The government will miss its migration targets by a long way, but that puts huge pressure on the Coalition. How could it make drastic cuts without wrecking parts of the economy?
Australians are about to get a rude awakening on one of the key issues for the coming federal election – and the awkward facts will set up yet another clash over housing and the cost of living. Adding more heat to the argument, the political dispute will turn, as it usually does, to competing claims about a Big Australia.
But this is not an unalloyed victory for Peter Dutton because he is running out of time to explain how his approach would deliver a different outcome. The opposition leader and his colleagues have been ducking and weaving on migration ever since they promised a cut in the intake in May. All the Coalition has offered voters is six months of doubt.
Those are confronting numbers because everyone has a stake in the outcome. There is a social contract between migration and population: The best analysis of the problem, by former immigration department deputy secretary Abul Rizvi, estimates a net intake of 463,000 for the year – about twice Labor’s expectation in its first budget. Rizvi set this out in a nine-page study this week for the progressive journalThe government has taken some radical steps to get the numbers down, including placing unprecedented caps on overseas students.
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