MIGRATION CUTS IN VIRTUAL REALITY

THERE are two big points to be made about the government’s slashing of migration number, only one of which has, as far as I can judge, so far been made.

That one is that the government is not actually slashing the numbers.

Yes, the prime minister has formally announced that the maximum cap for permanent migrants in any year will be cut from 190,000 to 160,000.

But as our colleague on The Australian, Judith Sloan, has succinctly and also rather sharply pointed out, the actual inflows under the permanent stream in the last two years have been, well, around 160,000.

So in effect, ScoMo, as he apparently prefers to be called rather than PM, has announced a real cut from 160,000 to, well, 160,000.

More importantly, that means it will make absolutely no difference to anything – whether you want a big, BIG Australia, a somewhat bigger Australia or a very modestly bigger Australia.

If you think too many migrants flooding into Melbourne and Sydney are making those two cities less livable – extraordinarily indeed, arguably already even less livable than the planet’s number one mega city Tokyo – that would continue unchanged.

Equally, if you are on the diametrically opposite side of the argument and believe the economy needs just as many migrants every year in the future as we’ve been getting, well, you would also get your wish.

The other part of the numbers, as Sloan also pointed out, is that the 160,000 only deals with permanent migration.

Every year we also get a flood of temporary migrants – many of who, by the bye, miraculously morph into permanent migrants.

Add these in and in the latest year (total) net migration was bumped up from that 160,000 to 236,700.

The temporary cohort is made up of New Zealanders, international students, temporary workers and ‘tourists and visitors’ (not quite sure of the difference).

Now you might think, they – with the possible exception of that quaintly identified ‘NZ’ category – would balance out from year to year. The new ones coming in, the previous ones going out.

But they don’t necessarily. They are also hard to control systematically and harder to police once through the gate.

And New Zealanders have been a consistent net inflow for decades. Indeed, the entire population of our cross-Ditch neighbor could decide to come here, and they all could.

It’s the 236,700-plus that our cities and especially Melbourne and Sydney have to fit in and provide infrastructure for, not just the so-called permanent 160,000.

Further, the real numbers are actually much higher: there are two aspects to that ‘plus’.

The first is that the 236,700 refers to the net increase in the latest year. We still have to provide infrastructure for the permanent ‘temporary population’ living here, especially foreign students but also (theoretically) temporary workers.

Secondly, it’s by no means clear that the numbers accurately capture the flows either gross or net, precisely because of overstays and category swaps.

This reality – that in fact absolutely nothing will change – rendered at least bizarre the immediate howls of rage from the ‘BIG Australia’ cohort. The ACCI’s James Pearson called it an “economic own goal”.

Seriously now, even if we were going to cut permanents from 190,000 to 160,000 a year, would anyone seriously try to suggest that having

1.6 million new people flowing mostly into Melbourne and Sydney over the next 10 years instead of 1.9 million is going to make any difference?

To anything? Either way? To either wrecking the economy or (further) wrecking those cities?

That brings us to the second point and why the howls were so hopelessly ludicrous: it’s all meaningless.

The government, the ScoMo government, can announce all it wants; but it’s pretty much on a par with Adolf issuing orders from the bunker in another March, 1945.

In two months Bill Shorten will be PM and Chris Bowen will be Treasurer. What happens to our immigration numbers and composition in 2018-19 and quite probably for at least a few and possibly many years after that will be in their gift.

I made the same point about the utterly bizarre high-fiving and woops of joy from the mortgage broking community when the government announced it would defer any ban on mortgage commissions.

Any announcement from this government, including very specifically anything in the budget Tuesday week, is, bluntly, worth four-fifths of five-eighths of very little.