As former home affairs minister, Peter Dutton knows how migration works. The opposition leader oversaw our borders for more than six years, so he understands that slashing 40,000 places from the permanent migration program will have little immediate impact on the number of people coming to Australia.
Why not? Because arrivals are dominated by temporary visa holders, not permanent settlers, and there is no limit on the number of temporary migrants who can come to our shores — at least for now.
In his budget reply, Dutton presented migration as something that governments can dial up and down at will — adding or subtracting thousands from population growth by the simple fact of a ministerial announcement. It’s a quaint 20th-century notion, from a time before governments opened international education, turned backpackers into fruit pickers and urged skilled workers to fill urgent gaps in our labour market.
The relevant metric for understanding migration today is not the size of the permanent intake, set in the budget, but the NOM, or Net Overseas Migration. That is the difference between the number of people coming to our shores for an extended stay, and the number leaving after living here for 12 months or more.
Australia’s migration intake is now demand-driven, which means the NOM rises and falls with changing conditions. When Australia’s labour market is strong, as it has been, more migrants come. If unemployment goes up, arrivals weaken, and more people go home.
Not that government policy plays no part. It was a government decision to shut our borders in response to COVID. Only Australians were allowed in, and immigration stopped. Many temporary visa holders lost their jobs and, denied any government support, were forced to depart. The NOM turned negative for the first time since World War II.
Towards the end of the pandemic, the Morrison government was alarmed that migrants might not return in sufficient numbers to keep the cogs of our economy turning. (Worried perhaps, that they had treated them too shabbily when the chips were down?) So, the government threw in some sweeteners. In early 2022, it allowed international students to work 40 hours per week rather than just 20. It also expanded a “COVID visa” beyond critical industries and kept it open to new applications long after it was needed to enable temporary migrants to stay working through the pandemic.
This allowed many visa holders to stay far longer in Australia than they could have otherwise. Together, these Morrison-era policies contributed significantly to the sharp jump in NOM at which the Coalition is now purporting to be so alarmed.
Yet, if we take a longer-term view, the migration-driven increase in Australia’s population over the past five years is pretty much in line with what the Coalition expected when it handed down its 2019 budget, before any of us had ever heard of COVID. The difference is not in the overall numbers but in the sharp falls and surges in temporary migration. Barring unforeseen events, these fluctuations are unlikely to be repeated.
Two years ago, when the Albanese government took office, it commissioned an expert review of migration that found the Coalition had bequeathed Labor a “broken” system. Getting migration “back to normal” will take time and the serious graft of detailed policy work and legislation.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil and Minister for Immigration Andrew Giles have been working to increase integrity in the system and make it more efficient and responsive to Australia’s economic needs. This is a slow process and was temporarily derailed by the moral panic following the High Court’s finding that indefinite detention was unconstitutional.
The devil often lies in the largely neglected detail. In the past year, for example, the government has twice jacked up the level of savings that international students must have to qualify for a visa. In October it went from $21,041 to $24,505 and in the recent budget, it was raised to $29,710. That is likely to slow student numbers over time, as will the government’s belated crackdown on dodgy education providers which operate more as visa shopfronts than training organisations. On top of that comes a promise to cap international student numbers, though if the draft legislation is any guide, this will be a very messy process.
Temporary migration has its problems, as some of us have been pointing out for years, but they are problems long in the making and they are not easily fixed. In suggesting he can just flick a switch and stop migration, Peter Dutton is engaging in low-level populist politics and treating voters as gullible idiots.
