Opinion & Commentary
Gillard's population policy at sea
Is the Gillard government for a big Australia or not? Anyone following the news this past week might be a bit confused.
Rewind to Tuesday, when Treasurer Wayne Swan used his budget speech to declare that all hands must be on the mining boom deck. As well as a focus on training, Swan announced 16,000 regional migration places to help meet emerging skills demand.
Fast forward a few days to Friday, when the spotlight hit Sustainable Population Minister Tony Burke. Releasing his new population strategy, Burke confidently rejected the notion that our economic development is tied to population growth.
In case punters were confused by Swan’s loose talk of skills and booms at the beginning of the week, Burke was back to remind us what the government really thinks: ‘Big Australia’ is out, ‘sustainable’ growth is in.
In an audacious triumph of political positioning over policy substance, the government managed to release two contradictory doctrines in one week — with neither promising any real change.
Swan’s focus on skills is due to continuing unprecedented minerals demand from China, which comes at a time when workforce growth is slow due to population ageing. It’s all about jobs, according to the Treasurer: we need more workers to ensure the opportunity is not wasted.
A major component of Swan’s budget is increased vocational training and moves to shift welfare recipients into the workforce. But his announcement of 16,000 extra skilled migration places for regional Australia is also an oblique admission that the challenge can’t be met by Australian workers alone.
Yet Swan’s 16,000 new migration places aren’t really new places. Instead, they are just a reshuffling of the existing quota to induce more migrants to move to regional areas. The ‘new’ places will form part of the 125,000 permanent skilled migration places allocated by the government – a slight increase on the 113,000 granted last year.
What’s of more importance is Swan’s move to speed up processing times for 457 visa applications — the controversial but widely used long-term temporary skilled migration category.
While permanent skilled migration numbers are set by the government and have barely changed in the last decade, long-term temporary skilled migration levels are uncapped and fluctuate quite dramatically with demand. This market-driven program acts as something of a release valve, with numbers going up when there is a shortage of workers and down when the economy begins to slow.
The 36 per cent fall in net overseas migration last year was partly due to a GFC-induced hangover, which saw businesses bring in fewer workers (but the importance of falling overseas student numbers can’t be underestimated either). As skills shortages again intensify, we can expect to see net migration again begin to rise.
The upshot of this is that if there are jobs for overseas workers, more overseas workers will come to Australia, regardless of what Treasurer Swan does or doesn’t announce in his budget.
What’s more, the intertwined relationship between temporary skilled migration and permanent skilled migration means that many of Swan’s new regional places could actually go to workers already in Australia. More than a third of all permanent visas are now issued onshore, and most go to skilled migrants holding temporary visas.
Increasing the number of permanent skilled visas available will probably shorten the queue for permanent residency amongst 457 visa holders, but it is less likely to increase the total number of skilled workers coming to Australia.
Swan’s announcement on skilled migration sends good signals, but won’t result in much practical change. Similarly, Tony Burke’s new ‘sustainable’ population strategy won’t make a real difference to population growth either.
Burke rejects the notion of a population target or a population cap, but these were unrealistic populist ideas floated in the heat of the election campaign that were never actually going to fly. The government will stick with the current laissez-faire approach to both net overseas migration and natural increase, leaving it with few levers to control aggregate population or population size.
And Burke’s declaration that better infrastructure is needed in high-growth areas is simply a reflection of what voters have been telling state governments for years.
Rather than promising any real policy change, Burke’s strategy will give the government a convenient document to point to when the population debate again inevitably arises— enabling them to reassure outer suburban voters stuck in traffic that Canberra feels their pain.
So is the Gillard government committed to increasing skilled migration, or do they reject the idea of a ‘big Australia’? In truth, it doesn’t really matter too much. Australia’s population will continue to grow and, as long as there are jobs available, part of this growth will come from overseas skilled migration. The government will quietly sit back, and allow it to happen – that is of course until the next populist population debate transpires.
Jessica Brown is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies. Her report Populate or Perish? Modelling Australia’s Demographic Future, co-authored with Dr Oliver Marc Hartwich, was published by the CIS.
