The business lobby took advantage of last week’s AFR Business Summit to pressure Prime Minister Scott Morrison to back a “more ambitious” immigration agenda:
BHP chief executive Mike Henry told the Summit there was an urgent need to return to pre-pandemic levels of skilled migration…
The Business Council of Australia wants the cap to be raised to 220,000 places for each of the 2022-23 and 2023-24 admissions to make up for lost skilled migration, then back to 190,000 a year thereafter.
However, the prime minister pushed back for fear he would be unpopular with the electorate:
Mr Morrison told the Australian Financial Review Business Summit ‘you just don’t turn on the tap and all of a sudden 160,000 people show up next week’…
“I don’t see us threatening the caps that have been put in place, certainly not in the coming year, and we will be watching that very closely.”
Mr Morrison said that once the migration system has recovered and is fully operational, issues such as those raised by the companies “will come to a head”.
“But for the moment, they present no obstacle”…
Raising the immigration rate is politically sensitive and something no political party wants to pass before the federal election, scheduled for May.
The Coalition and Labor would do well to recognize that Australians can’t stand a return to pre-COVID mass immigration. This was highlighted in last October’s survey by The Australian Institute of Population Research (TAPRI), which showed that only 19% of respondents supported pre-COVID immigration levels, with 70% wanting lower immigration levels (including 48% wanting significantly lower or no immigration):
February Solving political surveillance pollspublished in Fairfax, also showed that 65% of Australians want immigration to be restarted at a lower level than it was before the pandemic and only 22% want the same or higher:
Australians recognize that the mass immigration program from 2005 to 2020 was appallingly run and burdened everything in sight, leading to widespread infrastructure bottlenecks in major Australian cities, reduced quality of life and lower wages.
Unfortunately, in Australia’s unrepresentative democracy, vested interests in property, business and educational immigration lobbies often pull the strings of politicians, rather than the Australian people.
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at MB Fund and MB Super. He is also co-founder of MacroBusiness. Leith previously worked at Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.
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