Migration added just over 100,000 people to Australia’s population in the last three months of 2023, according to new official figures that cast doubt on the government’s own migration forecast.
Net overseas migration (NOM) – a figure that tracks arrivals and departures – was 107,300 for the December quarter.
While that is lower than the year before, it is not low enough to meet Treasury’s projection in last month’s budget, which was 395,000 for the full financial year about to end.
Data for half of that year is now available, and the running tally is at 252,000 — well past halfway.
And while the government has been quick to claim the figures are only starting to show the effects of its efforts to curb international students via a dodgy provider crackdown, former senior immigration official Abul Rizvi told the ABC he saw “little to no chance” the Treasury forecast would be met.
“The December quarter figure would be higher than the government would have been hoping for given the large net departure of students in that quarter,” he said.
“[The annual figure] will be well over 400,000.”
Gap between politics and policy
That would present a headache for the government, which has used the Treasury forecasts to argue it is bringing migration down from the record levels reached in 2022-23.
Net migration in that year exceeded half a million, largely because of a ‘catch-up’ effect from the pandemic migration slump.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton used that record-high figure to mount a political argument about the cost of living and has promised to reduce the numbers of permanent and temporary migrants.
But despite the heated politics, governments have minimal control over net migration.
Most of the main entry streams are not capped, including international students and temporary workers. And where governments have sought to impose limits, they have encountered business anger and warnings of economic damage.
As well as arrivals, the net migration figure is also affected by departures. And the last few years have seen unusually few temporary migrants departing, which is a direct consequence of the Morrison government’s pandemic-era decision to extend visas to encourage people to stay to support the economy.
Finally, there’s also the comings and goings of Australian residents, another thing the government has no capacity or reason to control.
Mr Rizvi noted that a “surprisingly large” number of Australians who had been living overseas have arrived back in the past year.
“That will ensure net migration remains high in 2023-24,” he said.
NOM: Not Overly Meaningful?
ANU Professor Alan Gamlen, a migration expert, told the ABC that these many and varied determinants meant NOM was not a useful way to track migrant numbers.
“You can and will find some of the country’s leading experts in this area disagreeing on what drives NOM, and that’s why it’s not a good policy target.
“It’s a derivative of an underlying basket of a bunch of different things. Derivatives are unreliable and they’re unpredictable.”
Professor Gamlen argued the focus on the surge in NOM was obscuring the fact that Australia actually has fewer migrants present in the country compared to the pre-pandemic trend, because the pandemic slump was much larger and much longer than the subsequent surge.
“NOM is going to stabilise of its own accord, and it’s going to stabilise without a need for aggressive, rollercoaster migration policy,” he said.
“The big story here is that there’s been much less migration than we expected since the pandemic started, not much more migration. And the focus on NOM has confused that.”