It beggars belief that with nearly a million unemployed and young people unable to buy homes in the big cities we want to cram more people in. My guess is that per capita GDP is in long term decline so we've overshot the optimum population. We are forced to make the choice between crowded small block or apartment living or ridiculously long commutes. The PM says we should live in 30 minute cities the same time as making the problem harder.

As for refugees I think spending the same money closer to the source of the problem would be more effective. Notice that the troubles seem to be in countries with high population. For some reason we don't get refugees from Switzerland. Maybe we should follow their population policy.

Conventional economic wisdom Peter, tells us this is exactly what you do to tackle the destiny of demography. And prop up a housing market looking to achieve over capacity for the first time in decades!?

Even so there are other unconventional solutions that solve the economic conundrum without loading the future with millions of idle hands!

This would be a much larger resettlement of older self funded retirees than that was so successfully implemented by cunning as a fox Joh Bjelke Petersen!

Who could come from Europe where the VAT is at times more than double what they'd pay here and they'd escape the proposed wealth tax and Eastern European winters.

As self funded retirees, opt for private health care!

As seniors they'd have all their child raising days behind them, so put no additional strain of our limited education budget.

We'd need to be much more pragmatic in some of our forward planning if we would implement the proposal.

We'd need long overdue real tax reform that simply deals the costly and entirely unproductive parasites out of our tax collecting compact. And achieved if the only tax collected was an unavoidable stand alone expenditure tax? Which could be cheaper than many European VAT's and still collect more than enough revenue!?

We'd also need to convert our transport options to local cleaner cheaper copious gas!

We also need to roll out cheaper than coal carbon free local energy options, which would halve the cost of industrial energy and have the high tech energy dependant industries of the world queuing to join the manufacturing ranks.

Even more so if they can get their production to market with rapid rail and very fast ferries. All very doable with the right mindset at the helm!

We need to end age discrimination that prevents retraining that equips older, wiser Australians with new and necessary skills?

It's simply not true that you can't teach an old dog new tricks! But in the case of the older dog, it just takes longer; and requires more repetition and patience!
Alan B.

The problem is that immigration is an easy scapegoat for governments' failure to provide infrastructure and services.

Australia doesn't actually NEED more people, but it would be BETTER OFF WITH more people – unless the government neglects nation building.

Sustainable Australia has ignored SA, WA, NT, and TAS, so there is nothing we non-eastern staters can do about the ridiculous immigrant numbers but write 'Stop Mass Immigration' on our ballot papers. I suppose their apprarent lack of interest in us is due to fact that most immigrants head for the eastern states, and the cost of campaigning is high. However, votes are votes;Sustainable Australia should look for them everywhere. We don't want people overflowing to us when there is no more room East of the Blue Mountains. All immigrants lower our standard of living and threaten our way of life.

The author assumes a problem due to his particular system of values.

Cui Bono (Who profits)? Answer: Australia.

Immigration boosts economic growth

- this is good for Australia's economy

- inturn this is good for Australians overall.

Plantagenet,

No one questions that mass migration adds to aggregate GDP, but why should you care if the pie is getting bigger, if your slice hasn't grown, may even have shrunk, and no longer has a cherry on top? The Productivity Commission in its 2006 report on immigration (p. 154):

"Most of the economic benefits associated with an increase in skilled migration accrues to the immigrants themselves. For existing residents, capital owners receive additional income, with owners of capital in those sectors experiencing the largest output gains enjoying the largest gains in capital income. On the other hand, the real average annual incomes of existing resident workers grows more slowly than in the base-case, as additional immigrants place downward pressure on real wages.

"The economic impact of skilled migration is small when compared with other drivers of productivity and income per capita."

Real GDP per capita has been fairly stagnant since about 2006, and real net disposable income per capita has been falling since 2011. At the same time we have had very high immigration for more than a decade.

http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2015/12/why-you-should-ignore-todays-gdp-print-2/

The real winners are the folk at the top. They get bigger domestic markets, inflated profits from essential resources such as residential land, and a cheap, compliant work force. Furthermore, they can socialise the infrastructure and other costs and use their wealth to cocoon themselves from most of the problems that they are causing for others.

Aiden,
I'd like to know why you think we would be better off with more people.
What's behind your opinion?
Is it a matter economics, or do you actually believe more foreigners will be good for the fabric of our nation?

If we adopt an extremist "We're all right Jack. Youse can't come here now." policy.

Then the countries in our region will rightly feel racially offended.

Instead of the current healthy levels of Chinese and Indian immigration and investment, China and India will use forceable entry.

We would ultimately need 200+ Australian nuclear weapons to defend a "No Migrants Need Apply" policy.

Environmentally friendly while masquerading as lefty enemies of neo liberalism, or plutocrat - nativist agitprop?

Noticed on MacroBusiness story cited, another 'dog whistle' headline 'Sustainable Australia Party Dissects the Population Ponzi'

http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2016/06/sustainable-australia-party-dissects-the-population-ponzi/

Like MB the writer of this article prefers the non-demographic research of an 'academic' to comment on immigration and population; always consistently negative?

The elephant in the room, is neither (mostly) temporary 'immigrants' nor fertility, but ageing native permanent population increasing pressure on services and budgets.

No coincidence that much of the nativist and far right literature obsesses about coming brown tides of humanity etc.. aka Trumpistas. A good example is found in article 'Far Right or Far Wrong'?

'Far right or far wrong? Illegal immigrants swamping Europe, turning churches into mosques - it's the perfect plot for a neo-nazi bestseller.... The book currently generating the most chatter is Jean Raspail's Camp of Saints. First published in 1973, in France, no British publisher (a gutless crew) has been brave enough to take it on. In America, publication was sponsored, in 1985, by the ultra-right (ultra-wrong), anti-immigration Laurel Foundation, under whose aegis it now sells like hot cakes.'

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2004/may/24/thefarright.immigrationandpublicservices

Luckily someone did review Raspail, Australian academic cited in this Online Opinion article, Katherine Betts, in John Tanton's nativist journal the Social Contract Press in 2005 'A Conversation with Jean Raspail'

http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc1504/article_1340.shtml

The 'elephant in the room' is white nativism, radical right and neo liberalism dressed up as environmental concern and desperate for support from young people..... all very well, but if you are a conservative how can it help the 'sustainabilty' of conservative parties by attacking their future constituencies, like Howard managed in his own safe seat, and paid the price?

Hi Divergence

According to the OECD, Australia’s real per capita GDP grew at 0.9% a year between 2006 and 2015, almost twice the OECD average of 0.5%

https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=PDB_LV

The main difference between real GDP and real national income is that, to calculate real GDP, export values are deflated by the price of exports (to work out the volume of exports); whereas for national income, they are deflated by the price of imports (to work out the volume of imports we can access in exchange for our exports). This means that real national income grows faster than real GDP when export prices are rising faster than imports, and vice versa. Unless Australia’s population growth has caused China to slow its demand for our coal and iron ore, which I doubt, then the comparatively weak national income numbers are completely unrelated to population.

The Productivity Commission report you quote is rather out of date. It recently completed another inquiry into migration, Its final report is yet to be released by government, but its draft says:

“While immigrants benefit from their employment in Australia, preliminary modelling suggests that the Australian population as a whole benefits from higher output per person.”

And

“Preliminary econometric analysis commissioned for this inquiry found no discernible effect from immigration on wages, employment and participation in aggregate.”

Let into any country hundreds of thousands of people from other countries thus radically reducing the national identity of the people in the country, easier to then control the population.

Guarantee that today you would never be able to get the current population of Australia to protest like they did during the Vietnam war against it, even if there was an equally bad situation.

Australians have now mostly become complacent and think they have to have Government fix everything for them, Government loves that because it allows them to grab more and more power and control over people.

Literally we are the nanny country.

Come off it plantagenet. Any increase in GDP is in the housing required to house this flood, & that increase is coming straight out of our pockets. Paying for that GDP growth is making us poorer.

As for that bit, "countries in our region will rightly feel racially offended", what rubbish. Are you offended you can't migrate to Japan. Countries can feel offended if they like, & some will no matter what we do, better that than keep offending most existing Ozzies.

The real problem is unemployment. Building another 100,000 houses a year, at our expense of course, is employing hundreds of thousands. Shut down that huge percentage of the building industry, & the whole economy collapses. The loss of the car industry, & some employment in mining, are just a drop in bucket compared to building for employment.

Then add the fact that they are yet to find a way of outsourcing it to overseas makes building about the only reliable employer of labour we have left.

All the existing population is just a little poorer for every immigrant, & I'm sure many of the politicians don't like the high immigration levels, any more than most of us, but they can see no way out of the catch 22 we have got ourselves into.

With immigration we are destroying the country, particularly with political correctness dictating the garbage we are letting in today. Without Immigration the economy collapses. Our grand kids will curse us for our gutlessness in letting it happen.

I am a town planner and can assure you that our current rate of population growth is unsustainable. The solution is to return to our long-term net migration average of 70,000 a year. This was the figure before the Howard years. I recently wrote this article outlining the reason why we shouldn't ignore this important topic: http://www.candobetter.net/node/4858

Rhian,

There have been a number of economic reports on immigration from around the world, such as the 2008 House of Lords report in the UK. They all seem to agree that mass migration only has a small per capita economic benefit, if that. See also the graph on page 155 of the Productivity Commission report. Male wages in the US have been mostly stagnant or declining since the 1970s, despite high immigration.

http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/chart/swa-wages-figure-4c-change-real-hourly-wages/

How is this possible if immigration is as wonderful for the economy as you say it is? How are those men better off, especially with massive inflation in costs for higher education, health care, etc.? There are more opportunities for women, but there are also plenty of exhausted mothers who wish that they didn't have to work so many hours.

Our GDP per capita has gone up, but it has been fairly stagnant compared to our previous growth. Has it occurred to you that we need more of it than other OECD countries because of the infrastructure demands due to the population growth? Assuming an average 50 year lifespan for infrastructure, a country with a stable population would need to spend about 2% of the original real cost of the infrastructure on repairs and replacements, which Jane O'Sullivan has estimated at about 13% of national income. If your population is also growing at 2%, then your need to spend on infrastructure doubles because the new arrivals need the full complement of infrastructure immediately. At the same time your tax base has only gone up by 2%. The newcomers will (probably) eventually pay for what they use, but it may take decades.

Our infrastructure is overstretched and crumbling because the politicians aren't game to raise taxes sufficiently to cover it. They could borrow the money, but then they would have to stop the Population Ponzi in the future to allow it to be paid back.

Hasbeen is correct. There will be some pain in moving away from the Ponzi, but it is unsustainable anyway. The pain can be minimised with careful management of the transition.

For every extremism, there is an equal and opposite extremism.

Divergence

I agree that the economic benefits of migration for the resident population are not large. But most studies do show a net positive.

Australia has a larger proportionate migrant intake than the USA, and here real wages have risen steadily for years, only recently taking a small backward step. According to the ILO, Australia’s real wage growth has been the strongest of the developed G20 economies in recent years, followed by Canada (another high migration country).

http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/@dgreports/@dcomm/@publ/documents/publication/wcms_324678.pdf
(Figure 5 page 7)

The recent slowdown in wages has coincided with a sharp decline in net overseas migration, down from a peak of 315,700 in 2008, to 167,600 in the year to September 2015. Typically, the periods when Australia experiences the fastest growth in net migration are also periods when it experiences the strongest real wages growth.

To me this is not at all surprising. Migrants are attracted when the economy is strong, but net migration falls when it is weak. The common cause behind these trends is the business cycle, and especially in Australia the boom and bust in commodity prices and demand in recent years. Real wages are falling due to the loss of high-paying mining and engineering construction jobs, and relative growth in low-paying sectors like tourism.

The data refute the proposition that high migration causes real GDP or wages to stagnate.

Rhian,

Of course there are other factors involved in wages, but I am glad you agree that the per capita economic benefit is small. The Productivity Commission model in the 2006 report showed a per capita benefit of less than $400 by 2024/5 You don't discuss the infrastructure issue, even though it has a serious impact on people's lives if they have to waste hours every week on crawling through heavy traffic or circling in a frustrating hunt for expensive parking, or if their child's school is overcrowded and demountable classrooms cover the playground.

There is good evidence that there is displacement and wages are depressed in the community for some groups of existing residents. See

http://articles.latimes.com/1988-03-18/news/mn-1878_1_illegal-aliens

http://www.ijreview.com/2015/06/337514-disney-world-fires-tech-workers-requires-train-immigrant-replacements/

The data certainly don't refute the position that those black janitors' or tech workers' wages were caused to stagnate, or rather disappear.

Hi Divergence

Yes, we need more houses, roads, schools and hospitals with a growing population, but we also have more taxpayers and consumers to pay for them. For some infrastructure, economies of scale mean that average costs are lower when population is larger. Other services need a minimum population level to be viable. That's why Sydney has a opera house, but not Wagga Wagga.

It may be that black janitors in LA suffer lower wages because of competition from illegal aliens. But white miners in WA clearly don’t. The USA has far less regulated labour markets than ours, and illegal immigrants are often not covered by the few rules that do exist. In our labour market, 457 visa workers can only be recruited if there is no suitable local labour available, and must be paid the same as local employees.

Perhaps I should have said “The data refute the proposition that, in Australia, high migration causes real GDP or wages to stagnate”.

Rhian,

Just do a search on "Visa scandals Australia", and your eyes will be opened. US law also says that H1B (like 457) visas can only be handed out if there is no American who can do the job. This is a joke. In fact, there is a law firm that specialises in showing companies how not to hire Americans

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU

The point about the infrastructure is that all the costs have to be met up front, before the migrant can contribute to them, and that it will take him a long time to pay for his share because the costs are so high. This is why we have an enormous infrastructure backlog. We never get a chance to catch up because we never get a break from the very high population growth.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” — Upton Sinclair (1935)

I had a perfect example of the detriment to Ozzies of this flood of immigrants, particularly as so much of it is importing the wrong people.

I waited 3 years to see an orthopaedic specialist. I finally saw one 3 months ago, but it took another 3 months to get the second appointment.

I saw that specialist today, at a major Brisbane hospital. The people in the waiting room made an interesting study. About half were south sea islanders, & Asians. Their accents made it obvious that few of them were born here. Of the Caucasian heritage people, again the accents or language spoken told me a large percentage of them were recent arrivals. It is the same at the nearest large suburban hospital I have taken my mother to on occasions.

Rhian claims more people mean more tax payers means more money for services, but as we know many migrants, particularly refugees are still not working after 5 years.

I don't know the percentage of migrants to native born Ozzies in the general population, but it appears they are much larger consumers of health care services than native born.

So many are waiting far too long for serious medical treatment, & it appears much of these delays can be laid at the feet of newcomers. Too many welfare for life are being imported, & much of the so called increase in GDP is actually the cost of supporting them. They fill public housing, hospitals & many services to such an extent that we just can't afford.

Hi Divergence

My salary is unaffected by whether we have high, low or no population growth.

Yes, there have been some instances of visa laws being broken or bent. But that clearly hasn’t resulted in Australia performing poorly on wage growth, as the ILO data demonstrate.

And yes, infrastructure needs to be paid for up front. In a business or household this is usually paid for by debt and repaid over a number of years, so the costs are spread over time and carried by infrastructure users. Governments often do the same.

If population growth led to ever-increasing infrastructure demands, one would expect to see government capital spending increasing as a percentage of GDP and/or total government spending, and probably rising net public debt. Government capital spending as a percentage of GDP has declined steadily for decades, from about 8% in the 1960s and 70s to about 4% today. As a percentage of government spending, it has fallen from more than 40% to less than 20%. If there is an infrastructure deficit, this is the reason.

Australia’s net government debt also trended down until the GFC – in fact it was negative in the mid/late 2000s, when population growth was at its height, and its recent increase is more a function of recurrent deficits than capital spending. It remains well below most comparable economies (at about 18% of GDP, compared to 70% across the advanced economies)

Hi Hasbeen

That’s odd, last time I went to the doctor, the waiting room contained lots of people, all of them white. I heard only Australian accents. That must prove that migrants don’t use health services at all. Or perhaps anecdotal evidence is not terribly helpful when assessing population-wide issues.

Happily, there are several doctors at my local group practice, so they got through the queue quickly. Three of the five doctors were of Asian origin. That is not unusual – census data show that more than half of Australian doctors and about a third of nurses were born overseas.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3882294/

I’m not sure what migration does for demand for health services, but it sure helps supply.

Hi Rhian,

The costs of infrastructure for such high population growth in the context of a First World country are simply unsupportable

“We’re a developed country with a Third World rate of population growth,” says former New South Wales premier Bob Carr, one of the relative few in this country’s business/political elite who is not a spruiker for “Big Australia”.

“My government was spending on non-Olympics infrastructure at real levels two-thirds higher than the average for the 1980s, but force-fed population growth runs so strongly that no government can catch up.”

“With population growth this rapid it is literally impossible to keep pace with infrastructure. You cannot possibly maintain spending at adequate levels to meet the huge challenge this represents.”

“It’s inconceivable that without ambitious Whitlam-style investment in urban infrastructure that any Commonwealth assistance will offset the impact of immigration,” he says.

“I’ll give you this guarantee. In the context of pressures on the deficit and a government that’s struggling with the pressures of Gonski and long-term health funding, Turnbull will offer nothing – other than a few model projects in light rail or bus transit corridors – to offset the problem our historically high immigration burden represents.”

Interview with Mike Seccombe, The Saturday Paper 7/11/2015

You skip over the issues of diseconomies of scale (such as desalination plants because a city has outgrown its natural water supply and running new transit corridors through built-up neighbourhoods), the distributional effects, which tend to siphon wealth up to the top, and the justice of taxing people more to pay for massive population growth, even though most of them do not benefit from it.

Hi Divergence

A politician’s justifications for his government’s under-investment in infrastructure is not very convincing. Nor is a “spending on non-Olympics infrastructure at real levels two-thirds higher than the average for the 1980s” particularly impressive, given that Australia’s real GDP increased by 65% between 1980-1989 and 1995-2005 when Carr was Premier. State estimates of real GSP don’t go back that far, but as Australia’s largest state Gross State Product in NSW tends to track national GDP quite closely.

The metrics we have discussed are aggregates, and capture both economies and diseconomies of scale associated with population growth. So if, for example, water prices are rising because of the need to build desalination plants, then that might lead to a higher price level and lower real wages. But we already know that Australia’s real wage growth is the strongest in the developed G20 economies. So even if population growth has caused higher water prices, this must have been more than offset by stronger nominal wage growth or lower price increases in other areas (economies of scale in public transport, perhaps). If you want to subtract the costs of diseconomies of scale from real wage growth to capture their effects on living standards, you will be double counting.

You claim there are distribution effects caused by population growth. Again I know of no evidence of this in Australia. Inequality has risen in most OECD countries in recent years, with no correlation I can see between population growth and changes in inequality. And unlike many other countries, in Australia real income growth has been strong for both low and high income earners, though it has been stronger at the top of the income distribution than at the bottom. If population growth is associated with strong growth in living standards across the board at the cost of a small increase in inequality, it is still a positive for the community.

OECD comparisons:
https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/49499779.pdf

Australian analysis:
http://www.treasury.gov.au/PublicationsAndMedia/Publications/2013/Economic-Roundup-Issue-2/Economic-Roundup/Income-inequality-in-Australia

latest Australian data:
http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/6523.02013-14?OpenDocument

That doesn't surprise me Rhian, it is the same in my town. Of course, we pay for our doctors, no bulk billing in country towns, & few new arrivals will be found paying for medical services, or anything else for that matter.

I did mention this was a major public hospital, even us Ozzies get it free at them, as do all these blow ins.

One good thing I noticed was all those fool transit lanes that cost greatly to install a few years back, have disappeared from the expressway. Thank god for that. I wonder where a little burst of common sense came from. It could not have been from our idiot town planners who pushed the things through in the first place.

The stupidity of giving busses & taxis preference could only come from a town planner.

We the motorists have even a little win over the fool planners out in the suburbs. A new roundabout built by a developer of an industrial estate had dictated bike lanes. Not only that, but it had little concrete islands with, would you believe, steel posts a bit less than a metre high, sticking up out of them delineating the bike lanes.

Very hard to see at night, these posts had been hit many times over about 3 months by cars, & stupidly replaced. The other day the islands, complete with the offending posts were removed by jack hammer.

I wonder that bit of stupidity by planners cost to build, & remove. Probably only a small fraction of the cost the long suffering motorists in repairing the cars that hit them.

What is it in the nature, or education of planners that makes them so hate motorists?

Rhian,

Growth in wages certainly has occurred, but it has been very anemic compared to growth in house prices and utility bills especially in the biggest cities. See the graph in this link for house prices in Australian cities over time as multiples of the median wage

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-02/janda-why-housing-affordability-isn't-being-fixed/6514766

Wages have gone up, but people's main expenses have gone up even more. The people who are selling the houses are obvious winners from this - a clear distributional effect. Population growth is not the only factor in this, of course, but it is hard to see how house prices could have been driven up so much without it.

Electricity prices have doubled over the past 7 years, and the government tells us that this is primarily due to network costs, which would have to go up with population.

http://www.industry.gov.au/Energy/EnergyMarkets/Documents/ELECTRICITY-PRICES-FACTSHEET.pdf

Government spending as a share of GDP has been fairly constant since 2000, but our government has actually been spending less on us on a per capita basis according to Richard Denniss of the Australia Institute

http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2015/07/the-australia-institute-slams-the-population-ponzi/

You can claim that the infrastructure problem only exists because Bob Carr and other politicians are incompetent, but I would be interested in your explanation as to why *all* of them in every city and state are apparently incompetent.

Hi Divergence

Many factors have contributed to rising energy prices including the need to invest in networks because of previous under-investment, government policies, especially growth in renewables, and rising fuel prices. The need to update existing networks is the main reason for growing network costs, not the need to expand them. And, as I have already indicated, these costs are full reflected in the price index used to calculate real wages.

House prices are not fully reflected in the Consumer Price Index, and I agree housing has got less affordable. Immigration may have been a factor, but so has natural population growth, falling household size, low interest rates, deregulated financial markets, government subsidies for first time buyers, rising construction costs and regulations that prevent supply for increasing to match demand growth. The article you link to points says that “Record low and stable interest rates are precisely the reason housing has become less affordable.” Not population.

I didn’t say Carr was incompetent, but he has indulged in a common sleight of hand used by politicians to make it seem that their governments have increased spending a lot on something when in fact they haven’t – by showing the aggregate increase over a long period of time. I merely pointed out that the growth in investment he described is almost exactly in line with GDP growth. Put another way, real growth in capital spending of two thirds over 15 years equates to 3.4% growth a year.

All levels of government have cut their levels of spending on capital relative to other things. This partly reflects economies of scale ( e.g. a bigger population will probably spend less per capita on roads) but also the fact that government has prioritised other things. This has created some infrastructure bottlenecks, but outside Sydney these have not been severe. Most Australian capitals compare well internationally for liveability.

tbc ...

... cont

Richard Denniss is right to say that it’s real per capita spending that counts, not total spending. But he is wrong to say these have declined (as he is often wrong about many things). Between 2005-06 and 2014-15, Australia’s population rose from 20.4 million to 23.7 million (16%) while its Consumer Price Index rose from 84.9 to 107.3 (26%). So government spending over that period would have to rise by 47% to maintain its real per capita value. But in fact, health sending rose by 79%, education by 70%, and total general government spending by 75%. Or, by my preferred measure (not to do what I accuse Bob Carr of doing), real per capita health spending rose at an average of 2.2% a year over the past nine years, education at 1.7%, and total spending at 1.9%.

http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/5512.02014-15?OpenDocument

Rhian,

It clearly costs money to expand networks as well as updating them. You haven't given figures on the actual percentages. Talk about real wages also obscures very real differences between social classes. People in the bottom deciles spend a higher proportion of their income on energy than those in the top ones.

So far as housing is concerned, construction costs haven't gone up in real terms since 1996. See the 4th graph from the top

http://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/the-road-to-private-serfdom,8870

The Institute of Family Studies says that household size has changed little since 1996.

http://aifs.gov.au/facts-and-figures/households-australia

Yet house prices have gone up enormously since then. According to the ABS (as of Dec. 2015) 54.3% of our population growth in the previous year was due to immigration and the rest to natural increase. Natural increase doesn't just include births to Australian born people, however. Migrants have babies just like everyone else. Second generation migrants are about 20% of the population, and I have read that about a third of babies now being born in Australia have at least one parent born overseas. With no net immigration and a fertility rate that has been slightly below replacement level since 1976, we would still be getting some population growth due to demographic momentum, but only at perhaps a quarter of our current population growth rate and declining all the time.

Here is an age distribution app.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-08-09/interactive-infographics-census-2011-australia-transformed/2829132

Obviously the demand for houses would be very much less, so it would be much more difficult to drive up prices.

People in Melbourne would be surprised to know that they don't have any infrastructure bottlenecks. I read complaints about it all the time.

If the politicians can afford to fix the infrastructure problems and have simply chosen not to do so, then they are incompetent.

Much of the 'population growth', 'immigration' and 'unemployment' perceptions are wrong.

There is a low correlation between NOM net overseas migration (movements of all travellers) and population growth, whilst the emerging driver is the cumulative effect of an increasingly ageing population, e.g. 85 years and over is the fastest growing cohort.

Nor is there any linkage between immigration and unemployment, according to research (as opposed to confected 'truisms' and opinion):

'Immigration is not to blame for cuts to jobs and wages. The suggestion that bringing 457 visa workers from overseas is coming at the expense of “local jobs” reinforces the myth that immigration causes unemployment and drives down wages.

In fact evidence from Australia and internationally shows that immigration actually creates jobs. In his book, Immigration and the Australian Economy, William Foster’s surveys over 200 studies on immigration and wages. He found there was, “a marginally favourable effect on the aggregate unemployment rate, even in recession”.

In a 2003 paper economist Hsiao-chuan Chang wrote that, “there is no evidence that immigrants take jobs away from the local Australian over the past twelve years… This supports the conclusion from existing research”.

This is because new migrants generate demand for products and services, such as housing and food. Many of them bring savings to help pay for these things, further boosting the economy and jobs.'

http://www.solidarity.net.au/mag/back/2012/48/immigration-is-not-to-blame-for-cuts-to-jobs-and-wages/

Further both (temp + permanent) immigrants and younger generations have become net contributors, supporting ever growing numbers of oldies and net beneficiaries who have access to services, benefits and the vote.

Andras,

No one who thinks about it would doubt that migrants create jobs as well as taking them, but it doesn't necessarily follow that they create more jobs than they take.

http://insidestory.org.au/australia-today-a-million-new-adults-just-385000-new-jobs

Youth unemployment is particularly high. Why would a 7-11 franchisee hire a young Australian, who has rights and would have to be paid award wages, when he can hire a desperate international student who is prepared to hand back half his wages, away from the security cameras of course?

Our whole immigration system is riddled with corruption from top to bottom. I am no more prepared to believe your experts than you are to believe Prof George Borjas or Prof Bob Birrell. See

http://www.smh.com.au/national/corruption-and-crime-syndicates-threaten-australias-border-security-20160622-gpp72z.html

It is yet to be seen how the events in the Middle East will transform the German real estate market, but there are a few points upon which experts agree:
1)The huge influx of migrants generates additional demand on the affordable rental housing market that was already under pressure and in short supply.
2)Construction volumes have to increase to accommodate the enormous number of expected migrants.
3)The government will likely ease construction standards and introduce additional measures encouraging private investors.
4)Refugee accommodation subsidies may continue for years as the government figures out how to integrate new arrivals onto the job market.