‘Australian nightmare’: Crisis we can’t ignore

The figures are striking.

Between 2000 and 2023, Australia’s population grew by 40 per cent — the fastest rate of any developed nation.

More than 30 per cent of Australia’s population in 2023 was born overseas, for the first time since 1893.

For every one baby born in Australia now, four migrants arrive. And many of those babies are themselves born to migrants.

The overseas-born population bottomed out at 9.8 per cent in 1947 and has been climbing steadily ever since, in almost a V-shaped recolonisation.

In the 60 years after World War II, net overseas migration — arrivals minus departures — averaged 90,000 per year.

Despite large influxes of migrants from Europe after the war, that figure only reached 150,000 twice in those six decades.

When John Howard kicked off the “Big Australia” boom in the early noughties, net overseas migration more than doubled from its historical average.

But that was just a taste of what was to come.

After Covid, net overseas migration skyrocketed to an eye-watering record of 536,000 people in 2022-23, dipping slightly to 446,000 in 2023-24.

“We’re not against migration,” said Frank Carbone, Mayor of multicultural Fairfield in Sydney’s west.

“Migration is the foundation this country has been built on — but it’s always been a sensible, regulated policy. At the moment it feels like the policy under Albanese has been unregulated and uncontrolled. It’s one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever seen in public life.”

The surge has been driven by international students, who make up the vast bulk of temporary migration numbers. A record 197,000 arrived in February alone and there are now more than 850,000 in the country.

The permanent migration program, currently set at 185,000 places, is a smaller contributor to net overseas migration, since 60 per cent of granted visas are already living in the country — of those, around 25,000 ...
[Short citation of 8% of the original article]