Australia is flirting with the idea of something it has never done: deliberately driving net overseas migration into reverse. In the history of our immigrant nation, extended periods of more people leaving our shores than arriving have only happened during convulsive moments: economic collapses, wars, and pandemics. A depression in the early 1890s and its aftermath pushed annual net overseas migration below zero on average over the 15 years to 1906.
Migration went into reverse during the first and second world wars as troops left the country, and during the great depression of the early 1930s, when unemployment reached as high as 32% in 1932. But we have never driven migration into reverse by design. Mark Cully, an economist and author of Waves of Plenty: Immigration and the Making of Australia, says such a policy would be “unprecedented”.
Even in Canada, where the country is midway through a radical migration “reset”, net migration has not turned negative. Yet, this is exactly what Pauline Hanson, One Nation’s leader, is promising to engineer – and for three years – if she wins government. Harnessing a growing sense of discontent with mainstream politics and rising economic grievances, Hanson argues her extreme plan would lower housing costs. ne Nation’s own economic team, cutting the number of temporary migrants by 766,000 over three years would lower rental inflation by a total of 6.5%.
That would save the average renter $54 a week after three years, according to the modelling they said was based on previous Reserve Bank research. By this narrow lens, Hanson’s migration plan looks like a winner. Peter Tulip, a co-author of that RBA research, says One Nation’s forecasts were not “implausible and unreasonable”, given the scale of their migration plan.
But Tulip, now the chief economist at the Centre for Independent Studies, warns there would be other consequences to such a dramatic reversal in migration that would leave us poorer as a country. So, economically, we would be worse off,” he says. If deep recessions have typically led to steep drops in net overseas migration – outside wars and the pandemic – then the flow may well go the other way.
The Coalition, in a race to outbid its populist rival, has also pledged to slash the number of overseas arrivals. In what the Greens has slammed as a “race to the bottom”, Angus Taylor, the opposition leader, has pledged to slash net overseas migration to 100,000 a year in its first term if it won government. That’s versus a high Nom of 300,000 now, and against the Albanese government’s target of 225,000.
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