Should Australia accept 2 million migrants over five years?
Australian Entrepreneur Dick Smith says Australia would “be crazy” to accept an explosive surge of 2 million migrants over five years, as suggested by government advisors to NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet.
NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet said the he “believes in a big NSW”, after his top bureaucrats proposed an “explosive” surge of two million migrants.
It has been revealed that this “top-secret, politically sensitive” advice was part of an incoming briefing document prepared by the Department of Premier and Cabinet, and submitted to Mr Perrottet when he took up the NSW Premier position.
Mr Perrottet said he had already discussed immigration with Josh Frydenberg last year, around catching up some of those numbers lost during the pandemic.
However, he also said the first priority was bringing home stranded Australians “who are double vaccinated” paving the way for international students, crucial to the NSW economy.
In 2018, Mr Perrottet, the NSW Treasurer at the time, wrote an opinion piece arguing against “extraordinarily high rates of immigration”, saying:
- Merely adding more people isn’t a sustainable economic strategy”.
- We can’t pretend that high immigration comes without a cost, and we believe growth should not impose an unfair burden on those already here.
- Excessively rapid growth puts downward pressure on wages and upward pressure on housing prices, both of which have sorely stung workers and aspiring homeowners in Sydney and other parts of NSW for a decade.
- It also means more people on trains, more cars, more students in our schools and more patients at hospitals.
- Even if the NSW population stayed at today’s level, it would take time to complete the work so that our communities could be more liveable, our commute times more manageable, and our schools and hospitals more capable of offering exceptional care rather than just coping.
- Instead, extraordinarily high rates of immigration risk pushing those outcomes beyond our grasp.
From my reading of this it seems that the NSW Premier, Mr Perrottet, is not overly keen on very high levels of immigration.