Instead of importing skills, train our own and employ older workers for longer, should they wish to work longer.

The days of entrenching experienced skilled workers at 45 are over. Just to get someone younger and cheaper!

Besides, our best future is an Automated one. Pushed back/kicked down the road by the extraordinary cost of price gouged energy!

The point about the economic consequence of shutting the borders during COVID are well made and prove the myth of big migration being needed to prop up or grow the economy!

With unemployment reduced to an all-time low there were more taxpayers paying tax and less living on taxpayer funded benefits.

The difficulties of getting backpackers in to harvest crops has resulted in innovation and robots that replace pickers. And will work 24/7 without union representation effing it up. This is the way to go, rather than bringing in more when we cannot house those already here.

Robots will cope with sheds without amenities. And work when conditions are right not when the clock decides the day is done!

Putting a hold on migration will force the price of housing and rents down! And force wages up! And force new ideas and innovation to the fore! A win, win outcome for Australia and our economy!

The current mob in power, would if they possessed a brain between them, find it very lonely.

As do those who simply ignore inconvenient evidence!
Alan B.

Instead of importing skills, train our own
Alan B,
Agee but, who'll train them ? The trainer-aged have proven that they're incapable otherwise they would have done so already !
We need to clean the gene pool before we can even start to think about training ! Very, very selective & limited numbers migration will do that !
Those who manage to do that will inherit this Nation !

I say - listen to all the economic and migration experts.
We have some of the best minds here in this country.
Listen to what they are saying. We are a big country - and
we can do really well with the right advice. That's why
inviting various opinions to the table - and talking things
through - and actually listening to what's being said - would
surely help to come up with the right answers and solutions.
Put politics to one side.

Put politics to one side.
Foxy,
Yes, as soon as these so-called economic & migration experts do so things will start to improve !

Issue with this 'analysis' include the first paragraph, 'sources' and how they are used to prove nothing?

While our working age declines, potentially along with our budgets if LNP and media had their way, numbers of seniors are increasing in the permanent population requiring more health services, pensions etc..

Although using departmental sources there is no presentation of demographics trends, but using media PR techniques simply focus on now and avoid meaningful analysis; using The Australian as source to oppose 'immigration'?

OECD data trends tell the story, anyone game to challenge demographic decline?

https://data.oecd.org/chart/6SR5

Finally, the old chestnut of slippery definitions i.e. rather than describing the NOM net overseas migration as net long term arrivals/departures who are 'net financial/budget contributors', they are misleadingly described as part of an 'immigration program' when it's simply a post activity 'barometer' that cannot be preset.

Remember pre Brexit when Tanton Network ideology via e.g. Nigel Farage et al, media etc. infected the UK Tory government of Cameron (& continues with refugees/asylum seekers) who naively tried to set a low NOM target, for Brexit; meanwhile in Oz before we had Labor making a risible decision in appointing a 'Minister for Sustainable Population' (?!).

No one including media in Oz realised that the NOM and our population had been spiked by an expansion of the NOM definition in 2006, reaction was straight out of the Malthus and Galton eugenics playbook.