Thanks for all the facts and figures. What is missing from this otherwise interesting article is the long term environmental costs of adding substantial numbers of people to our immigration program, that is, the costs of growing our population. Every time a greenfields site is paved over for housing, we lose biodiversity. Every extra person makes it harder to achieve our greenhouse gas emission targets. Every extra person in our cities makes congestion worse. Driving in Sydney and Melbourne these days is becoming a nightmare, even at weekends. Just getting from one side of one of these cities to the other to visit friends or relatives is fraught. And the big issue is: what will people do when oil hits another high and the economy is hit once again as it was in 2008? If our population doubles (as it will if current rates of growth are maintained) and climate change hits our food production, what will we eat? Forget importing food, we will have global food insecurity long before mid-century and other countries will be exporting little, or if they do, at enormous cost. It's fine to address immigration, but let's put it in the proper context, shall we?

Well you don't think we will spend a cool $billion on training bloody Aussies do you?

They just get better jobs more pay and the next thing you know they think they're upper class and vote for Tony Abbot. Lazy Bastards!

Better to give the money to foreigners who know how to kiss Labor butt!

Next!

Ghoulia Shillard
PM

Wow, an academic making sense for a change.

You had better have a chat to the education faculty Jo, as far to many of our kids coming out of school do not have the basics to handle the training we should be undertaking here.

You missed the other part of the story too Jo, the refugee area. We spend almost 3 times that much on housing & establishment costs with the refugees we admit from boats or official channels.

About the only profitable part of immigration from our point of view is the illegals. They come in, work on the sly, [probably cheaply], support, & house themselves, & still manage to send money home.

It is ironic that many of the most useful are these illegals.

Jo, you've only just scratched the surface of the costs of immigration. Let me list a few more:
- $770 billion infrastructure deficit (Infrastructure Partnerships Australia)
- $12 billion costs in inefficiencies through overloaded infrastructure (gridlocked traffic etc)
- Rising energy, water, land/rent/mortgage, food and fuel costs meaning upward pressure on inflation and interest rates
- Rising foreign debt to to increased overseas bank lending for mortgages
- Surging imports to service a larger population with consumer goods
- Reduced per capita value of Australia's mineral and export wealth
- Disincentive to train and invest in the Australian workforce

These are just some of the economic costs. What you also need to understand is that Australia's mining sector only employs a tiny fraction of our labour forse (just over 200,000 which is under 2%). We have over 2 million Australians unemployed, underemployed or given up the search.

Shall we talk about the environment now? After all, the economy is totally reliant on a healthy environment for long term prosperity. Or the social costs of housing crisis and overloaded hospitals?

At least there will be choice at the next federal election with the newly registered STABLE POPULATION PARTY.

High wage growth leads to high inflation. In turn that leads to demand for high migration. But where's the infrastructure? Successive governments set infrastructure development on the back burner. Public sentiment is not for high immigration, since without the necessary rail, road, housing & water infrastructure, high migration degrades quality of life for the people already residing in a country. Of course high incomes equals more cash money to waste on overpriced housing but where's the extra dwelling supply going to come from? Our governments must invest in infrastructure for the future, and they always fail miserably to do that!

Australia's housing collapse is well underway and property prices are declining fast. The majority of Aussies live in a financial world they neither understand completely nor gain from in any tangible way. The reality is property speculators damned themselves by jacking up the price of low quality fibro housing using record debt and dual wages, a way of life that's ingrained in society now when every sucker out there is convinced home prices can't ever fall. Read the willy commentary and claims from the bulls on discussion sites like http://australianpropertyforum.com to comprehend just how engrained the belief is that "property can only go up".

Australians have an abysmal track record in the real estate market. Germans have a better model that operates fairly and equally, and is the envy of most Europe but the politicians there still have to foot the bill for banking bailouts. The moral is nobody wins from crazy home price inflation, and many first home buyers are locked out of the market so something has to give, and soon.

Matt Cooper
http://australianpropertyforum.com/blog/main/3518382
Macrobusiness Property Forum

Thanks Jo, for the reference to the ABC's transcript of Mark O'Connor's recent debate with Peter McDonald. You say

"Environment author Mark O'Connor argues infrastructure costs are between $200,000 and $400,000 for every person that comes to Australia to work. While each overseas worker can contribute to the Australian economy the benefit is more likely to go to the company hiring them (and in this case it is the mining giants like BHP Billiton). For each person that comes to Australia to work it may save the employers training an apprentice or it may drive down wages.

According to O'Connor this may save the employer $10 000 in not having to train an apprentice, but the infrastructure costs borne by government is more than likely double that."

In fact, as the preceding paragraph suggests, the costs to the taxpayer are not merely double but more like 20 to 40 times the profit made by an employer who is too mean to train an Australian apprentice.

The error is in the ABC transcript where $200,000 (which is what I remember O'Connor said) got mis-transcribed the second time as $20,000.

Livio