The Joe Walker Podcast - "Bigger and Different": The Six Decades That Remade Australia — Mark Cully [Immigration Series]

Episode Date: May 21, 2026

Part 2 of a three-part immigration series this week. Martin Parkinson (economics) available here; Mike Pezzullo (acculturation, social cohesion, security) drops Friday. Mark Cully was the inaugural chief economist at the Australian Department of Immigration (2009-2012). His forthcoming book, Waves of Plenty (September 2026), is (to my knowledge) the first truly general history of immigration to Australia. It will fill a remarkable gap in our literature, given the centrality of immigration to the Australian story. We discuss Australian exceptionalism in migration policy. The only country to have run assisted passage at scale (around 3.5 million people whose fares were subsidised). The first country in the world to have a dedicated Department of Immigration. The first country to offer migrants English-language training. Per capita, the world's largest receiver of international students for decades. Today, one of only three countries – alongside Switzerland and Singapore – with an overseas-born share above 30%. On current trends that share is projected to approach 40% by mid-century, a level likely not seen since the 1880s. We walk through six decades that built the nation – the 1830s, 1850s, 1890s, 1950s, 1970s, and 2000s. We discuss why Australia eschewed slavery, why the 1850s might be the most important decade in the making of modern Australia, and what the White Australia policy was really about. We also explore what made the post-war migration program the most epic policy experiment in our history, whether migration has increased Australian living standards, and what history can teach us about the rise of One Nation. (Episode recorded on 23 February 2026.) Sponsor Vanta: helps businesses automate security and compliance needs. For a limited time, get one thousand dollars off Vanta at vanta.com/joe. Use the discount code "JOE". To sponsor a future episode, go to https://josephnoelwalker.com/sponsor/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Karl Marx is writing to one of its friends in New York. He's saying, those people who've gone out to Australia, they don't realize how much they've made our world shrink. It's kind of like it's a really early statement about globalization. After gold was discovered in 1851, without a policy, the default was it was open borders, right? We're the only country that's done assisted passage on scale. I don't think many people know that it goes back to the 1830s.

About three and a half million people came to Australia whose fare was either fully subsidised or generously subsidised, who otherwise probably wouldn't have come. In terms of its vision, stakes and execution, the post-war migration program is the most epic policy experiment in Australian history. Broad degree. If the US had, after World War II said, we're open again, many of the migrants from the countries that Australia signed agreements with would have gone to the United States instead. But the US didn't begin reopening to migration until the mid-1960s.

So we had this window of opportunity. If you had to boil down why the post-war migration program was so successful to the most basic set of preconditions, what would they be? Full employment. Yes. Yeah, full employment. migration has made Australia larger and has made it different. It hasn't made it more prosperous.

We probably would still be, in terms of incomes per head, roughly the same now as we are, had we not had a big pick-up in big boost in migration after World War II. By and large, the Australian experience with migration is probably the best the world can offer. Today, it's my great pleasure to be speaking with Mark Cully. Mark was chief economist of the Department of Immigration from 2009 to 2012. And he is the author of a forthcoming book, A History of Immigration in Australia. I've read the manuscript and it'll be one of the books of the year. So, Mark, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Joe, and thanks for the plug. So the title, I think, will be waves of plenty, and it's going to be published in September. It's striking that there's a

huge gap in the literature. Australia doesn't really have a general history of immigration, something that covers the full sweep from British, the arrival of the British through to the present day. So it's a huge service that you're doing for the country. In the book, you give a kind of macro overview of that whole history, but you also focus in particular on six decades and you provide like a narrative history of each of those decades. So those decades are the 1830s, the 1850s, the 1890s, the 1950s, 1970s and 2000s. So as I told you before we started recording, the book left me with a number of mysteries or questions, which we'll get to. I've got some big picture questions and I also want to go through each of the different

decades and ask a few different questions on each of them. But we'll start with my first mystery and the 1830s. So one of the defining features of Australia generally, but in particular, immigration to Australia in the 19th century, is that there are these chronic labor supply shortages, which are a function of the tyranny of distance. I think in the book you write until the mid-19th century, five pounds to travel from the UK to America or it was about 20 pounds to travel from the UK to Australia. And the amount of time it took. It was like about three times as long. Yep. Yeah, about three months. Three months. And you have to think about the opportunity cost of your time. You can't earn a wage, you bought a ship. Exactly. And at a much higher death rate as well. It was about 2%.

People died on the voyage on the way over, higher for kids. Yeah. I mean, in some ways it was almost like the then equivalent of traveling to the moon or something. And so as a function of that, Australia had these chronic labor supply shortages. And colonial governments primarily tried to address those through assisted migration. But it's striking that Australia never turned to slavery like other countries like America and South Africa.

did to solve their labor supply issues. And that's particularly striking because there was a local indigenous population, and yet we still exported a lot of labor from either the Pacific Islands or from the United Kingdom and Ireland. So, yeah, do you have like an account or an explanation for why Australia didn't turn to slavery like some other countries did? People and scholars make a distinction between free and unfree labor. Yeah.

And you could have slavery at one continuum, and then you could kind of have, I don't know, people just being hired as employees in a labor market at the, and covered by kind of rights and conditions at the other end. When you're asking about slavery, you kind of, I think, need to think of frame it within that kind of unfree labor. I see. And so you would characterize the kind of conditions under which Aboriginal Australians did work in the labor market as being on the borderline of unfree.

They had few rights. They were grossly, their wages were grossly underpaid, often not paid at all. and they weren't necessarily that much different from, and we might go on and talk about the South Sea Islanders in the way in which they were brought into Australia as indentured workers. The chronic labour shortage only became, started to become an issue in Australia during the 1820s. And I guess the way I've thinking about it

is that in the 1820s, we had this report that was done by, I've got his first name, the big, the big B-I-W-G, Big Report. He basically ran a kind of a Royal Commission into the operation of the convict system. And there were some concerns in Britain that being transported to Australia did not have sufficient terror attached to it. and Big was sent out to investigate this. And so there was this tension between the colonial authorities and British reformers and the British authorities

as to what were these penal colonies there to do. Were they there to send the criminal underclass from the UK away and to Australia? And so they're out of sight, out of mind. and just keep sending them there, or were these colonies to be, because there were two New South Wales and Van Diemen's land by that point, were they there to be something different to a penal colony? Were they to become, in effect, a dominion?

And at the same time, there was a push against, push starting against transportation for kind of moral grounds, because slavery was being contested, I think it was early 1830s, that the Slavery Act was passed to abolish slavery within the Empire. So the opportunity, I guess, for slavery to take off in Australia, whatever form it might have taken, didn't happen before 1830, which is when a sister Pashid started,

and didn't happen after 1830, slavery had been expunged in the British Empire. There are a series of papers which look at the use of Aboriginal Australians as workers in different parts of Australia. It's kind of well known that they worked done as kind of jackaroos and so on on cattle stations. It's a fairly thin literature, I would say, so it's very hard to be definitive about it. I guess the one thing that people know is the kind of the backdrop to this is the popular. population numbers were collapsed calamitously. There were perhaps, so Boyd Hunter's done some work on this,

perhaps about a million indigenous inhabitants of Australia in the late 18th century, and by about the 1840s, halfway 3rd. through the 1840s or thereabouts, the number of colonists had gone past the number of Indigenous Australians who had died principally from disease rather than from warfare. I guess I'd observed that even in the United States, they didn't, not in any significant scale that I know of, enslaved their own indigenous people. They brought people out from Africa to do that.

Yeah. So a question about the 1850s. I've kind of, I've come to view the 1850s as perhaps the most important decade in Australian history. And I've been trying to puzzle through what it means to have so many people in a country who were there for the first time. Maybe the most striking statistic from that period is I think by the end of the gold rush decade. So we're talking early 1860s. now, seven in ten people in Victoria were born overseas. It must have been such a strange experience to live in a society where most of your fellows were not originally from the place. It almost feels like a weird Lord of the Flyers kind of situation or something.

In some very real sense, it's like you're creating a society from scratch. I've just been recently trying to puzzle through exactly how that affects. Australian culture, that influx of newcomers. Right. And not even the particular qualities of the newcomers, but just the fact of having so many new people in such a short space of time. Victoria didn't have any colonists except for some, you know, renegades and kind of outlaws who were doing sealing along the Southern Ocean

until the mid-1830s, when the Port Phillip District. was established. So it went from kind of, you know, basically no white people to, I think it must have been 400,000 odd by the end of the 1850s. So it went from having no white people at all. Between 1835 and 1850, most of what is now Western Victoria and Central Victoria, northeastern Victoria, became occupied by squatters. And there were huge numbers of sheep there.

Melbourne was a big town of 20-odd thousand-ish. And then after gold was discovered in 1851, and effectively you had, you essentially had an, without a policy, the default was it was open borders, right? There were, there was no restrictions on anybody turning up. If so long as you could find a ship to bring you to Melbourne, you could come and you could start searching for gold. And people did come from all over North America, from all over Europe, from Britain and Ireland, from New Zealand. and I guess most famously, because it's the way it played out over the course of that decade from China.

William Howitt was already a fairly distinguished writer in London at that time and elderly, and he decided he'd come out to see what all the fuss was about and wrote a memoir of his time there, and it's so colourful and so evocative of, like you said, this, this land taken over by these white people searching for gold. And it was, I don't know, it was an incredible, it was both a kind of an upheaval of everything that had gone before, but it was also this tremendous kind of, I guess, a melting pot in that sense that people sometimes use it in the context of the United States in the late 19th century

of throwing all these people together. and everyone having to find ways of accommodating the way in which they saw the world and the way in which they interacted with one another. And it was the birth of Australian culture. There was certainly a lot of swagger and a lot of lyricans. There were a lot of former convicts had come from, particularly from Van Demos.

to try to make this, make their riches. And there were, there are lots of colourful stories about the escapades that they got up to in, in, and in fact, the Victorian Legislative Council tried to ban former conflicts from Van Demonsland coming over to Melbourne because of all the uproar that was being created. There's also an argument which people have been making for a long time, people like Geoffrey Searle, that the, if we think about the attributes of convicts and of assisted migrants, and then compare those two groups with the people who came in the 1850s, we're comparing the British and Irish, with, in those three groups, the convicts, the assisted passage migrants, the assisted passage migrants and the people paying their own way.

That last group were more middle class, more literate, and more skilled in their kind of background trades than the other two groups. The assisted passage migrants were very much laboring poor, and particularly from Ireland, the Irish were very overrepresented amongst the assisted passage migrants. And the convicts were also, you know, they were also very much working class. And a number of those people who had come, as paid their own way in the 1850s to search for gold, had spent a lot of time at charterist rallies in. in Britain arguing for electoral reform.

So you see a number of things kind of flowering, particularly in Victoria, but also in New South Wales in that decade, around seeking kind of broad franchise. And part of the resolution of the Eureka Stockade was to settle on a broad franchise. You see the first industrial agreement in the world on an eight-hour working day for putting up the law building at Melbourne University. It is a very fascinating decade.

I don't know whether it's the most consequential one in Australia's history or not, because there's a few contenders for that. Yeah, no doubt. But it was a fascinating one. Yeah. So all of those things in terms of the sort of experiences and the composition of the migrants who arrived in that decade, I think very important. You can draw pretty clear lines from those to the,

egalitarian culture that Australia is known for. For example, the chartists and whatnot. But yeah, I'm still trying to, it's still a mystery to me. Like the fact of, imagine living in a country or a city where 70% of the people around you are there for the first time. I'm trying to work out the importance of that fact in and of itself. And yeah, it's still a mystery to me. You can see in the letters.

The people write home and the guidebooks that are being produced. There's kind of official guidebooks that are being produced by the Colonial Land and Immigration Commission. There are kind of, I guess, proselytizers and boosters who are talking about what it's like to move to this place. So I guess it has elements of a wild west frontier in the way in which we sometimes think about the way in which the expansion westwards of the United States happened. You know, a little bit lawless, a little bit wild. There were so many people coming that ships had to wait for two days off the Queenscliff before they could get a berth to land.

And then when people landing, they're being quoted these outrageous sums of money to be able to take their bags from the port of Melbourne into the centre of Melbourne. So they just throw them away. or they have an impromptu you sail down on the wharf. There are so many people arriving that the average number of people living inside rooms in Melbourne

doubles. And I think each dwelling has like eight or nine people in it. And there's so few housing that they build a tent community on the edges of the Yarra where there's 7,000 people at one stage just living in tents. So you really are throwing all these people together into a really unsettling environment.

But the probability that somebody could become extremely wealthy overnight was much higher than it had ever been previously and sufficiently high. They brought so many people out. And it made, there's a quote I have where Carl Marx is writing to one of its friends in New York. He wasn't old at that stage, but he's saying he's saying he's. saying those people who've who've gone out to Australia, they don't realize how much they've made our world shrink. It's kind of like it's a really early statement about, about globalization and that we could never have imagined this, you know, before in the 1840s. And here it's, you know,

in the 1850s writing about this colony, which, and, you know, Melbourne kind of emerging overnight as and growing faster than Chicago did, for instance. I think Melbourne probably has the record in the 19th century for the, it grew faster than San Francisco, grew faster than Chicago as the fastest growing new city.

Okay, one quick question on the 1890s. So if the depression of the 1890s hadn't happened, and instead around the time of federation we had economic conditions like those of the post-war era so close to full employment good growth directionally how different do you think the white australia policy would have been i'm not sure that it would have been any different the the level of antipathy that had developed towards chinese migrants from the mid-1850s through to the late 1880s, it was extremely high. It wasn't unparalleled because it also happened, especially in the United States.

And in both the United States and Australia, you see this tension between the governing authorities, which are trying to broker these effectively trade arrangements to give them access to the Chinese market and to Chinese goods. So opening up these relationships under, you've got to say, on the Chinese side, a fair degree of duress. They, what we call the Nanking Treaty, they call the unjust treaty. And, but on the ground, um, the white Americans and the white Australians, the colonists were repulsed. by the Chinese migrants. And I don't know whether there's a precedent for it in the US,

but there is an, the report that was done, the Goldfield's Commission report on the Eureka Stockade Uprising, which I think dates from 1855, talks about yellow hordes. And this is an official government document. And that language and that antipathy, It's in countless newspaper columns.

It's in nativist nationalist leagues that were formed. It's in riots against to remove Chinese miners in different gold fields, notably in Laming Flat. But I think the one that really stood out for me, which predates the recession, the Depression, sorry, of the 18th century. 90s was in 1888 where a ship sailed from Hong Kong, the SS Afghan, carrying about 270 Chinese men, who were coming to Melbourne, Sydney, and then on to New Zealand. They were getting off at different points. And so under duress, the Victorian governor invoked quarantine. laws to say, I won't let this ship dock in Melbourne. And it then went around to Sydney and Henry

Parks, the New South Wales Premier said, I won't let this ship dock in Sydney. Somebody on behalf of the shipping owners and some of the people on board took it to the New South Wales Supreme Court who said, you have to let this ship dock. There are people in it who have people in it who have landing permits. They are already residents of New South Wales and they're allowed to come back in. And the Premier went out and said, I cast to the wind your landing permits, your cobwebs of technical law. And he then wrote, he then wrote retrospective legislation, which endorsed the actions that he and his government had taken to prevent these Chinese. men from disembarking. And it went all the way up to the British Prime Minister who said

the people of New South Wales have gone stark raving mad. But you have all of the ingredients that kind of prefigured the tamper about we are not letting this boat disembark, come what may, the writing of retrospective legislation to protect what they were doing. And it it was wildly popular. And, I mean, Parks took that action in part because a mob of, I don't, I think it was about 10,000 people thereabouts had descended and were basically going to enter the New South Wholes Parliament and kind of destroy it if action wasn't taken to prevent this boat from from disembarking.

So I... That was 1888. That was 1888. So that's three years before the economic troubles. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So it's...

It's a story about cultural and economic protection. There's kind of two perspectives on how to do that, but maybe we can get into that in a minute. But there's kind of cultural protection around we don't want miscegenation, mixing of races, and economic protection in that we don't want, we don't want cheap workers undercutting high wage rates. here. And so I don't think the 1890s depression, had it not occurred, would have altered that

trajectory. Right. A historian friend reminded me recently another sort of cultural considerations that, at least that the founding fathers had in mind, was they were looking very closely at the American experience and the civil war and they were keen to avoid the same. what they perceived to be the same race issues. So they saw a sort of stability through having a very racially and ethnically homogenous society. That's the resolution

that's arrived at in Queensland. So Queensland was the only one of the colonies that made use of South Sea Islanders as indentured workers. On the cane fields? Sugar cane work. Yeah, they were almost exclusively, worked on sugar cane fields. So it's probably more in the low 50,000s, but there were 60,000

contracts signed, as it were, if you believe these contracts are signed. But the population was maybe of the order of about 10,000 in any given year. And the other colonies had decided, partly by reference to the United States, they didn't want their colonies to become plantation societies. And in Queensland, there was a real split between the north and the south, because the north is where the sugar cane is growing and milled

and, you know, turned into sugar. And the south, the south doesn't have that. And so there was this cleavage between the north, and the south, and this was a real contest in Queensland politics from the mid-1860s through to 1900. And in the end, it was the north that ended up voting yes for Federation because they wanted to be able to sell their sugar tax-free within the new Federation rather than having to pay tariffs or duties on that on that sugar being sold into the other colonies and the deal that was eventually done in 1901 was the first the first kind of active of industry policy in australia so

there was a sweetener for the sugar industry nice in uh yeah in 1901 to kind of support the industry as it made this transition away from kind of quite large scale sugar plantations to smaller to smaller scale operations but they had to give up their use of of south sea islanders and most but not all of those south sea islanders were forcibly repatriated back to their homes but sorry so how is that relevant to the australian founders wanting to avoid the american race experience that was the close that you got to it. Oh, I see. The Queensland model, for one of a better term, could have been replicated in other industries

in other parts of Australia. And those governments in other parts of Australia said, we don't want a bar of it. They didn't want it in Queensland. And once the federal parliament had the authority over the country, it said, no, we are not having this in Queensland. Okay, the 1950s post-war migration program. So let me share two statements of my opinion and just give me a gut reaction to each statement. So first statement, in terms of its vision, stakes, and execution, the post-war migration program is the most epic policy experiment in Australian history. broad degree well next statement arthur corwell was more consequential in his role as immigration

minister than many australian prime ministers have been qualified degree yeah so he um he's he kind of fascinates me because he strikes me as like a a linden johnson-esque figure in terms of a great sense of personal agency, but also a willingness to use like Machiavellian means to achieve noble ends. Because it's quite striking that he often tells noble lies to the public to bring them, bring them on side. So for example, one of those is that for every one non-Briton, we're going to bring out 10 Britons. And he knows that that is not achievable. But he's just an enigmatic and charismatic figure. Yeah, I'd say qualified degree.

He was only immigration minister for three years, right? Yeah. 1947 to 1949. And Harold Holt replaced him as the immigration minister after the 1949 election. And I think Holt was minister for about double the amount of time Corwell was. And most of the agreements that...

Australia signed with European countries around opening up to migrants from those countries, a number of them with assisted passage as part of the deal, many more of them were signed by Holt than by Corwell. Yeah. But Corwell was the person who, so he's, like, he's fascinating because he's, he's got this kind of diametric view on what kind of migrants he would he would prefer to have and how he would destroy prefer to see australia evolve so he was terribly terribly vindictive to people from asian countries who were given temporary refuge in australia during world war two

because their countries were being invaded and they were able to flee and make the way to Australia. And there were maybe 10,000 of these people who were left in Australia at the end of World War II. And he said, no, you've all got to go. And he took this woman who had, who's her and her family, a larger number of kids, about eight or nine kids, the O'Keeves. So her first husband had died in the war. And then she married a British soldier. And that by law should have made her recognize this British subject. But he said, no, you've got to go. And he went all the way to the High Court to expel her. And the High Court said, no, you can't. And then he changed, he wrote an act to say, I can. And it went through the Parliament. And the Liberals then

reversed it. So he had that. But then he also was extremely fleet-footed and creative in setting up arrangements to bring 170,000 people who were in refugee. camps after World War II into Australia from a whole mix of countries of people who'd never previously come to Australia. So this is not the Italians and the Greeks. This is people from the Baltic states, Ukraine, Poland, mainly. And they're hanging out, and from Germany. Many of them are Jews. And they're hanging out in these refugee camps. There are more than a million of them in refugee camps all across Europe. And the International Refugee Organization was trying to work out ways of resettling these people

in other countries across the world. And that had not been Corwell's preferred path. He maybe was not even aware of it early on or just didn't want to pay attention because Australia was not really engaged in the discussion. through the International Refugee Organization about this. But when he found that he just couldn't get enough migrants from Britain and from Scandinavian countries, and he was hearing that from his people on the ground in Europe,

that the calibre of these people was high, he said, no, let's go for it. And so he very quickly, like within a couple of months, he got it put before, put for cabinet, got agreement, flew over to the UK and then to Europe personally to make all of this fall into place. And then even as it kind of kicked off, he said that what they were trying to do was to raise economists sometimes use about skimming the cream. If you're selecting from a pool, you want to get the cream.

And he was told if you don't move fast, you're not going to get the cream. So he decided to move fast. And then even after that first agreement, what he found was the International Refugee Organization wasn't giving Australia a high enough priority because the U.S. had agreed to take $200,000. So he said, okay, we'll match the U.S. Let's just make it $200,000. Added a zero. Effectively added a zero. Let's go and do this so we can get these ships coming. And it was a, you know, if it was the right course, maybe we can get to that,

but if it was the right course to bring more people to Australia, it was a fantastic deal because Australia only paid £10 per person. The international refugee organisation paid the rest. The US could have taken more, right? And they didn't? I can't recall how many the US took, but I think they, I think they honoured their agreement. I remember a line in the book where you say that if they'd been more open to migration in the 50s and 60s, we would have been left with the breadcrumbs?

That's about free migration, people paying their own way. And so in the 1920s, the US basically closed its doors to migrants from Europe. And it did this by putting in, well, particularly from southern Europe, it did it by putting in place quotas. and so in in the 1900s there were roughly 200,000 Italians per year going to Ellis Island there you know that archetypal migration journey 200,000 of them a year going through Ellis Island into the US and the United States what it did was it said we're going to put a quota on the number of migrants every year based on the share of the population in 1890s, 1890s,

90 when they did their census. And that meant that the number of Italians was capped at 4,000 a year, so 200,000 a year to 4,000 a year. So the United States, and Australia actually introduced quotas as well, the United States had shut itself off between the early 1900s and World War II. So the peak of when we talk about the era of mass migration from Europe to the new world, that went from 1840 until 1914, and then it stopped. And after World War I, it didn't start again. And after World War I, a lot of restrictions were put in place in both the US and Australia. So my point was, if the US had, after World War II said, we're open again, many of the migrants who, from the countries at Australia signed agreements with, so your Netherlands, Italy, Greece,

Yugoslavia, many of them would have gone to the United States instead had they been able to, but the US didn't alter, didn't begin reopening to migration until the mid-1960s. I see. Okay. So we had this window of opportunity where economic conditions were good in Australia, where the country had not been physically ravaged by war. The people had been a bit, but the country had not. And it looked like, you know, it looked like what it had in the 1880s.

It looked like paradise to get out of Europe and come to Australia in the 1950s. Yeah. So we might have an interesting difference of opinion on this next question, but if I recall correctly, in the book you write that the parish arm of the populate or perish policy was weak. And even if we doubled or tripled the population size, it still wouldn't have helped much with defence. Why do you believe that? So the first idea of the parish one was a population of 20 million is sufficiently high to defend ourselves. So I think that's contestable straight away, is a population of 20 million compared to 7 million, 7.5 million.

obviously you're better equipped to defend yourselves with 20 million than you are with 7.5 million. When were you going to reach 20 million by? So Menzies, when he was leader of the opposition in 1944, said, we'll be, we'll have a population of 20 million in 20 years. And Giblin, I can't remember what the L&F stand for in his name off the top of my head. But Giblin was a kind of senior economic advisor in the bureaucracy during the war period. And he got out a bit of pen and paper and did some jottings. And he said, well, if you're going to hit 20 million in 20 years, your population is going to have to grow at an annual rate of pretty close to 6%.

And that's not going to happen, right? That's not going to happen. It's just not sustainable to grow your population at that fast. So it's not going to happen before by 1964. It's going to happen a good deal after that. And he said, look, probably your kind of optimal rate of fast population growth without straining capacity and allowing infrastructure and housing to kind of keep up is about 2% a year, half of that to come from migration, half of that from natural increase.

So you're not going to get there. And now the other point I make is, almost the entire 7.5 million people huddled in the southeast corner of the country, and part of the idea about avoiding perishing was about protecting the north from invasion. Now, it's going to be difficult to defend the north, even with the population that's increasing, if they're all huddled in the southeast corner. Okay. Let me pick up on two things, two threads. So if by that time the way to defend Australia is just to defend the air sea gap to the north,

to make that extremely costly for any would-be attacker to cross, that's a very capital-intensive exercise. So it relies primarily on a Navy and an Air Force, not an army. Right. And presumably that's a function of GDP. So having a larger population helps with that indirectly. Yeah, I'd agree with that. That would probably be the crux of my disagreement on your,

your critique of the parish arm of the argument. The second thing I wanted to follow up on was the Gibblin formulation, so the 2% per year, one percent from net migration, 1% from natural increase. And obviously, Corwell picks that up and then it becomes the official policy for a whole generation. It has a very politically appealing symmetry to it. It seems like a much easier sell than saying, we'll take 1.3% from net migration and 0.7% from natural increase, something like that. Do you know how he actually arrived at that formula?

I don't. I don't. Okay. There is a memo in the archives where he explains it. And I can't recall, I can't recall what it says. Because it almost feels like a political decision, right? Rather than just something that falls out of the demographic modeling. Well, so.

The one and one? I guess you have to, part of the context before then, was that the birth rate had slowed in the 1930s, and the demographers were worried that it was permanent. So they were saying this is a structural change in family formation preferences by husbands and wives deciding what they're going to do. and it turned out that they were wrong. Well, the structural shift they were talking about,

they anticipated too early, in a sense. And the slowdown in the 1930s was due to economic conditions where there was so much unemployment that people were going, let's not have another child because it's costly and we're not sure whether we'd be able to raise this child well. And once the economy turned around, the birth rate took off. So the 1% around the birth side was kind of an optimistic at that time, an optimistic reading of what population growth from natural increase might be.

And I think the idea was you probably want to keep the numbers coming from migration and natural increase in a kind of balance. so that you have some sense around the direction of the country in terms of the share of migrants that are in the population. And Gibblin, like Nugget Coombs, was an artful economic advisor, and it probably was really nicely pitched to ministers. So you've had a number of senior public servants on your show, so you know that part of their job is to talk.

to ministers in a way where ministers can latch on to an idea and appreciate its appeal. So I'm sure Giblin was being political, quote unquote, in the way in which you put it, but I think he was probably being artful in going one plus one. That's a neat way of describing this thing. You can talk about that in public in ways that people will understand, and it doesn't sound scary. Yeah. So there's a Canadian immigration.

scholar Frieda Hawkins. Yes. And she says that the main difference between Canadian immigration policy and Australian immigration policy. And obviously this is a pertinent comparison because Canada is the country where most often compared to immigration-wise. She says that the main difference is that Canada never had the strategic imperative, the security imperative that we did because they were protected by the big ocean.

and the southern border with the United States. Do you know whether that lack of the security imperative, that context gave them poorer or different policy outcomes? So I read her book on the 1970s to 1980s immigration policy compared with Australia or Canada. Yeah. If it's in there, I hadn't picked that up. the main point of difference that you observe between Australia and Canada from 1947 to the late 1950s

is that we got the jump on on British migrants so we had a scheme of a 10 pound cap well it was free if you were a soldier of British soldier, and if you weren't, the cap was 10 pounds. And the fare at that time to get to, like in 1950 was probably about 100 pounds. So that was a huge subsidy for people. Canada didn't do that.

Canada thought, when they looked at what Australia was doing, it would attract the idol and the work shy. And it wasn't until they, set up their own, they copied Australia. We copied a lot of things from them. They copied us in setting up their own immigration department about seven years after us. And then they were pretty adroit, partly because much the same as it had been a century earlier, it's just easier to get to Canada than it is to Australia. Yeah. And easy to get back if you want to go back. And so by by the late 1950s, they were attracting more British migrants than Australia was.

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My audience can get a special offer of $1,000 off Vanta at vanta.com slash Joe. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash J-O-E for $1,000 off. One of the other remarkable features of the post-war migration program is just how much effort went into very careful propaganda to encourage the Australian population to accept these migrants. there are so many anecdotes we could tell here, but the one I liked the most from the book was the millionth migrant Barbara Porritt, who was very carefully selected and kind of almost paraded around. She was paraded around.

Literally. Yeah. Yeah. And even when she went back to the United Kingdom for a holiday, the department officials were stressing that she might not come back. And they would go to the Porrits place every three months to check up on them. How are you enjoying Australia? So incredibly, incredibly, the propaganda was so carefully calculated.

Counterfactually, how much of a difference do you think it made to Australian's acceptance of migrants? That's a hard question. Slight digression. Yep. one of the most popular books in Australia in the late 1950s was They're a Weird Mob by Nino Collotter. You know this book? I've heard of it.

Okay. Oh, this is a good story. Okay. Nino Collotter was an Italian migrant who ends up working on a building site in Punchbowl in Sydney. And it's, you know, it's in some ways it's very much a kind of a celebration of Australian ocherism about about migrants assimilating to Australian ways by themselves, you know, becoming effectively an ochre and learning the lingo and how to, and how to behave dreadfully to women and so on. And the thing about it is, it's actually a literary hoax. It was written

by a person of, an Australian of Irish descent called John O'Grady. And so Nina, Nina Clotto didn't exist. he was a dentist or something for the New South Wales government. And when the book started to sell like hotcakes, the ABC contacted the publisher and said we want to interview him, and he had to come out and break the facade. Actually, sorry, it's not, you know, it's John. But the book sold in, it sold millions of copies and got turned into a movie.

And it kind of, in a sense, John O'Grady was reflecting the way, way in which Australians themselves thought about these people who'd come from Europe and how they were fitting into Australian society and how they ought to fit in, how they ought to, how they ought to assimilate. But there's tenderness there. So the book gets a mixed press because it's, because it's got various racist tropes in it and it's terrible with women. But there's, there's definitely a tenderness towards the Italian migrants. And the propaganda bit, I mean, obviously, Cawar was the information minister in the war before he became immigration minister.

True. And he was a person who popularized the term New Australians. Yeah. And I still remember, you still remember, you know, conversations you had with people in the 70s and 80s, and they would talk about New Australians. Oh, really? Because it's not really a term anymore.

It's not a term anymore. It's not a so many words gone. In fact, I've never heard anyone use it. Right, yeah. But I heard it in my childhood. Yeah, interesting. So in other words, there was a kind of pervasive semi-openness to migrants, and maybe that would have enabled acceptance without propaganda.

It was a grudging acceptance, somewhat indifferent. and discriminatory, but not rejection. Not rejection. And where you could cross cultural barriers because circumstance threw you into that, there was genuine kind of engagement and openness and friendliness. I mentioned in the start of the book about my own migration story, and we settled in the northern suburbs of Adelaide in 1965, and it was a real polyglot community of,

what seemed to us polyglot, exotic. There were people from Malta, Greece, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and lots of POMs, Scots, Welsh, and lots of working class Australians. And we all kind of, we went to school together, we played football together, you know, we had scraps together. It wasn't kind of engineered. It just kind of happened. What was the good number to quantify the scale of the post-war migration program?

We added 2.5 million migrants. in about 20 years. 47 to 71, 2.5 million, yeah. More than half of them were not British. Not British. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So if you had to boil down why the post-war migration program was so successful to the most basic set of preconditions, what would they be? Full employment. Yeah. That was my first one. Yeah. Full employment. Yeah.

I think the thing about. that period is, and it goes back to that kind of argument about population or populate or perish, the 1950s wasn't really about populate or perish, it was really about migration as economic development and the people who came out large numbers of the men and significant numbers of the women worked in factories and they produced cars. televisions, refrigerators, washing machines in Australian factories that were then sold to the migrants and to Australians. And so they were both producers and consumers. And it was the heyday of Australian manufacturing. It's when Australia became genuinely kind of industrialised was in the

the 1950s, and it couldn't have done it on the scale in which it did without migration. And then you had this, you know, the fascinating circumstance of a very conservative liberal premier of South Australia adopting a kind of quasi-socialist economic and industry policy which is all based around bringing in large volumes of workers who could also be consumers, whose wages were below the wages of similar workers in Victoria and New South Wales, and designing whole towns like Elizabeth, which is where I grew up around that area, designing these whole towns to house these workers who would then work in the neighbouring factories

and then their children would go to school and then work in those factories, which is what I was expected to do. And it worked until full employment stopped and then it stopped working. I tried to write my own list and full employment was the first item on the list. Right. Yeah. Possibly it just dominates all the other ones.

I mean, the three others I had were culturally a gradual process of focusing first and mainly on British migrants, but then gradually moving farther afield to then eastern and southern Europeans. Thirdly, a compliant receiving population with the national security imperative, the assurances from the government, the propaganda, and then fourthly, I'm not sure about this one, but an egalitarian culture. Maybe that makes people more receptive. If you think of like a much more kind of hierarchical culture, like I can imagine France trying to do what we did.

Yeah, I'd probably almost give more weight to that one than your other two in a sense. Yeah. And the first lot of, there were very few people who were coming out from Britain in 1947, 1948, and so the displaced persons, 170,000 of those, you know, the ones who came and went to Bonnegilla, that camp near Wadonga in Victoria,

that was happening in 1949. And there wasn't really any stage at which there was this shift away from British towards European migrants. It all happened at the same time. So almost all the British migrants were assisted, about 90%. and the numbers vary by country, according to the rest, I think for the Italians, it was about a quarter. And that was one of the lowest ones. But there were assists.

So the government signed. And am I right in distinguishing assisted migrants from the displaced persons? Yes. In the counting? Yes. Yes. Sorry. The displaced persons are, nowadays we would call them refugees.

Yeah. We didn't have a refugee program then. Or humanitarian program. So they were called displaced persons. They didn't have homes. Their lives had been destroyed. And so they came to Australia to resettle under the auspices of the International Refugee Organization. The other countries that signed agreements, the countries that signed agreements with Australia,

sometimes that was done with a third-party body, I think it was called a European Committee for Migration or something like that. And they did do some of the co-funding of assisted migrants. Australia would, it got the British to partly pay for assisted passage of British migrants up until 1952-ish. And then the Brits said, hang on, this is crazy. Why are we spending all this money sending our people over to Australia when we've got our own labour shortages? We're not going to pay any more money on this. But the Australians were very good at hitting up not only the the international organization for refugees, but the European Committee for Migration

as co-contributors to the assisted passage. So wherever they could, Australians would always hit up other governments to, hey, send their people to Australia. Smart, smart deal. So moving briefly to the 1970s, you told me by email that in many ways you think the 1970s is a more compelling decade than the 1950s. Reading the book, it wasn't obvious to me why.

but do you remember what you had in mind when you said that? When I did the first kind of, what does the structure look like on this book? I had four decades and I added the 1830s and I added the 1970s. And it just became apparent to me as I was going through and reading that the 1970s was consequential in a bunch of ways. It was very significant for immigration. So firstly, I think probably people are very familiar with the idea that we ended the White Australia policy. The 1970s was the first time in which we introduced a formal refugee program.

So we had been a signatory. We had been a signatory that said, you know, we recognized. that there are these things called refugees, these people called refugees, but we did nothing really to encourage or resettle refugees except when we were bullied by or cajol by other countries to do so, and particularly we were terrible at ignoring the plight of Chileans who were escaping the repression of the Pinochet regime in the 1970s and of Indian, Indian Ugandans who, who were being expelled by the Ediamin regime in the early 1970s. We kind of washed our hands of those in ways that the Canadians didn't.

The Canadians were very generous in both of those cases. We got, no. But it was when we started getting boat people, boat people in inverted commas, arriving in Darwin in 1976, and provoking this kind of big discussion around what does it mean for Australia to be a country of first refuge? It had never really been a country of first refuge before. And a country of first refuge, the refugee protocol comes into effect. You have to take these people in, determine that yes, they are refugees and they need our support and you're not

allowed to refow them. You know, they're not allowed to send them back. There were small incidents of where this had happened, like in 1956, in the Melbourne Olympic Games, a bunch of Hungarians said, we don't want to go back to Hungary with the suppression of the uprising in Budapest and other places there was people who, Portuguese and local functionaries who've been supporting the Portuguese in East Timor came to Australia and were kind of ignored for quite a while by the Whitlam government.

So Australia was in its untenable situation where it had to do something to work out a more systematic way, a more considered way of dealing with this rising issue of people coming to Australia's seeking asylum. And it did. And it ended up being part of an international deal with a number of countries in the Southeast Asian region and the US and Canada and what have you. and we brought in 60,000 Indo-Chinese refugees from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, which was proportionally more per population than any other country in the world did. And that marks the genuine end, it seems to me, of the White Australia policy. And then we also had multiculturalism, was introduced in 1977 formally.

and it's the start of what becomes a kind of objective system for selection of migrants and the kind of compartmentalisation of streams of migrants into humanitarian, skilled and family reunion and the introduction of the first points test for choosing amongst would-be skilled migrants in 1979. So those four things are all highly, highly consequential. Are they less consequential than the scale of migration that happened from Europe and Britain in the 1950s? Probably. But when I started delving into this, I realized that I had to write about the 1970s because of those four things. Yeah, you'd underrated it originally.

I had underrated it originally. Yeah. Yeah. So the final decade, the 2000s, so the big theme of the 2000s is this growing disconnect between permanent migration, or the permanent migration program and the population due to the rise of temporary migrants. Are you aware of any other analogs in world history of such large populations of people present in a country who, aren't fully brought into the national project

or even certain of their future prospects in that country? So the poster child example, well, there's actually quite a number. Yeah. So you have to think about with the end of slavery and the use of indentured labour schemes to replace that in many countries

across the world, saw huge numbers of people from China and India in particular, also Japan, go and work in other countries across the world. And they didn't have the same rights as the people living there. You still see that play out in Fiji to this day, the tensions between the indigenous people of indigenous heritage in Fiji and, and people of Indian heritage in Fiji, right? They've had coups about it. After World War II, the archetypal example are Turkish migrants, temporary migrants,

going to work in German factories. The guest workers. Guestabita. That's the word came, it's a German word. Yeah. Guestarbita. And that took decades before the, you know, sometimes,

the three generations on, the descendants of those Turkish migrants before they were recognized as being citizens of Germany. Yeah. They're the two that stand out. I mean, nowadays, you also have similar circumstances in several of the Gulf countries. So the country which has the most Indian migrants resident in it is the United Arab Emirates.

Yeah. I think there's three million Indians living in the United Arab Emirates. Higher than in the United States or about equal with the United States. And they have no rights there. Another interesting example was the temporary agricultural workers from Mexico in the US, in the 40s, 50s, and then to 64. Yeah, no, that's another good example. Yeah.

Sure. one interesting characteristic that maybe distinguishes the Australian experience is that the temporary workers in Australia, many of them at least nominally are here under the aspiration of permanent residency and citizenship. So let's go right back to 1901, the Immigration Restriction Act, effectively put a ban on the use of temporary contract. workers except in circumstances permitted by the minister. And then that was tightened up in an act in 1905. And we had hardly any temporary contract workers between 1901 and World War II. We didn't need temporary workers in the 1950s and 60s,

because we had so many permanent migrants coming. And some of them could be temporary in the sense that they decided after a number of years they didn't like it and returned home. And there are stories, particularly with British people, who got a sister passage and then spent a couple of years in Australia and then went back to Britain using it as a kind of an early prototype of a working holiday maker scheme. Yeah. But the temporary migration programs were all designed in good faith about meeting a particular objective

that except for the temporary skilled workers one was not related to work. And now, you know, the three big ones, the biggest one is international students. And then there are working holiday makers, and then there are temporary skilled workers. They're the three large ones, and they have all become de facto labor schemes as well as serving other needs. Yeah. There's been this drift. So the international education industry has obviously boomed in Australia. I think it reached about $18 billion per year by 2010. It's usually around our third biggest export.

The point you make in the book is that that is inflated because the ABS uses conventional method of treating international students where it assumes that all of their expenses are funded from overseas money, but obviously many of them work part-time in Australia to fund their living expenses. The specific question I had was, say you did count properly, do you know the kind of magnitude of the inflation? And would that be enough to knock it down the rankings of our top exports? So yes, I do.

But I'd probably make a few points there. So firstly, as you said, the ABS follows international statistical conventions in how you classify the export income from international education. There's an offsetting item in the balance of payments which captures the income that is earned in Australia of people who are not Australian citizens. I'm not entirely sure how it's the methodology or how it's created. The Reserve Bank has published a paper not so long ago where they report the number and they say currently, it's about 60% of the export income is income generated from outside Australia and 40% is generated from within Australia.

You can find means of artificially growing of using economic policy levers to create incentives for people to alter their decisions that ends up reallocating resources to growing, making certain industries be larger than they otherwise would be. The question that you then have to ask is that optimal, is that in the national interest? It's certainly in the interest of many people in those industries. industries. It's certainly in the interests of vice-chancellor's earning more than a million dollars, earning, according to Paul Frighters, and Gigi Foster probably four times more than they'd earn for running a comparable institution in the United States.

Wow, really? You would have made similar points about the use of incentives in using migration rules as incentives to encourage people to work in horticulture, in abattoirs, in hospitality, where for various reasons, those industries have trouble hiring enough people who already living in Australia to take on jobs at the prevailing paying conditions.

So these are all choices that governments have. made that have distortionary effects on the allocation of resources across the economy. And they're done in ways which are quite hidden because they don't involve the payment of subsidies or any fancy, you know, tax and transfer things. They're just straight out migration incentives. and they're enabled by the fact that most of those temporary visas are uncapped. And so if you are a young person with moderately good English who lives in Nepal, all the Philippines, you can probably earn vastly more than you would be able to earn

if you stayed in your home country by coming to Australia, even if it's for a fixed number of years, but if you can land permanent residency, all the better. And we have allowed that to develop over time because many people still have this mercantilist attitude towards exports, that export income is a good thing because it's good for the economy. Whereas I know you're speaking with Martin Parkinson, he will say to you, exports, pay for imports. That's what they're for.

So what do you think of the costs we're not counting? I think the costs that we're not counting that we have a group of, so setting aside news, Zealand citizens, which I think is definitely a special case. There are near enough to 2 million people in Australia who are temporarily here on a visa which has a specified end date. Many of them are being exploited through underpayment of wages or working excessive hours, and they're able to employers are able to get away with this because of the lure of permanent residence,

often their sponsors, and it's their signature that's going to matter that's going to help get the permanent residence. We've moved away from being a so-called settlement society where the people we brought in who came to the country were being well-combed, as new members of this society and expected to be kind of participants, active participants in it and in shaping the country.

And now we've got these people here on a kind of transactional basis. And even after they've done their time, they still have to wait at least another year before, after many years already being here before they can become an Australian citizen. So we have, I think, maybe given too much weight to what the economic benefits of migration are without having regard to what some of the social costs are. And as well as the earlier point around what would the shape of Australian industry look like if our international education industry wasn't so large, for instance.

Yeah. So as one kind of mild pushback, you could say that a benefit of the rise of temporaries is that it helps people kind of try before they buy, so to speak. And so we might end up with more kind of committed permanent migrants that way because it gives people from overseas the opportunity to see whether they will be able to fit into Australian society or find jobs here. Yeah, I don't deny that. And then there's the other benefit, which is mostly on the fiscal side.

So Bob Gregory has this phrase where he says, these international students are a million-dollar babies. Yeah. Because you're getting a fully functioning, educated adult. You didn't have to spend that first 20 years raising and schooling. and there's definitely truth in that. I'm pointing to the strains that are evident from allowing this

to kind of develop in a fairly untrammeled fashion and suggesting that there needs to be some rethinking about the how much temporary migration you want and what and some point at which there becomes a resolution in people's status where they cease being temporary and become a permanent resident or they cease being temporary and leave Australia. And at the moment, we don't do either of those things.

So a very brief kind of person. personal interlude, but you were the inaugural chief economist at the Department of Immigration. Yeah. I'm very curious whether you could share some of like the more interesting questions that you worked on. And you don't have to go into detail on each one, but just, yeah, I don't even know what your role looked like or the kind of things that they, that you were investigating. I'd be interested to hear.

So I started in that job right at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009. and it was not long into the life of the first Rudd government. And, yes, they wanted, the minister, Chris Evans, wanted somebody who could help him think through the interactions between immigration and the labor market and the economy. The immigration department was full of lawyers. and there's not a solution to a problem that a minister faced at that time that somebody in the department would write a regulation about.

And he just wanted a kind of fresh set of eyes to help him think through some of these things. The thing that I got involved with that had the most consequence, and I worked with several other people on this, was this one. this was when the very first spike in international student numbers had taken off, and there were a range of overnight colleges that sprung up offering diplomas in cooking, for example, hairdressing, and a number of them were pretty dodgy. And at the time, under the existing... rules in the Migration Act and particularly the rules for applying to become a skilled

independent skilled migrant was you could have basically 100% probability that if you if you're under 30 and your English was pretty good and you enrolled in one of these courses and completed it you would meet the points test pass mark and there was a backlog emerging of applicants who were waiting their turn in the queue to be processed, so the current blowout that we have in bridging visas was starting to

take place then as well. And the minister wanted a review to be done. In particular, he wanted a review done of this regulatory instrument that Phil Ruddock had introduced called the Migration Occupations in Demand list So this list was updated two or three times a year by officials in the department in consultation with employers and with the employment department around evidence on jobs that were in skill shortage. And if you could demonstrate that you had a skill that you're in this occupation that was on the list

as a cook or as a hairdresser, for example, you got 15 extra points. in the points test. And that was one of the main things that tipped you over the past mark. And so I got asked to lead the review of that on the immigration department side. And then we worked jointly with colleagues in the then Department of Education and Employment. I was coming in as a, I hadn't worked in the public service for like 20 years and I had no idea about, I had no idea about my seniority and clout. And I had no idea about, public service processes. And I went to three meetings between us and the officials in education and employment.

And we were just arguing about the terms of reference for the review. And I got fed up. So I wrote a discussion paper and circulated it. And then the next meeting, everything blew up. And it was like, you had no authority to write a discussion paper. I said it's a discussion paper and nobody else has seen it. We're discussing it. And...

You can see the outcome of that review in the discussion paper because it just articulates a very kind of clear set of principles about how to think about skilled migration policy. And it ended up being, we ended up with the government, ended up agreeing to a bunch of proposals to end the migration occupations in demand lists. And then a really important initiative, which wasn't in my discussion paper,

but was worked up by other people in the department, was to make the application for school migration. It's a two-step process. So the first step was an expression of interest, and after the expression of interest, you would be invited to apply, whereas the prevailing law, if you applied, you had to be given a decision,

and if you were over the past mark, you had to be given a visa. So it basically tried to prevent the backlog emerging by only inviting the number of people to apply consistent with a number of skilled migration visas you wanted to issue in any given year. It caused a huge outcry when this came out, particularly amongst Indian authorities. I can remember we had to go and see the Indian ambassador who said, you've left my people high and dry to me and the minister.

There was various grandfathering arrangements put in place, but it would all be pretty sensible and then it all progressively got undone by particularly by lobbyists from the international education to the universities in the main because the numbers went down quite a lot the following year

and they lobbied really hard they got Michael Knight, the former New South Wales Minister for the Olympics to do a review and he's the one who whose review came up with a recommendation for a very generous post-study work visa for overseas students. And the numbers of international students have grown to levels

that I thought were unimaginable back in 2010. But here we are. Yeah. It's funny when people talk about the influence of private, of special interests over Australian policy outcomes, the kind of classic examples are like the mining companies around the mining tax. But I think the international education sector,

universities is like a very underrated example of people are digging in to very ferociously defend their rents. Yeah. I have some big picture questions and I wanted to start with a few questions on culture and social cohesion. This is more of a comment but in the book you say that the two best analogs for Australia if we didn't embark on the post-war migration program as Sweden and Belgium and that counterfactually Australia might look more like those countries, very homogenous, still rich, but much smaller, older populations. The Sweden analogy is a really interesting one more broadly, because Sweden has a similar political culture to Australia in a couple of ways.

There's the egalitarianism and the statism. There are all these strange parallels between Australia and Sweden. I put Sweden in there. as a provocation. Because there's a bunch of people, you know, on the kind of left-leaning people who hold Scandinavian countries up, especially Sweden, as an exemplar, that Australia might emulate. And so Sweden nowadays has, it has had for quite a number of years,

brought in significant numbers of refugees, but it's never had a migration program like we've had. Yeah. And the point I was trying to make was the conflation of what the mistake that people make over what we think about prosperity and that migration has made Australia prosperous. Migration has made Australia larger and has made it different. It hasn't made it more prosperous. We probably would still be, in terms of incomes per head, roughly the same now as we are had we not had a big pickup. been big boost in migration after World War II.

That is, so the reason why I picked Sweden and Belgium is we have the same population as them, roughly speaking, around the time of World War II, and we're now two and a half times larger than Sweden and about three times larger than Belgium. But we still have broadly similar. We've matched the living standards of Sweden's and Belgians, basically all the way through from the 1950s to the present. So that's not due to migration. to other factors.

Yeah. I want to come back to the living standards thing because I think that's really interesting and important. What do you think is the single best measure for the speed of acculturation of a migrant group? So you could think of like, you could think of intermarriage, you could think of language shifts,

you could think of second generation wage premium. You had to pick one. I think it would probably be how second generation and third generation see themselves, how they identify themselves. You would collect that through survey evidence? Oh, possibly. But, you know, what are the bits of their parents, grandparents' culture that they hang on to?

Do they identify as heritage dash Australians, or do they identify as Australians? Yeah. The intermarriage stuff is, it's obviously a phenomenon, and it's kind of, it's a bit tricky to kind of get underneath and and interpret and I'm not an expert in that in that field at all I know in the in the sociological literature it's often used as the the most important both cause and measure of acculturation yeah whatever acculturation is and acculturation is a two-way street as well right and there are different dimensions the pushback against assimilation in the 1950s and then the embrace of multiculturalism in the 1970s

was because the acculturation was only a one-way street, not a two-way street. And so migrants were expected to not speak their own language out of doors, not draw attention to themselves, not live in enclaves together to kind of suppress their identities. And multiculturalism, the embrace of that was partly a well-organised political reaction against the attempts by the dominant group, the Anglo-Saxons, to impose their cultural hegemony

over the rest of the population. So for me, I'll give a trivial example, would be if you turn on the television and watch one of those contestant shows like MasterChef or The Voice, you see evidently people of migrant heritage, second generation, third generation. they seem Australian to me. Those, you know, you do not see, you do not see Australia on home and away or on neighbours, you see it on Masterchef. And the voice, these people from Western Sydney, broad meadows, wherever they are.

They're people who get on with life and maybe they marry within their community, as defined by their parents or their grandparents, but maybe they don't. The country seems to me to be richer, culturally richer, and less homogenous for that. And it's definitely the kind of critiques about Anglo-Saxon hegemony and whiteness are less salient, I think, now,

than they were 20 or 30 years ago. You can't go through the streets of our main capital cities without recognizing that these are very diverse and mostly tolerant communities. I don't deny there's issues around so-called social cohesion and that there's evidence of discord and some fracturing. By and large, the Australian experience with migration is probably the best the world can offer.

I've been kind of like slowly trying to write this thing, maybe it's an essay or something, on why Australia has historically been so effective at accultrating migrants. and in conversations I've had with various experts over the last year or two, one of the big explanations that comes up a lot is that Australia has always taken a mix of national and cultural groups such that no one group is large enough to form a breakway culture like the Kebiswai in Canada or the Catalonians in Spain. And we haven't done this in any given period, like in any one year, but we've done it over the course of decades by moving from kind of hopscotching from the British to

northern Europeans, eastern and southern Europeans, the Turkish, the Lebanese, the Vietnamese, the Indo-Chinese, now today, Chinese and Indians. And so we've ended up with this incredibly diverse overseas-born population. But at least since 1973, we've had a principle of non-discrimination. it seems like this hasn't been planned. It's just kind of unfolded. And if that's true, that's a really striking fact about Australia and Australian history because one of the most important characteristics of Australia as the OECD country

with the highest proportion of overseas-born citizens or residents, we have kind of like stumbled into that situation very successfully. Are you aware of, have officials or governments ever thought deliberately about the mix? Like, and when I say mix, I mean making sure that we have not too many from different groups. You know whether that has ever been thought of in a deliberate way. and if so what would the policy levers? Because my assumption is that we haven't thought of it in a deliberate way, but I'm wondering if I'm wrong.

Well, it's obviously, I think it has been thought about in a deliberate and quite applied way for much of Australia's history, some of it kind of hidden in behind the scenes. But if we restrict it to the post-war era? All right, restricted to the post-war era. So firstly, the, the door was effectively closed to anyone outside of Europe, the British Isles and North America, up until 1973.

So if you're thinking about mixed, that was very deliberate. So that was a continuation of the white Australia policy. the relaxation of that policy in 1973 had no material impact on the mix of migrants until we were welcomed in the Indo-Chinese refugees. But even within Europe, the immigration officials were, would select individual migrants,

so they would reject people. But it wasn't just the doors open for anybody from Italy or Greece. Okay, the door is open to this many migrants from Italy and we want them to come from the north. We don't want them to come from the south. We want them to be people with the background in skilled trades. We don't want illiterate peasants. And then when the door was open to Turkey,

which was defined as being European in about 1969. We want Assyrians, we want Christians, we don't want dark-colored Muslims from Turkey. So those decisions were all made by immigration officials personally in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. And it's not until 1973, when those people all lose their jobs effectively as decision makers, they now have to follow rules that are written down and codified and transparent.

So prior to 1973, there was heaps of discrimination exercised. This was the kind of, that was the era of the angels and arrogant gods. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, that's the title of the book by Harry, forgotten his surname, who was a migration officer, and it's a kind of memoir of his time and of other migration officers in the immigration department. So there's no doubt they were exercising those. decisions against individuals or for individuals a lot, and that altered the composition

relative to what it might otherwise have been if people had just been allowed to fill their quotas according to how they self-selected. After 1973, there was quite a reaction against, firstly, the thing called the structured selection assessment system introduced in 1973 and then the per first points test, which was called the New Yorker. numerical multi-factor assessment system in 1979 about criteria that might be biased against people from certain countries. And so particularly there's a big argument about English language and how proficient people had to be in English before they would be allowed to migrate. And that was eventually resolved by saying, yes, as a country, we do want people to be

where we can exercise some choice over the kind of migrants that we want to have. So leaving aside partner visas, it's very hard to impose requirements on if I want to marry somebody from China who doesn't speak a word of English. What right does the government have to tell me who I can marry and who I can live with? So they've kept away from, by and large, from interfering in partner visas. But in most other visas, there has been, agreement, eventually bipartisan agreement, that proficiency in English helps people, in your terms, acculturate. So that's been quite deliberate. So I think this proves my claim. So if you

imagine like a hundred little silos representing different countries, so over time, it's like we've filled each little silo up no further than. and it's brim. So we'll take this many Greek people, this many Italian people, this many Vietnamese, until we've kind of ended up with a really diverse. Except we haven't chosen those mixes. It's been self-selected. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it happens through chain migration. That's how it happens. Yes. And then another chain starts, right? So you talked about India. you know, India, if you go back to pre-2000, there were fewer than 100,000 Indian-born people living in Australia, and there are now close to a million.

And that's happened through chain migration. You know, everyone is, you could, you would go into, you would hop into a cab, and there'd be some young Sikh driving the cab. You'd go into petrol stations, and you just started to see that. And so it's been very, it's actually been quite, and chain migration happens like this a lot. It happens in small areas of a given country.

It's not a national thing. I mean, you can't speak about India as being a homogenous country at all. It's way more multicultural than Australia is. But we have a lot of the Indian, born migrants living in Australia come from the Punjab. They're Sikhs from Punjab. They are way overrepresented in Australia amongst the Indian born than they are in their own country.

So that, and... Like one in five Indian migrants to Australia or six. I think that's right. It might even be one in four, something like that. Yeah, whereas in India's like 2% of the population. Yeah, yeah. So these things do evolve and iterate over time.

It's really fascinating to look at when people, when the peak population was for particular, for particular groups, communities of migrants, sorry, that language is a bit funny, people born in different countries coming to migrate to Australia. So, and you can, you can check this at the different census dates. So the number of Italians born and Greek born in Australia, peaked, what year do you think? 1971. Okay.

So the Baltics, people from the Baltic states peaked in 1954, people from the Netherlands and Germany in the 1960s. I mean, I thought it would be, I would think most people's prize would be, it would be much later than 1971, because it's not until the 1970s that there's a celebration of cappuccinos and pizzas and all that stuff washing through, washing through Australian culture, but the number of, you know, that population had already by then become quite elderly.

That's when you see the non-is in black in the 1970s. But, okay, so I take your point that we shouldn't have this illusion of control, like this is driven by migrants making the decision to move here and then things like chain migration. Just let me push on this. further. So take, I don't know, the United States, maybe the modal group are people from Mexico because of America's geography. So there's just, and then you see how this manifests in American society. Like you go to California and the road signs are all in English and Spanish.

We don't, and maybe for us, the modal group are like the British, but we don't, We don't seem to have anything like that because there's a big spread of different groups. And that is the thing that just, it just seems to have happened accidentally. So I do mostly agree with that. But in the appendix, I've got a table on the birthplaces of migrants and how that's evolved over time. And in the 1860s, the number of 20% of the population have been born in England. That's what you point earlier about 70% of people born overseas in Victoria in the 1850s. So at a national level, if you can think of Australia being a nation in 1861,

over 20% of the people resident in the population had been born in England. And then in 1901 it dropped to 10%. In 1947 it had dropped to 5%. In 1961, it had dropped to 2%. you know, it's just dropping down and no other countries since the late 19th century

there hasn't been any particular country that has dominated the population as an immigrant as an immigrant group other than you would talk you would you know

the British Swiss brute straps thing in so in 1947 the overseas-born share of the population was 10%, the lowest it's been, if we treat, look at the colonist population since the early 1800s at 10%. But it was culturally homogenous and British Australian.

That's all over the history, the way in which people saw themselves as as as as British so that's that has that crimson thread of kinship as Henry Park called it in the kind of discussions around Federation that that thread has faded and and frayed and it's it's no longer so hegemonic so in the last couple of months there's been some unprecedented polling of political opinions. So for the first time in its history, one nation is now its primary vote is on par with the Liberal Party

or the coalition, tied with the coalition at 23%. There was a December poll. So that was a Demos A.U poll. Then there was an earlier poll in December by Roy Morgan, had one nation at 17% nationally, more than doubling since July, 2025 beating the previous record they'd set in 1998 of 14.5%. So you've got an anti-immigration party now enjoying unprecedented support.

How do you explain that? There's never been an anti-immigration party in Australia that's had any real presence. or support up until now. But when I mean anti-immigration, I mean anti-immigration in the sense of anti-a-certain a certain mix of migrants. The only comparable period, it's not even comparable, but there was a lot of trade union opposition to migration

in the 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, they were successful, the trade unions were successful in getting assisted passage to basically stop in everywhere other than Queensland and Western Australia. And of course, there was opposition to migrants from outside Britain because of the issues we've discussed.

before around maintaining the purity of the white race and around competition for jobs. So the trade unions were the leading opposers of immigration, which is what makes the post-war migration boom under a Labor government so remarkable. And a government with very deep ties to the trade union movement. So that was what was remarkable about that particular period. The arguments about immigration have always been more concerned about. the mix rather than about the level and I'm not sure in the past I'm talking about I'm not sure whether the rallies that we've seen the march for Australia rallies and the rise and support

one nation is an argument about level or a reaction against level and against this idea that migration has been too high since the pandemic and it's pushed up house prices and it's put pressure on congestion and what have you. Is it about that? Is it about that there are too many people of Muslim faiths coming in and they are not integrating into society and there's a number of radical jihadists amongst them and they're causing fractures in Australian society?

So I don't know which. They might be connected to, like, concerns about the level might have have spillover effects for concerns about the mix or something, if that makes sense? Yeah, maybe, but so I'm not sure what it's about, but the levels are clearly coming off. Yeah. And, you know, at least at a superficial level, the kind of high-level indicators in the Scanlon Foundation's annual social cohesion survey still suggests that a very clear majority of Australians who are talking kind of like four and five. are saying we support multiculturalism and we support a diverse intake of migrants.

Which would suggest that the concern is more about the mix. Except they're saying we support the diverse intake. Four and five are saying we support a diverse intake of migrants. Yeah, I say. So I guess they say that and then there's also net negative sentiment about migrants from Muslim backgrounds and migrants from Sudan and Iraq? Yes. So I wonder if you take all that together, then maybe that suggests that the concern is the mix. So I think there is some concern about the mix, but I don't. So I, so the, the only period that I can think of that in recent history

that looks like now is the, the late, the late, the late, the late, the, the late, 1980s and early 1990s. So there's been a question asked in opinion polls since the mid-50s, do you think the level of immigration in Australia is too high, about right or too low? And in almost all years, and almost all polls in all years since that's been conducted from the mid-1950s through to the present, the largest group are people who say it's about right. The second largest group are people who say it's too high and the lowest group is people who say it's too low. There's been only a handful of times where the proportion saying it's too high is greater than the proportion saying it's about right. And there was a prolonged period where that was the case

from around the mid-80s to the late 1990s. And that coincided with it kind of kicked off with Jeffrey Blaney making his remarks about wanting the rate of immigration from Asian nations to slow down. Then John Howard hinting at that in the late 1980s and then Pauline Hanson being elected to the federal parliament in 1996. So there was definitely, it seems to me, a reality. action in the Australian community, some disquiet about the volume of immigration from Asian nations over that period, even though the question was about the level.

Because the migration levels in that period were not high. Unemployment was high, and the immigration intake had become possibly majority Asian, or very close to it majority Asian, from the kind of mid-80s through that period, and I think there was a reaction against that. And I think that that was also partly fundamentally underpinned by a slowdown in the rise in living standards. And when they started to pick up again,

when our little kind of productivity boom happened in the 1990s and we started to see real income gains year on year, I think that and a little bit of similar reaction to what people had had in the 1960s to the wave of migrants from Italy and Greece and just going, well, actually these people are, they're hardworking, they're aspirational, their kids are doing well at school, they seem to be having a go. And I think people probably became a little bit more relaxed about that. over time and that that fell away.

But it looks to me maybe that there is some fracturing around the migrant intake at present and whether it will abate as the level of net overseas migration continues to fall as it looks like it will do, is, I think, still up in the air. At least until Bondi, my explanation for the increasing negative sentiment towards immigration had been three causes attach a roughly equal weighting to each, so a third, a third, a third, for want of better evidence. The first one was the stagnation in living standards, contributing to the kind of zero-sum mindset. And as you know, as you know, from studying history, the first scapegoat in that situation is

usually immigrants. Second cause was the perceptions of a loss of control after the post-COVID surge and net migration. And then the third, which I think is the most underrated, is negative mood contagion from the United States and the United Kingdom. And we forget that we don't have an autonomous media ecosystem anymore. Everyone's on the same Twitter, everyone's on the same YouTube. All the Australian influences are following Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and people kind of just copy and paste the same talking points. The immigration debate is very different over there because of the issues with illegal

immigration that they have, which we don't really. And yeah, I think that kind of seeps into the Australian debate. So I'm not going to dim you all from any of that. I think that sounds plausible to me. I know lots of people are going to try and push me on questions like this about my book, but it is a work of history, and I'm not a commentator, or I don't want to be a commentator, about current issues and less than the extent that there are lessons from history

that might be useful. It's difficult to know what, a, how a government might reconcile having a racial discrimination act, a non-discriminatory visa policy, and how you might square that with some preferences around adjusting the mix. I don't know how you can do that without giving up one of those things. Yeah. And that means that you are returning to something that is discriminatory by ethnicity or race or cultural background, faith or something. And, you know, we've said since 1973 we're not doing that.

But if that's being entertained, then that means opening up those debates and, you know, And I can't imagine that's going to be pretty. Yeah. So to finish on some more big picture questions, but these ones aren't related to culture, are there particular periods in Australian history where immigration has made a large difference to living standards, either positively or negatively?

So I think the way I think about this is that there are times when if we had not had large intakes of immigration, we would have had headwinds. We would have just hit capacity. We would have been operating at full capacity and not being able to meet demand without inducing more supply. So that's one thing. And I think that we'd probably talk about the 9.

It's an example of that. The other thing, so I do not buy the argument that some people buy, that migration increases productivity. I just do not find the evidence on that at all persuasive. And I think there's, I think there's two mistakes that are made by people who talk about, how migration lifts living standards. So one is that a lot of the gain that appears in the modelling is an artefact of the age composition of the migrants being heavily skewed young.

And that gives you a lift in your participation rate that you otherwise would not have had, which manifests itself in a higher GDP per capita than you otherwise would not have had, but it's simply a function of the age of the migrants, not of their skill. And then the second one is I don't think the kind of people who advocate these things try to work through the general equilibrium

resolution of bringing in larger numbers of bringing in larger numbers of skilled migrants in terms of how that plays out over time into the occupational composition of employment. So at the margin, you feel all of your intake was skilled and it was all clustered in one occupation, engineers or something like that. It's obviously those people coming in are not all going to be employed as engineers. So how does the intake alter the over time, the occupational composition of employment relative to what it otherwise would have been?

I'm not convinced that it makes the overall composition more highly skilled. I just think there's a lot of shuffling in the queue for different jobs. jobs. And in a sense, this has always been the case with first-generation migrants. They pay a penalty, even international students pay a penalty for not having been born in Australia. And they accept job offers that are inferior to what they would prefer and are inferior to what Australia. an otherwise identical Australian-born person receives, and those effects tend to wash out by the time you get to the next generation. So the thing I dislike about the discussions about migration in Australia is they, even the analysts tend to be advocates. Well, they're either anti or pro. We don't really have anybody like George Borjas. I guess we had Bob Beryl for a while. who was an analyst who thought that the immigration intakes generally were too high.

He was probably our equivalent to George Boulas. But most of the people who work on migration in Australia are a little too selective in the way in which they talk about evidence. Yeah, no doubt. So do you agree with Ian McLean that on net migration, probably hasn't mattered for Australian living standards. It's certainly mattered for Australian GDP, but it hasn't really changed living standards. So we don't get to run,

you can't run cat of fatals, but that's partly the argument I was making earlier on about Sweden and Belgium. So it's possible that our living standards might not be as high as they presently are, but materially I'm not sure that it's going to be that great. Yeah. A difference.

So I agree with Ian McLean. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So I have this framework in my head for thinking about our ability to accept immigrants. And I think you could think of like three constraints on. immigration the first is like the carrying capacity of the continent and maybe that's like a stock concept the second is the economy's ability to absorb

migrants and maybe that's like a flow concept and then the third is like the rate of acculturation of migrants to the mainstream and vice versa if you if you think that that's a good framework if you look back over Australian history which which of those three constraints do you think has tended to be the and constraint. So that's a hard question around. So I think it's probably important to say that up until 1950, migration wasn't managed in the way in which we think about it now.

The only way, the only real two ways the government managed migration was through the volume of assisted migrant, assisted passage, which tend to do move in line with the economic cycle and by constraining the mix through the Immigration Restriction Act. So it's not until the 1950s that you start to see technocratic discussions about the level of of immigration and what's optimal. And at least on the economist side, it was about capital investment keeping pace with population growth. So it's a pace argument rather than a carrying capacity argument.

The first kind of period where you see a carrying capacity, argument come to the fore is in the early 1970s when it became fattish to advocate for zero population growth and so as an early early manifestation of the Greens and the Democrats I think were advocating zero population in the early 1970s and you started to get the first environmentalists arguing on carrying capacity grounds that Australia's population couldn't go past a certain level.

And then you have, I use this story that I heard Ken Henry tell when I was in the immigration department about a discussion he had on carrying capacity between him and Kevin Rudd. After Kevin Rudd became Prime Minister, and

it's such a good story and I couldn't use it in my book until I found out that Ken Henry had told that story on your podcast and so I've used it and it's a great story because there's this confusion between Rudd and Henry about the number and Ken Henry says he thinks the optimal optimal size of Australia's population, given the way it manages its resources and so on at the time, was 15 million people. Which is kind of a crazy thing to say, right?

Because Australia's population at the time was, I think, was 21 million, and Rudd misheard him and thought he'd said 50 million, and Rudd said, great, that's exactly what I thought, 50 million. So it's, I mean, I guess Ken Henry was trying to pull him up to make him think seriously about what kind of country would look like if it had a population of 50 million versus 15 million. But I don't think we've had a proper discussion, really. There's been various attempts over time to kind of integrate a discussion

around population policy and immigration policy, and they've always fallen over. They've probably always fallen over because of the vested interests in maintaining relatively high immigration intake. Yeah. So on that, Peter McDonald told me that as far as he's aware, the post-mour migration program is the only time a country in history has had an explicit population plan.

That is to say, a target of we want to get to 20 million and we're going to do it by growing migration. this much migration and this much natural increase. It's hard to verify that, but does that check out with you? So I think the idea of the 20 million population target fell away very quickly after World War II and what drove high immigration levels was labour demand fundamentally and every year. So I don't think there was a population. plan as opposed to an annual process under the auspices of the Immigration Planning Council

advising the minister on what the right level of immigration ought to be in any given year. There was a couple of times where they came up with a five-year plan. I think there was one published in the late 1950s. And there's been various attempts by different expert advisors the government on immigration to try to get them to agree to a longer-term migration planning framework, which is de facto becomes a population policy if you accept that, at least on the natural increase side, demography is destiny. And things change, but there's a fair bit of constancy. So your migration policy becomes a de facto immigration policy. So beyond the 1% 1%-7%, 70,000 people a year target.

I mean, Peter might be true that it's not been done in any other country. The 1% target was only met for a handful of years in the 1950s because there was a pretty high outflow, which wasn't being factored into thinking properly. And that got called out by the Vernon Committee report in 1965, which said, if this is your target, you haven't met it for the last. decade and we think it's too high a target anyhow they wanted 0.9%. Yet there's been, as I said, various attempts to try to get governments to think about

whether a long-term planning framework on immigration, migration is a good thing to do, but I can't think of any governments that have really kind of gone, yes, we'll do that, partly because they don't really like having decisions that bind them. They don't really like having technocrats tell them what the decisions are. You see the way the treasurer bristles every month, when the reserve bank, or every eight times a year about the reserve bank setting interest rates, and they would much rather have the flexibility of adapting according to according to circumstance.

So would it be a good thing on balance? It probably would be better for there to be a bit more certainty. It might help state governments do better planning around infrastructure and so on. It might help with making the public feel more confident that immigration is being managed well. But it's not going to happen until, there's some kind of re-imagination of what a migration program looks like that factors in the level of temporary migration into its thinking and that considers use of capping the number of temporary migration visas

in any given period and factors in a period of time under. which people can remain as a temporary migrant in Australia. Yeah. So final question, could we just pull together a list of some of the things that makes Australian immigration history exceptional relative to other settler countries? So we've just spoken about the fact that maybe Australia is the only country to have had a population plan.

It was also, I think, the first country in the world to have a dedicated Department of Immigration what are some other things that stand out to you as unique about Australian immigration history, again, relative to other settler societies? So we're the only country that's done a sister passage on scale. Yeah. Right? That's, I don't think many people know that it goes back to the 1830s. Yeah.

Right? And I think the rough magnitude is about three and a half million. people came to Australia whose fare was either fully subsidised or generously subsidised, who otherwise probably wouldn't have come. Some of them would have come anyhow and had their fare paid for them, but a fair number of them didn't. So no other country did that on the scale in which Australia did over such a long period of time.

That's probably in many ways more fundamental than having a dedicated immigration department. English language training where Australia was the first country in the world to offer offer that. She said it started in kind of baby steps in the late started on board ships actually. And in the camps in Europe. And in no, was it in the camps in Europe?

It was definitely on board ships and it was in the camps in Australia like Bonagilla. I don't know whether any other countries have an equivalent to SBS TV and and ethnic radio. There was, I mean, possibly they do in Canada, I'm not sure.

But that's, that's been something that Australia's done. The Australia got a kind of first jump on exploiting the opportunity for people from developing countries to obtain an educational

qualification from a developed country. we were so in absolute terms i think australia ranks third behind the united states and the united kingdom but we have a much smaller population so on a per head basis we've been first in the world for a long long time i'm not sure if i'm missing anything we were the first to do mandatory detention for unlawful non-citizens so we haven't discussed this at all we could go for another hour on the question of Australia's treatment of refugees. I'm not sure whether we were the first or not, but it is a fascinating history with lots of suffering involved on the parts of many people about mandatory detention. And particularly, I think, what was notable, I tell this story

about the cycle of history moving quickly, that a mining camp, that was set up, I think it was a BHP camp, but it could have been a Rio Tinto camp, but I think it was a BHP camp in Port Headland being requisitioned to house 21 Cambodian asylum seekers who'd come on a boat and had been held in Villawood for a couple of years. And they were sent to Port Headland

because they would be out of the way of lawyers. That's why they were sent there. and it's no coincidence that almost all of those camps were set up in areas where it was very difficult for for lawyers to go and for the public to protest and, you know, people were treated in really inhumane ways in those, they were treated as prisoners and they hadn't committed any offence. I guess one other thing that makes us exceptional is the highest share of overseas born in our population among our city countries. It's not quite that there's some funny wrinkles. Oh, is it Luxembourg that beats us or something? Luxembourg, Switzerland's about up there. Yeah, true.

Israel. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you could say like for a country with a population larger than 10 million or something, we've got the highest. Well, so I think, I mean, everyone thinks, so the US, if we do it the comparison with the US, the US has 50 or million people in it who are born outside of there. And they, it's more than any other country in the world in terms of the volume of migrants they have. And there they make up about 15% of the population, whereas in Australia, I think it's now nudging 32. and it will, given what's happening,

even with a much reduced immigration intake, it's still going to be rising because it's going to outweigh natural increase. So it will continue to drift upwards. Somebody's done some modelling. It might even be in Alan Manning's new book, and he says Australia's going to come out somewhere in the 40s, 40%, which, you know, it hasn't been since probably,

about the 1870s, 1880s. Wow. Yeah. Do you know when? We'll hit that? No. I mean, you could do some back-of-the-envalupe calculations, but I haven't bothered to try and do that.

But it's high, right? It's high. And there's no slowing down in the appetite of people who wish to come to Australia. I think one of the things that is intrigues me, because it goes partly of this question about living standards and partly about who benefits from migration, is if you weight the migration intake by the incomes of the countries from which they come, that weighted average figure has not altered since the 1970s.

and world incomes, average world incomes, have more than doubled in that time. So that means that our intake is increasingly coming from poorer countries. This feels important, but I don't know what to make of it. It feels important, but I don't know what to make of it too because, you know, by and large those people who are coming are coming through skill channels, or they're coming as through as spouse of skilled migrants.

So they've been vetted on their occupations and vetted on their educational qualifications and vetted on their English proficiency. And they're, you know, many of them are doing as other migrants have done. They're either succeeding in their preferred jobs or they're doing well in their less preferred jobs, but they're making sure their kids are doing really well. So, yeah, I mean, what do you think we should make of it?

That fact, that we're increasingly taking people from poorer countries. I think that's probably true for other countries besides Australia. That, you know, in the aggregate, the overall picture is 4% of the people in the world are living in countries in which they were not born. So 96% people are. But in Australia it's about 32%. So it's kind of eight hundred times. Well, you know, eight times that 4%. So it's a huge magnitude difference.

But in the OECD countries, that 4% becomes about 15, it's been rising. Yeah. And rising in all OECD countries. And I think, you know, people like Heinz has, who analyzes these kind of movements, would say you have this kind of development hump where people in very poor countries

don't have the resources or wherewithal to migrate. and people in rich countries don't need to migrate, but it's the countries in the middle of those. So you get this inverted you shape about the propensity to migrate from given countries, and that's more of the world now, is in that hump, and have the wherewithal to get to OECD countries.

And OECD countries have been since the 1990s, as in Australia, liberalising the opportunities for people to migrate to their countries as workers and as students and the pressures for them to continue to do so because of population ageing are going to remain high. So it's hard to see that tension that exists in almost all OEC countries over migration dissipating because there's this economic need to find workers to do jobs that locals don't want to do and just to help them manage their shrinking

otherwise their participation rates would come off. And we haven't not seen that in Australia, which has been interesting and surprising in many ways. but we will eventually without continuing to have moderate to high levels of immigration. Yeah. All right. Let's leave you there. This has been great.

Thanks, Mark. Okay, thank you. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, you can support the show by leaving a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or by subscribing on YouTube. Thanks to this episode sponsors, you can find them in the episode description. and thanks to Bill Manos and the Manos Foundation for their generous patronage of the show. If you'd like to become a sponsor or patron, you can go to j-nwpod.com slash sponsor

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