Australia's skilled migration program simply isn't working the way it is supposed to.
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Articles on population policy
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Immigration is neither the problem nor solution in many areas where Australia is off-track, from government debt to environmental action.
Population growth has pros and cons, and the Morrison government's plan is less about a change in immigration numbers than about increasing the benefits and minimising the costs.
Population growth in Australia is a problem mainly because of the lack of a coherent national policy to manage it. The focus needs to be on maintaining quality of life through sustainable growth.
Efforts by governments to redirect population growth to regional Australia have never worked. Even if such policies could be made to work, they probably wouldn't be worth the costs.
Many people think a population policy is about control – like the one-child policy in China, for instance. But modern population policies are about population-well-being.
Top contributors
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Demographer, ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods, Australian National University
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John Daley is a Friend of The Conversation.
Chief Executive Officer, Grattan Institute
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Professor and Demographer, Macquarie University
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Associate Professor, UNSW
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Professor of Environmental Geography, School of Biological Earth and Environmental Sciences, UNSW
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Associate, Grattan Institute
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Researcher, UNSW
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Senior Research Fellow, South Australian Centre for Economic Studies, University of Adelaide
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Adjunct Fellow, University of Adelaide
