Opposition Leader Peter Dutton made his Budget Reply speech last Thursday night. In his speech, he claimed a Coalition Government he led would have reduced permanent migration from 185,000 in the next year to 140,000. Telling ABC’s 7.30 immediately after the speech
“It’s not just housing. People know that if you move suburbs, it’s hard to get your kids into school, or into childcare. It’s hard to get into a GP because the doctors have closed their books. It’s hard to get elective surgery. These factors have all contributed to capacity constraints because of the lack of planning in the migration program.”
Dutton also would claimed he would implement a two-year ban on foreign investors and temporary residents purchasing existing homes in Australia
So, his cunning plan is to reduce demand for new homes, schools, roads, health care and so on.
Except – it won’t.
The permanent migration figure in the budget is only part of the story. In 2019, the Morrison Coalition Government – with Dutton as Home Affairs Minister (and responsible for immigration numbers) – was going to reduce the number of permanent migrants from 190,000 people per annum to 150,000 people per annum. Writing for the ABC’s website, Laura Tingle points out that
… the very same 2019 budget papers were forecasting that net overseas migration would be 271,700 in 2019 (compared to 190,000 permanent arrivals) before dropping ever so marginally to 271,300 in 2020 and then to 263,800 by 2022 (despite the cut of 30,000 permanent places a year).
But Dutton had an answer for that, according to Tingle
Dutton told Radio 2GB on Friday that “at the moment … the government’s predicting 528,000 this year” for net overseas migration.
Actually, no. That’s the figure for 2022-23 in the budget papers, which say that in the financial year just ending, net overseas migration has already fallen back to 395,000.
It is predicted to fall to 260,000 in 2024-25 (a number Dutton described as “pretty dodgy”) and then to about 235,000. (Both numbers notably also less than those forecast in 2019).
Trent Wiltshire, the deputy director of migration and labour markets at the Grattan Institute, said that if the cuts fall on the family intake it “won’t do too much to the migration numbers in the short term because they’re already here on temporary visas, and will stay on temporary visas” for longer.
Simon Kuestenmacher, writing in The New Daily also suggests a cut in the permanent migration target number won’t do much to assist the scarcity of homes for people to live in because it isn’t the problem
The narrative is simple. How foolish were we to take in record numbers of migrants during a nationwide housing shortage?
No context is provided regarding last year’s record intake. The growth was exclusively driven by international students. All other visa categories were below pre-pandemic averages.
We let in so many international students in a single year because they weren’t able to come in the years prior due to our national lockdowns and the prolonged Chinese lockdowns.
This was pent-up demand and won’t be repeated. The spots for international students are now filled and we will bit by bit, and automatically, reach pre-pandemic levels.
So – Dutton is wrong again.
There are two problems here – Dutton is using a megaphone to misrepresent facts. Reducing the permanent migrant target number in the budget will do nothing to increase the number of homes available in Australia. As a former Minister in a government, Dutton should know this. So he’s either had absolutely no clue what he was doing when he was the Home Affairs Minister (which is concerning) or cynically using the plight of certain groups of people that have chosen to hopefully call Australia home to gain an advantage (which apparently is LNP policy and racist).
As Karen Middleton suggests in The Guardian
It was all straight from focus groups and from the Howard government’s old Crosby-Textor playbook. Find out what the people are complaining about and repeat it back to them, with sympathy and volume.
It was the verbal version of a colour-coded spreadsheet, cross-referencing important constituent groups and key demographics the coalition needs to win over, with focus-group data on what people say they care about and especially what worries them.
Certainly there is a conversation to be had about migration to Australia and the effects on the provision of services to all of the community. But the conversation isn’t as easy as reduce one component of a migration policy and all our problems will be solved. While Pauline Hanson has been trading on racism since the 1990’s (and at one time the Liberal Party de-selected her as a candidate because of her stated beliefs). Dutton is attempting to ‘blow the racist dogwhistle’ by calling for simplistic solution rather than make a genuine contribution.
It seems that politics still has the mental scars from John Hewson’s attempt to introduce a GST and reform the tax system and Bill Shorten’s attempt to reduce some overly generous concessions made to investors. A case in point being the brouhaha over the $300 being given to everyone with an electricity account in the Federal Budget. There is always some example the politicians and media can expose that don’t need the handout (despite the overwhelming evidence that a lot of people do). Rather than asking question in Parliament and in the media why someone with lots of money should get the assistance – wouldn’t the better option to use the advantages of your position in life to suggest that if you don’t need the money, make a matching donation to Lifeline, Vinnies, or some other group that you believe provides genuine help to those that are less well off?
We shouldn’t be kicking the can down the road by supplying simplistic solutions to complex questions as Dutton is attempting to do here. Yes the housing shortage is real, as is the need for universities to earn research funding from international students, the need for immigrants to provide labour in those fields where there are shortages and the desire by many people (most of whom are in the country already) to settle permanently and have their own roof over their heads.
While might resonate with the ‘Sky after dark’ crowd, Dutton’s refusal to open a discussion on all the reasons for a housing shortage in his budget reply speech is telling. It generally takes longer than a 15 second news grab to explain the reasons for a problem and a preferred solution successfully. If Dutton had a real answer or a willingness to arrive at rational and responsible solutions to a host of problems in Australia he should have provided it on Thursday night instead of the speech full of marketing slogans and soundbites.
We should expect better than this.
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