Should Migrant Policy go Regional?

Jul 15, 2010

The population debate has been on the fore of an imminant 2010 Federal election. Issues raised in the Treasury's Intergenerational Report in February 2010, revealed a projected national population of 36 million by 2050, and an additional 10.5 million people were projected to be living in Australia's capital cities by 2056. I believe this issue had contributed indirectly via a drop in popularity to Mr. Rudd's downfall, as the sheer numbers had many Australian fearing population explosion particularly without supporting infrastructure.

However, according to Mr. Henry using immigration policy to engineer decentralisation was not the right path. "The immigration intake of Australia is historically quite volatile . . . but the fact there is such a strong relationship between the immigration intake and economic growth suggests there is something to it," he told the Committee for Economic Development of Australia conference.

"If the skilled immigrants are coming into Australia to fill jobs not being filled by Australians, there's a limit to which one should seek to interfere and push skilled immigrants to places where the jobs might not be. I don't think that I'd be starting with immigration to intervene in the geographic distribution."

While Kevin Rudd initially endorsed a Big Australia before backtracking and appointing Tony Burke as population minister to examine the issue, one of Julia Gillard's first acts as Prime Minister was to distance herself from a Big Australia. Ms Gillard said Australia shouldn't "hurtle" toward a population approaching 40 million without more consideration of the environmental and infrastructure needs. In a pointed move, she changed Mr Burke's title to Sustainable Population Minister. It emerged that pre-election material, ALP leaflets, being distributed in Sydney's outer west with the clear message from Ms Gillard that a Big Australia was "not on".

Dr Henry said although there were housing, transport, infrastructure and environmental challenges for big cities in handling an extra 10.5 million people, there were also opportunities. 

Secretary Henry's comments are an endorsement of the "Big Australia" population debate.

However, his comments do not address the massive skills shortage in many Regional areas. Without incentives for 'Australians' to decentralise, Immigration policy is an effective method of dealing with the issue. I don't think it's an issue of Immigrants doing jobs that Australia's will not, many are the same positions; it's more an issue of not going to the locations where these jobs are.

Your thoughts?

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