Why Treasury migration forecasts matter, and why they’re unconscionably high

Routinely, governments declare, we've got a fix, for these self-inflicted crushes. Behold then the Alan Tudge scheme to channel booming population away from big cities. Finally now, our stressed infrastructure will be able to 'catch up'. Postwar history undermines such claims. As government itself says, few nations are so urbanised. An unyielding 40 per cent of the population occupies two sprawling and increasingly unequal cities.

When taken as normal, a 37 million in Australia by 2050 skates around unsustainable land clearing, habitat loss, water consumption, and greenhouse emissions. Yet the official Sydney and Melbourne urban plans both take as read a future 8 million. These 'vibrant' mega-city vistas are geared to elite economic interests. Not to the ordinary people.

Never mind the Canberra bubble. Focus on the population bubble. As government prolongs it, so also they prolong the implausible 'congestion busting' and 'decentralisation' fixes. Thus might they perpetuate ourhouses and holes (consumption and extractive) economy and its iron-coal-and-students trade. Net migration would better serve the national interest and the voter preferences, if managed at more like its 1980s-1990s levels.

In conclusion

Net migration, the Treasury population lever, is adjusted with little explanation or scrutiny. 21st century government has more than doubled it. Political parties defend this as normal:

• though the permanent migration 'cap' would eventually bite into the migration 'net', the latter remains the best year-on-year measure of our true migration levels;
• the net migration tally renders more visible the habitual boosts to immigration, not for the welfare of residents, but for the sake of 'GDP growth' and the Big Australia lobby;
• Treasury's high-migration assumptions scaffold this GDP growth. Dismissing environmental cautions, ratcheting population continues to prop up sputtering GDP;
• net migration is geared to 270,000, a high exceeded once before, with population growth at 1.7 per cent, last observed in 2013. It makes a mockery of 'congestion busting';
• the true migration and population plans, despite their importance to voters, are by party consent absent from politics. Thus, they default to the Treasurer and Treasury; and
• post-election, Labor continues to brand as a high-migration party, contesting if anything refugee and asylum policy - not every commentator can fathom the electoral logic of this.