Clare O’Neil says we can’t run a sustainable migration system where people come to Australia and “stay as long as they want”.
But that’s what’s happening and, in part, is what’s behind the record influx of self-selecting foreign students and temporary workers that is supercharging population growth, keeping spending and employment ticking over, and putting strain on housing supply.
The Home Affairs Minister wants to pin failures in the visa system on her predecessor, Peter Dutton. Christine Nixon’s rapid review, which did not justify a six-month delay for release, identifies the key gaps and areas of weakness in Australia’s visa system that have allowed it “to facilitate sexual exploitation, human trafficking and other organised crime”.
Nixon’s starting point is that while the permanent program has a planning level (190,000 places this financial year), the level of temporary migration to Australia is for the most part, uncapped and demand-driven.
“While ever temporary migration remains uncapped and demand-driven, the volume of temporary migrants who arrive by plane will almost certainly continue to rise, and the importance of preventing, deterring and sanctioning those who seek to abuse Australia‘s visa system becomes even more paramount,” Nixon said.
All this does not inspire community trust in migration processes, which is fundamental to social cohesion and successful settlement of migrants.
By extension, this dysfunction inhibits migration playing its proper role in “meeting labour market gaps and delivering fair and efficient outcomes”, as the inaugural report of Jobs and Skills Australia outlines.
While Jim Chalmers insists net overseas migration “is not a government target or policy lever”, that doesn’t mean the Albanese government can wash its hands of the consequences – as the previous tenants in Canberra did through sloppy oversight.
Especially as the rush is on.
According to the Department of Home Affairs, at the start of September there were 1.5 million foreigners here on temporary visas with work rights, as well as a record 700,000 New Zealanders.
That first number has grown by 600,000 over the past two years, as the international border was reopened and temporary migrants surged back into the country.
Since September 2021, the number of foreign students here has more than doubled to a record 661,000; working holiday makers are up by more than 100,000 to pre-pandemic levels of 134,000; there’s been a doubling in the number of graduates to 194,000; and a fourfold jump to 200,000 in pandemic era visa-holders to address critical workforce shortages.
This boom in temporary migrants has caught Labor on the hop, with more people coming and more staying on than officials were expecting.
In the May budget, Treasury estimated net overseas migration in the previous financial year would be 401,000; according to Australian Bureau of Statistics figures released a few weeks ago, in the year to March, migration added 454,000 to our world-leading population growth.
As we’re finding out, quarter by quarter, the pause in the pre-Covid migration trajectory has been spectacularly reversed.
The Treasurer says don’t worry, even with the stronger near-term outlook, total migration is still far below the level forecast by the Morrison government prior to the pandemic.
Treasury said in May it would take until 2029-30 for total net overseas migration to catch up to the pre-Covid forecast.
Now some economists who watch arrivals and departures closely believe we’ll soon surpass that earlier track, when some warned of a return to the Big Australia years of 2008-09.
Westpac estimates that over the period of 2020 to 2025, net migration will be roughly 125,000 more than what would have been expected before Covid-19.
“In other words, by the end of this year, migration will have fully caught up for the losses observed over the Covid period, and will be outstripping its pre-Covid trajectory,” Westpac’s Ryan Wells wrote in a recent research note.
Better get some new lines Treasurer, as that spike in stayers is on your watch.
O’Neil will soon circulate a new migration strategy, based on the review by Martin Parkinson released in April.
That will be the final piece in the skills matrix after the employment white paper and universities accord, and will be Labor’s best shot at reorienting migration so that it assumes its traditional, nation-building role.
The haphazard, open to rorts, mishmash of a hundred visas and a thousand labour agreements, years-long appeals sagas, migration free-for-all we have now is destroying one of Australia’s greatest assets.
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