A mass migration program in itself does nothing to lift productivity, which is the only variable that can improve living standards over the long run.
After all the hype and build-up, Tony Burke has delivered a great big nothing burger at the National Press Club, which can be summed up as “nothing to see here”.
The biggest promise Burke made was the to make precisely zero changes to Australia’s net overseas migration intake in terms of its size. Instead, his modest changes are designed to simply meet the massive migration intake already committed in the government’s budget.
Of course, Burke reeled out the old trope that cutting immigration will “trash the economy”. That is exactly the type of self-serving, economically illiterate bleating you would expect from the pro-migration business lobby.
The reality is Australia is already in an economic recession on a per capita basis, which is a better measure of living standards than headline GDP, which mass migration advocates cite.
More people makes for a bigger economy, but with a smaller share allocated to each person. Australia used to be relatively small and relatively rich. Over the past few years, we have become much bigger, and average Australians have become tangibly poorer.
A mass migration program in itself does nothing to lift productivity, which is the only variable that can improve living standards over the long run. A selective, skills-based migration program can indeed lift productivity, but a look at the nation’s woeful productivity performance suggests the typical migrant is not, on average, more productive than the current typical Australian worker.
One of the most damning yet underreported economic facts is that the number of job vacancies as measured by the Australian Bureau of Statistics remains almost 50 per cent higher than before COVID despite nearly 1.5 million migrants arriving at a net basis since then. The IPA recently revealed that only one-third of permanent visas issued in 2024-25 were to those who met the official skills requirements.
Declining living standards
Writing in these pages earlier this week in defence of high migration levels, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s Andrew McKellar acknowledged that “our economy is failing to grow fast enough to maintain living standards”. Yet he somehow failed to connect the dots between declining living standards and mass migration. If our current migration program was good for our economy, then Australians would be richer than ever before. Instead, GDP per capita has declined in 10 of the past 16 quarters.
McKellar is also astonishingly ahistorical in arguing that an annual NOM of about 200,000 is normal in Australia. It isn’t. From 1949-2007 Australia’s migration intake was remarkably bipartisan, averaging about 90,000 a year. It was only after Kevin Rudd turbocharged migration in the pursuit of his Big Australia agenda that numbers above 200,000 become the political norm.
One Nation’s policy of 130,000 NOM after three years of negative migration is positively generous by this longer-term perspective.
Curiously, McKellar argues that One Nation’s policy would be “a COVID-level shock without any of the offsets. In 2020, the collapse in arrivals came alongside tens of billions of dollars in fiscal support. This time there would be none.”
It is certainly difficult to predict precisely how aggregated economic statistics would be affected by negative net migration. But we are hardly Robinson Crusoe on this matter, with Canada substantially cutting immigration from October 2024.
The sharp cut to migration did push headline GDP into a technical recession but also delivered the first boost to real per capita GDP in two years. That’s the kind of actual win for ordinary people that our politicians should be seeking to replicate, and is precisely why more Australians are turning to One Nation.
