Submission to the Inquiry into Migration, Pathway to Nation Building

A more detailed discussion of the impact of migration-fuelled population growth on the economy is given below in the section titled The claimed economic value of migrants. [...] What is a sustainable level of migration? A sustainable scale of immigration is one that allows Australia’s population to stabilise or slowly contract, in order to protect and improve the long-term ecological health of the Australian continental bioregion, which underpins the security and quality of life for future Australians and contributes to planetary stability. [...] This escalation of activity into a concerted growth lobby is detailed in a 2006 study by social scientists Katharine Betts and Michael Gilding.29 It is not coincidental that the property industry rivals mining as the greatest source of political donations and lobbying activity.30 The instituting of Treasury’s Intergenerational Reports, and more recently the formation of the Centre for Population w. [...] Referring to the high immigration decade prior to the pandemic, Professor Ross Garnaut succinctly expressed the view of most economists not aligned with the growth lobby: "The overall effect was to integrate much of the Australian labour market into a global labour market for the first time. [...] The vast experiment of accelerating Australia’s population growth through high levels of immigration has solved none of the problems it was intended to fix, while exacerbating all of the issues of most concern to Australians, from job insecurity and falling real wages to housing unaffordability, inadequate infrastructure, environmental degradation and greenhouse gas emissions.