Australia lacks a coherent national approach to planning where settlement and growth happens. It's time to take stock of our cities and regions and work together to improve outcomes across the nation.
Many skilled migrants in South Australia have found themselves in a classic Catch-22 situation – they can’t get local experience because they don’t have local experience.
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Australia's skilled migration program simply isn't working the way it is supposed to.
More by luck than design, recent recent levels of immigration seem to be in a ‘goldilocks zone’ that balances economic, social and environmental objectives.
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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.
The Morrison government’s population plan looks to reduce the concentration of growth in the big cities and to raise the benefit-cost ratio of population change more broadly.
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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.
Current levels of population growth become a problem for Australians when investment in infrastructure like public transport fails to keep up.
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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.
The Morrison government is but the latest to indulge in the policy fantasy of redirecting population growth to regional Australia.
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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 are conflicted about whether the population should continue to grow and what the population of the future should look like.
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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.