Submission to Dept of Home Affairs consultation on Australia’s 2022-23 Migration Program

21 January 2022

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Australia’s immigration policy is its de facto population policy. In setting Australia’s immigration policy, the Minister for Home Affairs is setting Australia’s population policy. Home Affairs should therefore advise the Minister that population growth has these costs:

1. Harming the environment.

2. Reducing Australians’ quality of life.

3. Impoverishing Australians by

a. increasing the number of people among whom our fixed resources are divided.
b. billing citizens and states for infrastructure we could just not build in the first place.

4. Retarding our politics by

a. crowding out of important policy questions with ‘urgent’ infrastructure questions.
b. discrediting of our politicians by their pushing high population growth on a public opposed to it.
c. Requiring ever more coercion in order to meet our international climate obligations.

5. Increasing inequality by lowering wages and making housing expensive.

The government’s purported population policy (comprising the Intergenerational report (IGR) and Population Statement (PS)) does not model any of the above costs. The IGR and PS do not offer a comparative analysis of the merits of different levels of population. The benefits of Australia’s policy of deliberate population growth (so called ‘Big Australia’) are vastly offset by the above costs.

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