00:00Fethi, the immigration debate feels highly polarised in Australia right now.
00:04Has it always been so?
00:05There's always interest in how many migrants we take.
00:09Are we taking too many?
00:10Are we taking too few?
00:11Do we have the right policy settings to welcome migrants?
00:15What kind of migrants?
00:16What kind of visa categories?
00:18Where are they coming from?
00:20Will they fit?
00:21Will they cause any undesired impacts on society, whether socially, economically, politically,
00:27even environmentally?
00:29Immigration, and rightly so, needs to be subject to public debate.
00:33Unfortunately, what tends to happen at times is that we don't debate immigration in a logical,
00:39considered manner.
00:40We tend to be debating it on the basis of a lot of disinformation, on the basis of a
00:44lot of myths about immigration.
00:47And therefore, people form opinions about immigration in ways that do not reflect facts.
00:52There's no such magical metric, if you like, in terms of numbers of migration.
00:57By and large, I think Australia has very much had the right formula.
01:02And if you look at the history of migrant intakes in Australia over many, many years,
01:06it has been fairly stable.
01:08The exception being the COVID years.
01:10We had a very significant downward decrease.
01:14And then following that, we had what many people refer to as a surge in migration, which
01:20again, is really misunderstood.
01:22People think of migration as simply people who come here on permanent visas to settle
01:27forever.
01:29But if you look at the data that we have, probably the largest component of our migration
01:33program is what we call temporary arrivals.
01:36So that's people who are either international students, or working holidaymakers, or sometimes
01:42seasoned workers.
01:44Populations grow as a result of two things, either natural births or immigration.
01:48In the last few years, immigration has become a contributor to that growth to the point
01:54of just under 54%, I think.
01:57Which shows you the importance of immigration, that if we stop having a proactive and a very
02:02carefully designed immigration program, then what will happen is our population will start
02:08to decline.
02:09There is already a huge crisis globally in terms of aging populations.
02:12You see that in Europe, countries like Italy, you see it in Asia, countries like Japan.
02:17And what happens there is that when your population is aging, you don't have enough
02:22in the labor market to support those aging citizens.
02:25You don't have enough taxpayers to generate the wealth that's required to provide those
02:30key services.
02:31So we must always have a population growth that is positive, and that is able to support
02:38the needs of the larger population.
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