The changing faces of Australia – where to next?

In the last 100 years Australia's population has grown faster than any other country in the OECD.  We have had over 22 years of uninterrupted economic growth.  This would not have been possible without immigration and international education.  Australia invented crowdsourcing before it became a thing.

A quarter of Australian residents were born overseas.

Immigration has also made Australia one of the most interesting and pleasant countries on Earth.

We live on the driest habitable continent.  Our arable land is shrinking.

Business loves migration.  Big business loves it because it stimulates economic growth, and small business loves it because it can deliver a cheap source of (sometimes illegally exploited) labour.

We have an education system that has become dependent on international students, and this dependence is developing in our school system.  International education is our biggest service export (bigger than tourism).  In Victoria it is the biggest export of any type.  International education is inextricably linked with immigration and migration law and policy in this country.  However, these two are also badly disconnected, and often working against each other.

We have a staggeringly complex set of migration law, regulation and policy.  The only area of law that comes close is tax law.  Most lawyers will not touch migration law unless they are expert in this field.  And it is always changing.

Who knows, but there are surely hundreds of millions of people who would like to move to Australia.

Faced with all of these facts, you would think that Australia would have a solid long-term population policy, or at least a debate.  But this is not the case.  Many other countries have had population policies, in one form or another, for decades.  In Australia, it is a kind of taboo area.

This May it will be five years since the Gillard government released the “Sustainable Australia – Sustainable Communities” paper, which was an attempt at addressing the challenges of population growth.  It examined many of the drivers and effects of population growth, and emphasised the importance of regional migration.  That document, however, under the heading “Why Australia does not have a population target”, distanced itself from any kind of target setting.  To me this is failing to fulfil an important responsibility of government.

Since that report (someone please correct me if I am wrong) our Federal Government has barely mentioned any policy or law relating to population.  The entire focus seems to be on short term issues such as refugees or getting the mix of student and skilled migration right.

How can this be a reasonable approach to planning for our future?  What should we do?