the post Covid reopening, soaring past the UK and New Zealand, which for decades had held the top spots. Indeed, the Indian Sun pointed out that figure excluded more than 300,000 Australians of Indian ancestry born here.
The rapidity of the change has been striking. According to ABS data, in 2000, India wasn’t even in the top 10 migrant populations by country of birth. Now it is top, ahead of Nepal, Malaysia, South Africa and Sri Lanka which have edged out Italy, Scotland, Greece, Germany and the Netherlands.
It’s no secret Labor has been much more successful winning the votes of new Australians. Just this week this masthead revealed that Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan planned a five-day trip to China in what was reported as a “major political play to consolidate support among Chinese-Australian voters heading into the 2026 Victorian election”.
She will take along four backbenchers and a junior minister who represent critical marginal seats with large numbers of Chinese-Australian voters. In federal and state elections where sometimes as few as 10,000 votes can change the outcome, Indian-Australian and Chinese-Australians’ political views matter greatly.
It’s not fanciful to think the Coalition might need some high-profile trips to India and China too if it is to have any success in upcoming elections.
Indeed, according to India’s Commerce and Industry Minister, Piyush Goyal, in remarks reported by The Economic Times of India this month, the Indian government was in “deep negotiations with Australia” to send “hundreds of thousands” of skilled Indian tradesmen to Australia help the government achieve its 2029 home-building target.
It must be stressed that the bulk of new immigrants cannot vote in Australian elections. They must first have been a permanent resident for at least a year, and lived in the country for at least four years in total. But it’s possible many will stay and seek citizenship.
Politicians from both major parties accused Australians who last weekend marched against mass immigration of stoking division, but it may be the deliberate policy of mass immigration is what is stoking division. One would struggle to find any country in history where a sudden, massive influx of immigrants hasn’t elicited disquiet, especially after a few years of high inflation.
Indeed, the UK, which voted for less immigration from Europe in 2016, has for two years seen a surge of anti-immigration riots, after more than four million arrivals, almost entirely from outside Europe, arrived from 2021.
Some proponents of massive immigration here deny it’s happening. In The Age this week, ANU Professor Alan Gamlen said the Institute of Public Affairs’ claim that net permanent and long-term arrivals exceeded 457,000 over the 12 months to June included tourism. It clearly does not. He also said the figure would be “more than 30 per cent” lower, even though the official Net Overseas Migration figure for that period is months away from publication and has traditionally closely tracked the NPLTA figure.
Call me old-fashioned, but even were Gamlen right, that’s still about triple the annual level of net migration of the Hawke-Keating years.
Australia has entered a period of extraordinary population growth — by far the highest in the developed world – and demographic and cultural change, with profound political and economic consequences. Who can blame immigrants for wanting to come here, and for wanting to maintain economic and cultural ties with their homeland? We would do the same were the situation reversed.
Let’s cross our fingers and hope Australia doesn’t encounter problems with which Europe is dealing.
Indeed, if more diversity makes us strong, Australia is about to be become a superpower.
One piece of government-promoted wisdom few of us could ever forget is how diversity is our strength. In other words, the more people of different cultural backgrounds in a nation, the stronger that nation becomes.