More ‘good people’ needed to tackle our population debate

September 4, 2025 — 5.00am

If the hard-learned political lesson of the post-Tampa years was the imperative for any government to keep control of our borders, the lesson of how to restore trust in our broader migration program hasn’t quite sunk in.

Although it was difficult on Sunday to see past the neo-Nazis and COVID cranks and other assembled conspiracists to spot Anthony Albanese’s “good people,” as he described them, there isn’t much point starting this column from the assumption that everyone who “marched for ’straya” is an irredeemable racist.

Former high-ranking public servant Martin Parkinson has been blunt in his criticisms of how Australia manages and communicates its population growth.Credit: Louie Douvis

Let’s instead assume that between Thomas Sewell – the jack-booted, mustachioed leader of the National Socialist Network arrested this week – and sovereign citizens fanboying suspected cop killer Dezi Freeman – there were thousands of protesters who took to the streets of Melbourne and Sydney without hate in their hearts but sincere concerns about how fast our country is growing.

They have good reason to feel this way.

As former Australian public service boss Martin Parkinson found when he reviewed the migration system two years ago, the failure of successive governments to articulate what our migration polices are trying to achieve and to shift a narrow policy discussion about the permanent migration intake to a more pertinent one about population growth, has done us no favours.

Parkinson’s blunt conclusion was that the migration system was broken and no longer fit for purpose.

Crowds board a tram in Melbourne.Credit: Bloomberg

The heat and spittle in Sunday’s protests suggests the fix offered so far by the Albanese government – a soft cap on international student numbers, greater protections for workers on temporary visas and fine-tuning of the skills we are trying to import and types of visas on offer – hasn’t sorted all the problems.

Albanese’s good people are not dills. They understand that Australia and particularly, its three big eastern seaboard cities, are growing at a rate no one planned for and beyond the capacity of stretched public services to accommodate. They know what uncontrolled population growth looks like because this is the story of 21st century Australia.

When Peter Costello tabled the federal government’s first Intergenerational Report in 2003, treasury projected that by 2042, Australia’s population would reach 25.3 million people. Instead, we reached that milestone in 2018. Our best guess missed the mark by 24 years.

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According to the latest Intergenerational Report, published in the same year as Parkinson’s migration review, Australia by 2042 will be a country of 35 million people. Of course, that assumes we are better now at forecasting population growth than we were at the start of the century.

If you compare the 94-page, 2003 Intergenerational Report with the 276-page edition published in 2023, it seems the only thing growing faster than our population is the verbosity of government. All those extra words and yet so little clarity about an issue that is critical to our future prosperity, quality of life and social cohesion.

Australia hasn’t had a national population policy since the end of the Whitlam government and our leading demographers are not convinced this is necessarily what we need.

If we did have a population policy, its aims would be difficult to reconcile with a net gain of nearly 1 million people between July 2022 and June 2024 – even in the context of a post-COVID correction – and a settlement pattern which, in Victoria, crams nearly 9 out of 10 new arrivals into a capital city more crowded than the Labor back bench.

As of June 30 last year, Melbourne was a city of 5.56 million, having added 142,600 people over the previous 12 months. The Australian Bureau of Statistics population clock tells us Victoria has more than 7 million residents today and by the end of this decade, will be pushing 8 million.

These numbers are not driven by the annual, permanent migration intake, the latest target which was announced on Tuesday by Immigration Minister Tony Burke. As Parkinson and others have identified, our population growth is largely a product of temporary migration by people who come here to work or study.

Their visas are temporary but, so long as more people in their circumstances keep coming, the increased demand on housing, health and transport is permanent. This is why, no matter how much the state government borrows to build new roads, rail lines, schools and hospitals, it can’t keep up.

The federal government recognises this and its decision to limit new international student enrolments below their pre-COVID peak is a significant move to bring to heel a runaway trade. But it is fearful that if it slams the brakes on temporary migration our economy will end up in a ditch.

On Sunday, Albanese’s good people marched in horrid company. In Melbourne, they marched quite literally to the beat of neo-Nazi drums, surrounded by people who, in the words of Liberal MP Andrew Hastie, went down a rabbit hole sometime during the pandemic and never came out.

Did they recognise Thomas Sewell, at the front of the march, as Australia’s most notorious neo-Nazi? Did they appreciate that some of their fellow protesters have a disturbed level of sympathy for Freeman and none for the two good police officers he allegedly gunned down?

Whether good people or bad, they weren’t in a good place on Sunday. It is no place for good people marching behind Sewell and his black-shirted goons. It is no place for good people to be marching behind white supremacists in Sydney or Pauline Hanson in Canberra.

There are serious problems with our migration system and Australia’s rate of population growth. It shouldn’t be left to racists and cranks to point this out.

Chip Le Grand is state political editor.

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