Geelong Advertiser

Australia cools on influx of migrants

- JOHN MASANAUSKA­S

A BIG majority of Australian voters believe the country is full and almost half support a partial ban on Muslim immigratio­n.

Just over 50 per cent of voters agreed that Australia had changed beyond recognitio­n and “sometimes feels like a foreign country”, a poll commission­ed by The Australian Population Research Institute has found.

It has implicatio­ns for the main political parties as citizens cope with massive population growth driven by record migrant intakes.

The nation’s population grew by 384,000 in the year to March this year, and 60 per cent of that was from net overseas migration.

Melbourne has among the highest growth rates of any city in the Western world.

It added nearly a million people over the past decade to reach a population of more than 4.7 million.

Arrivals from Asia dominate annual migration to Victoria, with those born in India and China the top settlers.

The TAPRI survey, to be released today, was done in July-August and based on a random national sample of 2067 voters from an online panel of 300,000 people run by The Online Research Institute.

It found that 74 per cent of them thought Australia did not need more people. On Muslim immigratio­n, 48 per cent supported a partial ban, a quarter opposed it and 27 per cent neither supported nor opposed it.

The authors said that such voter angst could easily be exploited in campaigns by such parties as One Nation and Australian Conservati­ves, but it also offered the Coalition Government a lifeline.

“The Liberal Party may have little choice but to mount such a campaign because it faces electoral oblivion in 2018 if it does not guard its voter base from challenger­s from the Right,” they said.

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