Demolishing The Australia Institute live on ABC Radio National

Last week, I debated Matt Grudnoff from The Australia Institute live on ABC Radio National on the topic of immigration.

At the opening, host Sally Sara asked me whether immigration was too high and sustainable, and I answered with the following:

Absolutely not. So let’s be honest here. We’ve had an absolutely extreme amount of immigration over the past 3 and a half years. We’ve had more than 1.4 million net migrants arrive in Australia. And actually since the end of 2019, which includes the pandemic lockdown, 267,000 net migrants have landed on average per year. And that’s nearly 50,000 higher than the decade leading up to the pandemic.

So this level of migration has been extreme. And it’s one of the reasons why we have a rental crisis in this country because nearly 300,000 more migrants are now in Australia than would have been here had the pre-pandemic trend continued.

So that’s 300,000 more people needing rental accommodation and it’s one of the main reasons why we have rental crisis.

Matt Grudnoff responded with the following spin:

In the last couple of years, migration and population growth have been a lot higher, but the couple of years before that, the borders were shut and we had none. And what’s effectively happened is those two have offset each other.

And you’ve got to remember that Australia is increasing the amount of housing at record levels as well. As we grow and become a larger country, we’re able to build more homes. And the rate of housing is increasing at the same rate as the population is increasing at the moment.

I responded with the following:

100% I disagree. That is complete rubbish. We’ve got nearly 300,000 more migrants in the country than we would have had the pre-pandemic trend continued.

We have a rental crisis in Australia, with the rental vacancy rate tracking at historical lows and even the federal government’s own national housing supply and affordability council has clearly stated that we have a housing shortage and the housing shortage has gotten worse.

So I don’t know where Matt’s getting these delusional numbers from quite frankly.

To which Matt responded:

Well, I’m getting my numbers from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. If you look at the average population growth before the pandemic, it was 1.5%. Over the last year, the population growth in Australia has been 1.5%. It’s gone back to the pre-pandemic growth rate.

Obviously, talking about growth rates rather than numbers is deceptive, given the population today is 2.3 million larger than in December 2019.

It is the number that matters, not growth rates. Moreover, immigration’s share of population is far higher, which adds to housing demand immediately, given that migrants arrive as adults.

Meanwhile, actual dwelling construction has fallen as immigration boomed:

I also questioned why The Australia Institute, in the last decade, was a vocal critic of high immigration-driven population growth:

The Australian Institute was actually a vocal critic of big migration pre-pandemic. So they released a paper in 2015, basically pushing back against Big Australia calling for a population debate.

Richard Dennis, the former chief economist, wrote detailed articles in the AFR and and appeared on radio raising the alarm on Australia’s population growth and this is when Australia’s net overseas migration was much lower than it is today.

So, The Australian Institute has actually changed its spots and it’s done so, I believe, because now we have a Labor government in office whereas when the Coalition was in, they were happy to criticise it.

Matt Grudnoff responded, claiming that my claim was “just nonsense” and once again lied that migration is the same as the pre-pandemic era:

Well, that’s just nonsense. What I’m saying is that the current migration rate is the same as it was in the pre-pandemic era.

The Australia Institute was previously a critic of high immigration:

Matt Grudnoff might want to examine The Australia Institute’s previous positions on immigration under the former Coalition government.

In 2015, TAI published an excellent research paper calling for a national debate on Australia’s future population:

Since the Sydney Olympics in the year 2000 the population of Australia has grown by 25 per cent. In fact, since the Sydney Olympics, Australia’s population has grown more than the entire population of Sydney at that time…

Each year our population increases by around 400,000—a new Canberra every year…

Despite our rapid population growth being at historic rates and among the highest in the world, it is all too rarely discussed…

Australia needs serious debate around what our population policy should be and how to plan for our future population.

In 2015, when net overseas migration was around 185,000, Richard Denniss gave a masterful interview on Sydney’s 2UE Radio, explaining why the drive towards a “Big Australia” is destroying Australian living standards:

Population growth costs a lot… If you double the number of citizens then you double the number of teachers and double the number of nurses. It’s pretty simple math.

But of course, you don’t have to double them if you gradually plan to lower the number of services. If you are happy for us to gradually lower the number of services in our health system, our aged system, if you are happy for congestion to gradually get worse, if you are happy for the amount of green space per person to decline, then you can do what we do.

But the trick is at the moment is every budget – and all governments do this – every budget the minister says “I’m spending a record amount on health”. Well, of course you are, we’ve got a bigger population than we’ve ever had before.

Every year has to be a record. But, their own data shows that on a per person basis, it’s just not keeping up.

Denniss wrote an excellent op-ed in The AFR in 2018 attacking the Liberal’s high immigration, even though it was significantly lower than current levels:

Peter Dutton’s best argument for Australia to lower its annual immigration intake is one word: Sydney. Australia’s largest city has been made crowded, slow, expensive and unproductive by decades of unplanned immigration.

Anyone planning an event knows that it makes a lot more sense to put the tables and chairs out before the guests arrive lest you bump into people and knock over the vases. And anyone living in Sydney now knows it makes more sense to build light rail, and all of the other infrastructure that millions of people will need, before they arrive rather than after.

Back in 2000 after Sydney spent billions building stadiums that we were told would last for 50 years Australia’s population was 19.1 million. And today there are 24.7 million of us bidding up the prices of the same amount of land. Australia’s population has grown by the equivalent of an entire Sydney since the Sydney Olympics but obviously our infrastructure has not…

Australia’s rate of immigration nearly doubled on John Howard’s watch…

Big business loves big population growth because with a population growing by around 2 per cent a year, the fastest in the OECD, customer numbers grow by around 2 per cent a year without even trying. For our big banks, retailers, airlines, telcos and petrol companies high levels of immigration growth mean high levels of profit growth.

Governments love rapid population growth as well as they have come to treat new arrivals more as new taxpayers rather than as new citizens who deserve the level of public services and amenities Australians once took for granted. Put simply, successive governments, state and federal, have used rapid population growth as an opportunity to cut government spending per person while bragging, year after year, about record levels of total spending. It’s a cynical trick…

While big business and governments love all the revenue that comes from all those extra wallets entering the country, the Australian community has never been as keen. Not because they are all racist, although some clearly are, but because with long waits to get into hospitals, clogged roads, crowded trains and dwindling amounts of public space they simply couldn’t see the plan to accommodate even more…

Rapid population growth without a similarly rapid increase in infrastructure spending delivers better budget outcomes at the expense of worse public services. Rapid population growth delivers better customer numbers without any need to deliver better customer service. And rapid population growth puts downward pressure on wages without the need to train your existing workforce.

It is disappointing to see what was once one of my favourite economic think tanks turn into a fake left virtue-signaling joke.

Bring back Clive Hamilton’s Australia Institute.