The Big Australia Freak Out Over One Nation’s Proposed Immigration Cuts

The sudden alarm among Big Australia journalists is not really about plumbers or nurses. It is about a taboo being broken. One Nation has proposed cutting the stock of temporary migrants back toward pre-pandemic levels, and that is enough to bring out the familiar sermon: skills shortages, an ageing nation, and the suggestion that anyone who questions mega-migration is economically illiterate. Leith van Onselen's reply in Macrobusiness (link below), is that the sermon is asinine. Australia has already grown its population at more than two and a half times the OECD average since 2000 and still complains of worse skills shortages than ever. If importing people were the cure, the patient should have recovered by now.

The ageing scare is treated the same way. A large share of today's older Australians are themselves the product of earlier migrant waves. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare notes that more than a third of people aged sixty-five and over were born overseas, a higher migrant share than in the population as a whole. Yesterday's young arrivals become today's pensioners. Continuous high intake does not freeze the age structure; it restocks the conveyor belt. The deeper claim, that ageing itself is an economic catastrophe requiring permanent demographic replacement, is no stronger. Across the rich world the share of people actually working is higher than it was forty years ago even as populations have grown older. Japan's population is smaller than two decades ago, yet a larger fraction of Japanese are in work than in Australia after a generation of extreme intake. World Bank figures put Japan's employment share above Australia's. The country that refused the Big Australia model did not run out of workers. Australia, which embraced it, still talks as if it has.

Canada is the control experiment the sermon prefers not to sit with. For years Ottawa ran one of the developed world's most ambitious immigration programs, sold on skills, youth and dynamism. Labour-force growth came almost entirely from abroad. The old-age dependency ratio barely moved. Housing, infrastructure and public services did not keep up. Productivity stagnated or fell as newcomers clustered in lower-value work and over-qualification became common. Research associated with the C.D. Howe Institute has made the awkward point that extra people raise labour demand as well as supply, more customers for housing, hospitals, schools and low-skill services, so economy-wide shortages can worsen rather than ease. Canada eventually had to cut planned permanent intake and cap temporary residents after a political backlash. High replacement migration did not abolish ageing. It produced a larger, still-ageing society with a housing crisis and weaker output per head. That is not a mystery unique to Ottawa. It is what happens when population policy is asked to do the work of training, capital investment and using the people already here.

The "skills crisis" line also collapses once the composition of the intake is admitted. A serious skills program would be small, selective and tightly matched to occupations that cannot be filled by raising wages, training locals or drawing older workers back in. Much of Australia's recent growth has not been that. Temporary and other categories have put large numbers of people into the country whose main economic function is to occupy dwellings, fill classrooms and, in the longer run, sit in electorates. Calling that a skills strategy is a category error. Bums on seats can raise headline GDP. They do not automatically raise GDP per person, housing per person, or hospital beds per person. Employers who have grown used to a cheap, expandable labour pool have every reason to shout shortage the moment the tap is tightened. Journalists who treat those shouts as national strategy are doing the employers' public relations.

There is a domestic alternative that does not require another million arrivals. New Zealand's non-means-tested superannuation is associated with far higher workforce participation among people over sixty-five. Australia's income test on the age pension produces effective marginal tax rates that can reach the mid-seventies, which is a fine way to tell fit older people not to bother. Matching New Zealand's participation rate among that age group would add on the order of half a million workers who already live here, already have housing, and do not add a matching claim on schools and maternity wards. One Nation's proposal to lift the earnings penalty on pensioners and veterans points at that reservoir. It is the sort of unglamorous reform that never features in a migration press conference.

None of this requires pretending that Australia needs no migrants at all, or that every journalist who worries about a tight trade is a priest of a replacement religion. It requires noticing that the religion is real: high intake has been treated as a moral and growth identity rather than a policy with costs, and questioning the volume has been treated as heresy rather than arithmetic. The arithmetic is not obscure. Past migrant cohorts age. Extra people need houses and services. Skills shortages persist after record population growth. Canada tried the same medicine at scale and did not cure the disease. Japan and a higher senior participation rate show other ways to keep an economy staffed. The freak-out over One Nation is the sound of a consensus that has not had to defend itself against those facts.

https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2026/09/an-immigration-lesson-for-ignorant-australian-journalists/

https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2026/09/labors-immigration-reforms-are-too-little-too-late/