There are a couple of issues in economic commentary at the moment that deserve some attention. One is an interesting and challenging one; the other is decidedly of the pet shop galah variety.
The latter first: the rise in Australia’s headline inflation in August reported last week will put pressure on the Reserve Bank to raise interest rates again.
So let’s run through the data. Inflation in August rose to an annual rate of 5.2% from 4.9% in July, thanks to automotive fuel, rents, housing and holiday travel. Those factors are all linked to supply — higher petrol prices due to OPEC and Russian production cuts, rising holiday and travel costs due to capacity limits by airlines ahead of September holidays, rents due to the limited supply of apartments, and housing costs due to higher prices for materials and the impact of the successive rate rises by the RBA.
Electricity and gas prices also made a big contribution, but there is nothing either the RBA or consumers can do about that — even Philip “Greedflation? What greedflation?” Lowe blamed that on profiteering by companies such as Santos, Woodside and Origin Energy.
But as the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) pointed out, “new dwelling prices rose 4.8% (in the year to August), which is the lowest annual rise since August 2021, as building material price increases continued to ease reflecting improved supply conditions”.
Meanwhile, other economic indicators are softening rapidly. Last Thursday’s retail sales figures for August were very soft: just a 0.2% rise in August to be up 1.5% from a year ago. It was 2.1% year-on-year in July. In real terms, that means retail sales are down 1-2% on a year ago.
AMP chief economist Shane Oliver pointed out this is happening despite rapid population growth. “With population growth running around 2.5%, retail sales per person are actually down 1% year on year (yoy) and real retail sales per person are down around 4.5% yoy,” he added.
The weak growth in retail sales is also linked to the way Australians are running down their cash holdings and savings. ABS figures on Thursday showed that for the first time since 2007, household deposit accounts shrank, by $6 billion. On top of this, the demand for credit (from consumers, business and the government) in the June quarter was the lowest since the June quarter of 2005, another sign of the weak health of demand — though it was helped by Treasurer Jim Chalmers repaying $15.7 billion in government debt in the quarter.
Job vacancies have also softened quickly in the past six months — there are now fewer vacancies than people unemployed for the first time in more than a year. Vacancies are now 18% under their peak in May 2022 of around 477,000.
Oliver sees the RBA looking to cut rates from next June given the tepid state of the economy — as opposed to the galahs at the Financial Review who reckon we need one more monetary kick in the teeth.
The government’s employment white paper last week also drew the attention both of galahs and more serious commentators, for the perceived inconsistency of its “full employment” goal with the RBA’s belief that unemployment will have to rise significantly to push down inflation.
The RBA, like plenty of economists, remains wedded to the idea of a non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU), below which further falls in joblessness will only push inflation up. Like many ideas in the RBA’s thinking, its best days might be behind it — especially given the difficulty NAIRU-heads have had in accurately estimating what the rate actually is in Australia. For a while there a few years ago, it was, orthodoxy said, around 5%, which now seems like an alarmingly high unemployment rate.
The problem the RBA, orthodox economists and policymakers around the world have is that economic concepts like NAIRU, devised during the post-war period, look increasingly disconnected from the economic reality of the 2020s. In particular, ageing populations and even population decline in a growing number of countries are creating a fundamentally different workforce dynamic than in the post-war years. We’re inexorably moving from a world where there was plenty of labour to one where labour will be increasingly scarce and we’ll be competing with other countries to import it.
Australia has been lucky so far in being able to lift female participation far above where we thought possible 20 years ago, but we’re still importing vast numbers of workers (especially foreign students). We face a future where “full employment” may not be a policy goal but a policymakers’ curse, one that forces us to constantly ask “Where will the workers come from?” for a growing number of industries. And moving interest rates around isn’t going to do anything to fix it.
It’s not so much that the NAIRU is an economic concept disconnected from today’s economic reality so much as it has been found out as the load of tosh it always was.
Strip away all the language designed to confuse, and what you’re left with is a neoliberal shibboleth that says that if you don’t have a pool of unemployed, you might get inflation. The part left unsaid is that pool of unemployed is there to discipline the workforce against making wage demands – there’s always someone there to take your job if you get too uppity.
A theory that says there’s a level of employment that leads to inflation, but it can’t be predicted, it can’t be measured, it cannot even be determined historically isn’t a theory, it’s sophistry. The NAIRU has always been a number plucked from thin air to give cover to neoliberal policy preferences.
Nah, it’s economics! An art form that takes author prejudices, mixes them with dodgy statistics, and then pretends that mathematical rules apply.
NAIRU worked for as long as it did because the conditions that resulted in the observations that in turn resulted in a certain rule of thumb being adopted didn’t change for a while. It went through a process of “look at that pattern, we can use that” to “something is a little off, but if you squint a little you can still see the pattern” to “can’t see that pattern any more – reality must be broken”.
Agree, and avoiding or ignoring complexity of factors driving any given phenomenon or headline e.g. ‘AMP chief economist Shane Oliver pointed out this is happening despite rapid population growth’.
The latter is complex but presented simplistically, as is most media analysis of the same, hence, suboptimal understanding and flawed conclusions e.g. conflation of new temporary residents (under the NOM) dominated by international students, but described as ‘immigrants’ suggesting permanence, simply not true (with permanent cap).
Also relates to another Kenae article today on hate speech in media e.g. one cited globally or Anglosphere then Europe, is the great replacement, is related to inflated population data, growth, ageing/decline and change to more diverse, educated, secular and mobile citizens who are deemed as threats to the status quo.
You are being dishonest, again.
Individuals on temporary visas do, indeed, often leave (eventually).
But as a group – what matters – they continue to increase; there’s no cap on temporary migration, after all.
300-400k more people each year still need somewhere to live, eat, c**p, etc, while they are here, even if 100k of them leave each year to be replaced by 100k more.
Dr. Smithy, That’s quite a tasty claim you are making ‘You are being dishonest, again.’ while you offer nothing specific?
I literally explained why, specifically, above.
But in longer form:
You are trying to portray temporary immigrants as irrelevant because they (eventually, mostly) leave. However, while this is technically true on an individual level, it is not at a group level. One departing temporary immigrant is subsequently replaced by (at least) one arriving temporary immigrant.
So in the measure that matters – population – there is no difference between permanent and temporary immigrants, but you are trying to argue there is. Indeed, arguably temporary immigration is worse, because it is not capped and required qualifications are much looser.
It’s a similar kind of dishonesty to when you try to argue population growth is the result of people living longer.
Gobbledegook, no time frames nor trends, never a clear statement or claim, no details and no source is ever offered*, hence, can neither be proven nor disproven, it then allows beliefs, opinions and nativist talking points to be offered, masquerading as ‘analysis’ for the centre; MB style?
*A while ago you offered the ‘Over Population Project’ as a source; it’s not credible as its key people are linked to Tanton Network, so why present it or who offered for presentation?
His advice i.e. the late US white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton was that the RW anti-immigration movement needs to get people talking, negatively, about immigration. Worse by talking in negative stereotypes and numbers it takes individual agency away from immigrants or people i.e. just units or robots?
LOL.
As I said, you are remarkably dishonest.
What has happened to that theory beloved by economists – market forces? Supposedly when supply goes down – the market will pay more. So if we are so short of workers, why are wages so flat? We have a conundrum, lots of women stuck at home with their children because childcare is too expensive and/or unavailable where it’s needed. Ditto housing – lower income workers can no longer afford to live where the jobs are – so adding in long travel times and expense as another barrier. The fields in which women are traditionally employed, nursing (health care), teaching, child care, social work, are all high stress but low paid.
“In real terms, that means retail sales are down 1-2% on a year ago.”
Why is anyone surprised? Inhibiting wage growth long term (presumably to cut costs and hence inflate profits) and raising interest rates means people don’t have $ for discretionary spending.
Overall, what I think it means, is loads of low cost foreign workers are wanted by big business, (increasing pressure on the housing crisis) rather than paying a decent wage to Australians who’d love to have a job.
How are rising property and housing costs not the single biggest driver of inflation?
Housing costs are fixed costs that households have to meet so if they keep going up then household incomes have to keep rising to keep a roof over people’s heads.
The interest rate hikes increased people’s monthly costs by thousands. Not sure where the spare thousands came from to cover it but that puts huge pressure on wages where people then have to go to their bosses to ask for pay rises to pay the mortgage or rent. That’s sort of a non-negotiable.
“Boss I’m going to be homeless”
has a slightly different ring to it compared to:
“Boss I just can’t eat out as often as I used to”.
Any boss paying less than a six figure salary in Sydney is relying on their employees living with their parents or in a crowded house share. That’s madness.
How does anyone start a start up and pay their workers enough to pay their rent?
How does anyone starting a start up paying the rent?
Housing costs are basically turning Australia into an unliveable and un-investable basket case, where working doesn’t pay, and the only game in town is flipping properties.
Young people are leaving in their droves and taking their brains and youth with them.
Anyone unfortunate to move here to support our essential services will find themselves out west in a giant share house.
Most hilariously of all we’ve got a generation of lotto winners lined up to receive their tax free inheritances once boomers move on.
People in their 40s-60s who themselves are probably sitting on millions in equity will soon inherit millions completely tax free. How is that not (super) inflationary???
I’ve got a plan. It’s called The Great Release. We offer boomers the chance to downsize by giving them tax incentives to sell up if they put their money in a fund. The fund will then guarantee them a tax free return. This will particularly helpful to those who are asset rich but money power.
We then use that fund to deal with climate change: rolling out renewables and insulation, and preparing communities for disasters.
It would be an opportunity for that generation to make up for the years of inaction and address intergenerational inequality.
What’s not to like.
Because the only housing costs captured by inflation are the cost of new construction (NOT including the land), and rents currently being paid (NOT currently being advertised).
Purchases of existing houses, and increased mortgage payments due to interest rate increases, are not counted by inflation.
Yup. Housing costs have been an albatross around the neck of the Australian economy for 15-odd years now. Certainly since the GFC, and arguably for a few years before it.
But nobody (who can) is seriously interested in fixing the problem because doing so necessarily results in an epic reduction in the real cost of housing, the bubble of which – one way or another – underpins a substantial fraction of the Australian economy. It’s a political lose-lose situation.
Realistically, relatively few are in this situation in net terms.
And the aged care industry will suck most of the money out of the boomers and old Xers. Young Xers and Millennials will probably be lucky (on average) to inherit much at all (and probably thankful debts can’t be passed on).
Make your mind up. The other day you were insisting that money was no issue for addressing climate change because the Federal Government can create as much as it needs.
What random bits to selectively quote….
Did you agree with any of it or are you just arguing?
I know how inflation is calculated.
But as you must have gathered by now I don’t really care about made up economic definitions or calculations.
My fund idea is based on a few assumptions:
a) whilst it’s a fact that the federal government can create money most people don’t believe that so it’s a bit like trying to convince the billions of religious people that there’s no god; and
b) it’s a way of dealing with the risk of (actual) inflation due to all of that pent up equity; and
c) it’s a way of freeing up some family sized homes for actual families and encouraging people to move into smaller places where it will be easier to care for them into aged care.
Do you agree with the idea?
No need to selectively quote a random internet post. Let’s stick to big ideas.
Then why are you complaining about it not showing things that aren’t in it ?
Boomers already have a fund that gives a tax-free income: Superannuation.
If you inject a lot of cash into the economy by spending, it’s going to increase inflation, regardless of where it comes from.
I remain unconvinced there are a lot of boomers sitting in vaguely affordable family houses that aren’t moving out because they think they’ll be taxed a little bit too much. And I can absolutely understand why anyone who did not have to, would not throw themselves at the mercy of the aged care system.
I think you are creating complexity with no reason. You are focused on the how, not the what. What are your policy objectives ?
Would it help you if I spent pages arguing why the current method of calculating inflation is nonsense or can we cut to the chase and just assume that massive mortgages and rents are driving up the cost of actual living?
I also don’t care that boomers to varying degrees have access to super.
It’s not tax that is discouraging boomers from moving out. It’s nobody thinking of trying to incentivise them to do it..
This is about incentivising behaviour:
a) the fund basically says to boomers that they don’t need to worry about investment properties because they’ll have this additional income;
b) the fund gives the boomers the opportunity to seize the moral high ground by helping to fight climate change.
We’re going to see large amounts of cash released into the economy one way or another. The fund gives the government the ability to manage its release and target it to spending on things where we don’t really have a choice but to spend on.
We simply must start engaging in war levels of spending to deal with climate change. Inflation and economic considerations are largely irrelevant.
Your alternative please?
It is extremely difficult to have a conversation with you, when you redefine words with a well established meaning (inflation, in this case), then chastise others for not being able to read your mind about what you meant, rather than what you wrote.
It’s unclear what your actual “fund” is targeted at, and what the payouts are going to be.
If it’s boomer homeowners without any investment properties – the vast majority – then what you’re proposing is they sell their house, buy a downsized house, and put the leftover (assuming there is any) into a fund that will pay them an.. amount ? How will that amount be calculated ? Is it just running down the sum paid into the fund or are they paid it in perpetuity ? Is it indexed ? How does it interact with the pension ?
If it’s boomer homeowners with investments, then they sell their PPoR as above, and subsequently their investment properties, the funds from which if put into the fund will pay them back out a tax-free income stream (presumably indexed as well – but to what ?) based on… the previous rental income ?
Then the ‘Renewables Australia Future Fund’ is also going to spend money on renewable energy infrastructure ?
It seems very complex (and therefore exploitable). And I think you might be a bit optimistic on the kinds of ROIs attainable with those kinds of outgoings to meet. Is it going to be allowed to run down the principle ?
More importantly, it still won’t really address much, if anything, in terms of either housing shortages or affordability. All you’re really doing is – maybe – putting some (probably relatively well off) families into more appropriate houses and exchanging some renters for owners.
(Also, there is precious little evidence to suggest boomers – as a demographic – have much interest in “seizing the moral high ground by helping to fight climate change”. Indeed, if anything the opposite is true – they are consuming as much as possible before they die without care for the consequences.)
To do what ? Assuming it’s addressing housing shortages and affordability, incentivising boomers to downsize and trying to put some brakes on inflation, some ideas:
Economics is not a real science and economic terminology is at best inaccurate and at worst deliberately misleading so take as a given that I’m not using terminology in any way prescribed by it.
Inflation = how much stuff costs
Demand far outstrips supply = stuff costs a lot of money.
I’m trying to address lots of things at once:
a) increasing supply of family homes;
b) getting older people into smaller homes;
c) giving older people a simple means to save the planet – no less;
d) making extra funding available to fight climate change (happy to merge funds);
e) reducing inflationary pressures (see above definitions) when a ton of tax free equity gets released to already wealthy individuals.
I like some of your ideas except of course for your randomly selected immigration cap that doesn’t seem to factor in our ageing population.
Plus we already have about 15 boxes to tick on immigration cards (any of which any of us could fall foul of) so I don’t like the idea of adding more like – are you a worthwhile human being?
Well that hardly helps anyone understand what you do mean, if there’s no way of telling whether you’re using the common definition of a word or going all Humpty-Dumpty.
Except with housing, of course.
It’s approximately the long run average before Howard kicked off the high immigration programme in the ‘00s.
Immigrants get old, too.
Leave the poor straw man alone.
The queue of people wanting to get into Australia is, for practical purposes, infinite into the foreseeable future.
Indeed, and not just because Australia is an attractive place to live/work. Soon, low-lying areas around the world will be underwater, and refugees will be flooding out. Think Pacific Islands, SE Asia, Bangladesh etc.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/29/climate/coastal-cities-underwater.html
That’s not a given if we price ourselves out of the market.
Ireland is in the EU where there is free movement of people but it can’t convince people to move there because of the cost of living, so they have a huge worker shortage.
The real issue is that whatever happens with AI or capitalism, we’ll still need essential workers like doctors, nurses, aged care workers, teachers, police (not quite ready for robocops!) and a standing army to deal with more extreme weather events.
So what we really need to do is deflate the property prices. To your point above only a tiny percentage of people are actually benefiting from sky high property prices.
Owner/occupiers don’t because of they move they still have fork the next rip off. I don’t think it’d be as politically unpopular as you think particularly if we were to start questioning some of the myths about “mum and dad” investors and stop blaming immigrants who aren’t actually buying any homes!
Ireland is in the EU where there is free movement of people but it can’t convince people to move there because of the cost of living, so they have a huge worker shortage.
The cost of living in Australia has been amongst the highest in the world for a decade or more. It has not slowed anyone down.
And the alternative to Ireland is anywhere else in the EU, whereas the alternative to Australia is typically places like China, India, Nepal, Vietnam, etc.
All it will mean is an increase in overcrowded rentals – people sleeping six to a room by hotbedding, temporary bathrooms setup in closets, cooking on balconies, etc, etc.
Almost none of them are going to come from the kind of immigration our system is setup for, and that’s under the very questionable assumption there won’t be enough locals to meet the needs of “essential workers” after robots take all our jobs or whatever.
Most immigrants that arrive aren’t exactly filling high-skill, high-productivity, high-value jobs. They’re wiping bums, delivering food and giving “massages”.
(And I think you’ll be surprised how quickly AI and robotics replaces a lot of the tasks of doctors, nurses, teachers, etc.)
The political problem is not just who benefits from maintaining or even increasing high house prices (which is pretty much anyone who owns a home, even with a mortgage), but who suffers from a housing crash (which is… pretty much everyone in the short (and probably medium) term).
I guarantee you even the slightest hint of policy that would reduce house prices is political poison (arguably this is one of the reasons the Greens are attacked so much in the mainstream narrative.) Younger homeowners work under the assumption that the increase in value of their property will help them upgrade their housing as their needs change. Older homeowners use the equity to support their children (or grandchildren) buying their first homes, funding their consumption, or paying off their mortgage when they retire and downsize.
The political juggernaut isn’t the tiny number of multi-property investors, it’s average joes and janes.
I reluctantly concluded about ten years ago – when I genuinely thought property prices just couldn’t get any higher, to the point we subsequently delayed a house purchasing decision that has probably priced us out of what we want for the rest of our lives – that this country will be economically and socially burned to the ground to maintain the property bubble, and I haven’t seen much since that comes even close to changing my mind.
I’m always reluctant to accuse people who bang on about immigration of being racist or xenophobic (they’re usually just seeking simplistic solutions to complex issues) but it’s hard to escape your utter snobbery and looking down your nose at the “type of immigrants”.
I’ve no idea what “type” you’re referring to but immigrants, being people, are a mixed bag. Some will be big execs, small execs, essential workers, backpackers, students, families of migrants, lovers, refugees or whatever.
They will mostly contribute to society and make the country a better place as evidenced by history. They are also largely inevitable due to the world we live in.
You’re going to have just accept the fact that we can’t go back to whatever year you or your family moved to Australia….
LOL. So reluctant you’ve done it multiple times.
We have an immigration policy that is, purportedly, intended to attract primarily highly skilled, highly productive and economically valuable individuals to help grow the economy and increase everyone’s standards of living and quality of life.
It does not do this, as is most clearly shown in the wages of “skilled immigrants” (permanent or temporary), the vast majority of whom do not even earn the average full-time wage. Other massive red flags are the huge number who cannot actually find work in their claimed field of expertise and the fact that employers have been complaining about skills shortages for 10+ years.
My comments have been about the utter failure of immigration policy based on its supposed objectives compared to outcomes, and the obvious dearth of any strategy for, or even consideration of, the consequences of rapid population growth it drives.
Everything else is you making stuff up.
If you want to advocate for and justify an immigration policy that is, essentially, “come on in”, then go for it.
I know you struggle to see anything beyond economics and money, but there is in fact more to life.
Your random caps on immigration and snobbery won’t change the fact that we have an ageing population, and that people move for all sorts of reasons that – shock horror – don’t have anything to do with money!
Which of the following do you want to ‘cull’:
– refugees;
– family members;
– partners;
– non-white people;
– students;
– back packers;
– essential workers/high skilled workers ;
– “highly skilled” workers (ie people who aren’t actually that highly skilled but make loads of money like management consultants or economists);
– billionaires.
Because I’m telling you now if you ever get your wet dream of reduced immigration it’s going to be in that order.
And if it all comes down to money, money, money well Australia right now is a terrible place to move because one needs vast amounts of your precious Aussie dollars to be able to afford to put a roof over one’s head.
There’s no issue with housing supply in Australia. Offical statistics shows there’s enough housing for the average household size. What there is not and never will be is enough houses for Australians to own multiple properties (that they then rent out under some of the worst rental laws on the planet).
A grossly incompetent management of a finite resource is responsible for the ludicrous cost of houses in this tiny populated, back water. That could be fixed tomorrow by better regulation. No bricks needed.
Literally the opposite of reality. Again.
My suggested cap is based on long-run immigration intake before John Howard got involved.
Also, Immigrants get old, too.
LOL. So much for “reluctant to accuse people of racism”. Can’t even make it through another post without doing it.
Yet the line to do so is literally millions of people long.
If people and households were just numbers in a spreadsheet, or maybe even if we had a command economy, you might have a point. But neither of these things is true, so you don’t.
As you happily noted elsewhere, inflation is caused by shortages. The shortage in housing supply is why we have a bubble.
It’s unclear why people owning multiple properties and renting them out, is contributing to a lack of available housing, nor how swapping those renters for owners would improve the situation (indeed, given renters are more likely to be in shared houses, would probably make it worse).
It could not. Unless – maybe – you wanted to switch the country to a command economy and control who owned what, where they lived, what they worked as, etc. Historically, that hasn’t worked out well.
Australia builds around 100k net new dwellings per year. Current NOM is running at 300-400k per year.
Migrants actually do have to live somewhere. Whether they’re buying or renting, they’re consuming scarce housing.
The issue is what is the cause of the house prices and the cause is unregulated capitalism not people.
Any system that can’t cope with people is really not working very well.
No, the issue is we can’t build a Canberra every year to handle the Canberra’s worth of extra people.
(Another issue is should we build a Canberra every year to handle a Canberra’s worth or extra people?)
The system is actually works fairly well – Australia builds a huge amount of housing and other infrastructure, one of the highest per-capita rates in the world.
But we can’t build fast enough to handle the demand.
So a system that can’t cope with less than half the population of the UK is a great system???
Australia builds a huge amount of housing that:
– consists of McMansions and collapsing buildings that meet energy requirements from 19th century Europe;
– are bought up by investors who:
a) are given interest only mortgages multiple times their actual incomes;
b) rent them out on short term leases;
c) use negative gearing to cover losses.
Yes, what a wonderful “system”.
I genuinely can’t figure out how to explain to you that houses (and all the other infrastructure necessary for people to live) take resources, labour and particularly time to create, and that is why you cannot just drop hundreds of thousands of extra people into a system already running at capacity.
Because it seems so obvious that it shouldn’t need explanation at all, but I’ve tried already at least a couple of times now and it’s obviously not getting through. You genuinely seem to think that all it takes is just adding people to a country and all the stuff they rely on just appears alongside them.
Yes, but it does deliver a LOT of houses, which is the relevant part to a housing shortage. Not enough to meet the demand imposed upon it for the last decade or two, but much more than most other countries (eg: roughly 50% more per capita than the USA).
For comparison, the UK builds barely more dwellings each year than Australia, which is why its property market is even more ****ed up than ours is.
Also, most new builds are bought by homeowners. Investors overwhelmingly prefer existing stock.
ummm, Ireland refugee statistics for 2022 was 81,256.00, a 748.98% increase from 2021. Ireland refugee statistics for 2021 was 9,571.00, a 5.93% increase from 2020. Over 17,500 ‘other’ (non Ukrainian or EU..obviously] undocumented asylum/refugee resident arrived in 2022 from the EU.
It had the highest (native) birthrate in the OECD but a decreasing falling population – not even half its pre1845 total.
After it became part of Schengenland (1997) the population began to increase, until the Celtic Tiger got a bad case of mange in the GFC when the population almost reached approx. half of the 8M pre1845 and stabilised.
Since 2016 it has grown by more than 25%, (almost 5M, of whom 75% were EU but now far outnumbered by ‘Other’, including an astonishing number of…Albanians.
They are claiming refugee status – from a country which is now the new go-to 21stC ‘Yugosexia‘ (see pre break-up after Tito’s demise) tourist capital for cashed up Germans etc.
ummm, Ireland refugee statistics for 2022 was 81,256.00, a 748.98% increase from 2021. Ireland refugee statistics for 2021 was 9,571.00, a 5.93% increase from 2020. Over 17,500 ‘other’ (non Ukrainian or EU..obviously] undocumented asylum/refugee resident arrived in 2022 from the EU.
It had the highest (native) birthrate in the OECD but a decreasing falling population – not even half its pre1845 total.
After it became part of Schengenland (1997) the population began to increase, until the Celtic Tiger got a bad case of mange in the GFC when the population almost reached approx. half of the 8M pre1845 and stabilised.
Since 2016 it has grown by more than 25%, (almost 5M, of whom 75% were EU but now far outnumbered by ‘Other’, including an astonishing number of…Albanians.
They are claiming refugee status – from a country which is now the new go-to 21stC ‘Yugoslavia‘ (preTito’s demise and national break-up) tourist capital for cashed up Germans etc.
This was AWAITENINGED until tweaked – on the off chance that the original appears,try to find the trigger word (hint, 5 evil letters within a normal word).
Thanks for a history of my own country.
Refugees are different to economic migrants.
I’m telling right now there’s a shortage of workers and people are not moving there from the eastern and southern states in the EU due to the cost of living.
And I’m also telling right now many people are not that keen on moving to Australia. I wouldn’t given the farcical cost of housing.
Data suggests otherwise.
Because you’re probably not prepared share a one-bedroom flat with half a dozen other people. Rent’s not so high split that many ways.
As per the old unjoke “Bed collapses in one b/r flat, 15 injured.”
The future is a little more foreseeable than that. Most first world nations now have birth rates too low to sustain their population. Sure, there are bound to be a lot of potential immigrants out there in third-world countries but neither we nor the competing nations want the majority of them. There’s not much demand in Australia (yet, anyway) for experts in subsistence agriculture. We are already competing for the supply of foreign doctors, with Australia using the condition of the NHS to poach Asian and African-trained staff from the UK.
The supply of people wanting to get into Australia, the ones that we want to attract, is quite exhaustible. We can probably count on future willing migrants from the Pacific region, but outside of there we’re going to be a distinctly lesser-ranked choice after the US and the EU.
There are tens of millions of educated Asians who might like to migrate to Australia. They’re not all subsistence farmers you know.
According to RN on Sunday morning, there will more Indian descended citizens here than those of British descent within a generation and the current residents have a higher proportion of BAs & PhDs than the general populace.
Tell them to steer clear as they’ll never be able to afford a home!
Yet these are the kind of immigrants that policy has been designed to attract for a decade or more (at least you have to assume that was its objective, since its done such a good job of it).
Even under a zero NOM policy, population would keep rising for another decade.
The suggestion that we cannot create enough local workers for critical roles like doctors over the long term is absurd. It’s a teaching and training problem, not a number of people problem.
Exactly. Good economic policy is about the allocation of real resources to maximise the well-being of the society in a sustainable way. It’s not about fiscal surpluses, it’s about ensuring we have the resources (such as doctors, but also food, shelter – including aged care) available at the time we need them. Shortages of real resources is the cause of inflation. We could theoretically run out of able-bodied workers, but only with poor planning.
Consider this – the black population of Britain until the turn of the century was almost entirely Afro-Caribbean.
Today there are far more African… err… blacks than Caribbean origin british born.
Why/how is that so?
Unrelated is that almost half of the senior Cabinet members are of Indian origin, mostly via East Africa parents.
Discuss.
Anyone inclined to yell racist, check out the recent race riot in Peckham.
Seems like you’ve already discussed it. ::shrug::
As usual, nothing original to contribute – always the cut’n’paste contrarian with zero else in the locker.
I guess you’ll need to be more specific, because from what you’ve posted above it’s unclear what is supposed to be “discussed”.
Your only posts whine & nitpick – never a worthwhile thought.
We’ve more in common than you might think, then !
What’s there to discuss?
We all started in Africa.
Migration is a fact of life and is not even limited to humans.
The difference is humans should’ve probably evolved beyond the point of fighting over the nearest branch.
It never ends well.
Ten years ago Dáil Éireann legislated to recognise ‘Travellers‘ (once called ‘tinkers’ – among other, more pithy sobriquets) as a separate ethnic group and thus a Protected Group in law.
Naturally this came with all the usual special funding, privileges & excuses for unacceptable behaviour & mores so familiar whenever racializm is invoked.
Yay for Yes coz that couldn’t happen here.
I spoke to a student from Kenya yesterday looking to travel for study. They said Australia wasn’t on their list any more because of the lack of/expensive housing. So the effects are starting to be heard worldwide
What I fail to understand is this concern over lack of workers. Are we all slaves to the economy? Will we all have to take on two or three jobs just to keep business profits growing? And, Bernard, I have to strongly disagree that forcing ever more women to work is a good thing. They are going into rubbish jobs on small wages in increasing desperation to pay the mortgage or the rent or the gas bill. Leaving the kids with the neighbours or aunties or a bunch of strangers in so-called child care. Child care businesses are propped up by tax payers so that women can go to work in order to inflate house prices and prevent collapse of the bubble. Slaves to a housing bubble created over decades by government policy. Are we stupid, or what? Is a life well lived all about maintaining bank profits? Is a house for living in, or a means of screwing money out of others? The realisation of the 40 hour week was celebrated as a step forward along the way to social happiness – less work! More leisure! Hooray! Well done the workers!
How things have changed.
Surely, surely, businesses have to adapt to the availability of employees. And the government has to, at some point, stop pandering to business unions by bringing in ever more feckless people in some sort of human pyramid scheme. A million in three years – it’s madness.
Economics is the art of forcing theory to fit reality. Reality, ever changing, is always way ahead of economists’ rubbery ideas and futile teachings. The state of economics, at the moment, is a hammer bashing everyone on the head, causing ever more misery and poverty. So there it is: economics causes poverty.
The thing is that a “lack” of workers – up to a point (which we are so, so far away from) – is a good thing in the big picture.
It raises wages, which grows the whole economy.
Increasing wages typically eliminate mind-numbing and soul-destroying drudge work first.
It drives innovation and increased productivity,
It increases tax revenue (for those who think that’s important).
All of these things serve to raise the standard of living and everyone’s quality of life. It is “the tide that lifts all boats”.
It does mean a handful of the wealthiest people may become slightly less wealthy in relative terms. This is why they – and their useful idiots who think supply-side, trickle-down economics are good, actually – consider it to be disastrous.
I wholeheartedly agree about the desirability of raising wages. But in a country where unions have been effectively disempowered, where workers have little bargaining power, and where most employers regard employees as a cost to business that must be minimised as much as possible wherever possible, I don’t see much evidence of worker shortage causing wages to increase. In fact employers, and their representative associations, generally fight any request for a wage increase to the bitter end. There may be some enlightened employers in Australia who do accept that their employees are a valuable asset contributing to the productivity and profitability of their company, but sadly they are in a small minority.
Have you considered this might be evidence there is not actually a worker shortage (or at least not a serious one) ?
I have considered that. In the town I live in, there are numerous businesses with signs in the windows begging for staff. However, when I ask if they have considered paying more than the basic wage they say no. They appear to regard wages in the same way they regard taxes, as something to be minimised or avoided. Surprisingly, many have told me they can’t find workers because unemployment benefits are too high and there are too many lazy dole bludgers, echoing the liberal party lifters/leaners rhetoric. As far as policy goes, the people I spoke to prefer to see cheap labour imported from overseas rather than raising wages. Of course this may not be representative of other employers, but I suspect it probably is.
You would struggle to find many parts of the Australian economy not heavily reliant on exploitation of immigrant labour for their profitability.
Even the wealthy would be better off with less inequality. That rising tide reduces crime, improves health, education and life expectancy.