Net migration falls as ‘values’ debate heats up
As the immigration debate turns from numbers to values, Australia’s net immigration intake has continued to fall from its post-COVID record.
Net overseas migration (NOM) from people moving to Australia, excluding those moving away, fell to just over 305,000 in the last financial year, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported on Thursday.
This is 6,000 fewer than the NOM through March and 250,000 fewer than the peak in September 2023.
However, the rate of decline is slowing.
Former immigration department secretary Abul Rizvi said although the result was below the Treasury’s forecast of 310,000 NOM in 2024/25 published on Wednesday, it looked unlikely to reach future forecasts of 260,000 in the current financial year and 225,000 in 2026/27.
He said there were two factors limiting the decline in immigration levels.
Following a tightening of student visa policy from mid-2023 to mid-2025, the government announced higher planning levels for 2026, resulting in an increase in offshore university applications in September and October.
Secondly, Australia’s strong labor market has led to higher inflows, especially compared to New Zealand.
Source: ABS, AAP
Right-wing commentators and politicians focused on the increase in migration numbers following border closures due to the pandemic, with the NOM turning negative.
Liberal MP Andrew Hastie, for example, accused the Albanian government of worsening the housing crisis.
In recent weeks, and especially in the wake of the Bondi attack, the immigration debate has shifted from how many people to whom.
“It really matters who we bring into our country,” Mr Hastie told Sky News on Tuesday.
“They need to subscribe to Australian values that are fundamentally Judeo-Christian values: equality, the rule of law, consent, democratic traditions, all of these are fundamentally Judeo-Christian.
“What we see is that radical Islamic theology, as John Howard calls it, is completely incompatible with Australia’s success.”
Mr. Rizvi predicts a heated internal debate within the coalition about whether to return to discriminatory immigration policy.
While Australia’s immigration policy discriminates based on skill, age and health status, the country has not had a discriminatory immigration policy based on race, religion or nationality since the 1970s.
Mr. Rizvi said reintroducing measures limiting immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, for example, would be extraordinarily difficult to implement in practice and incredibly divisive.
It would be inevitable that the Supreme Court would challenge such a policy.
Screening visa applicants for anti-Semitic views expressed by the coalition or strengthening ministerial powers to strip visas of noncitizens with extremist sympathies, as the government has promised, will do little to change the volume of immigrants arriving from certain parts of the world.
“The views of the vast majority of people are not documented everywhere, and doing research on their merits would take a very long time and clog an already clogged system to the point where it becomes inoperable,” Mr. Rizvi said.
