Population

Dick Smith wants to cap Australia’s population at 30 million over concerns about a lack of resources and housing costs. In doing so he falls for the ’lump of labour’ fallacy, and fails Econ 101: it’s poor planning, not immigrants, that erodes housing affordability in Australia.

The numbers are in: in 2022-23, Australia’s population grew by 624,100 people, or around 2.4%. That’s a huge figure – a record, in fact – and it was driven by the net addition of 518,090 overseas migrants. As you might expect, the media jumped all over it:

The merchants of fear were out to get their clicks again on the weekend, jumping on the inevitable post-pandemic surge in migration to crack a headline: “Monthly long-term arrivals and departures data released by the ABS suggests that net overseas migration (NOM) has surged even higher, with around 500,000 net migrants expected to have arrived in Australia over the 2022-23 financial year.