Interstate migration: behind the headlines

The graph also shows the recent increase in net interstate migration to Brisbane which has the media and boosters excited, but it also shows this isn’t anything to get overheated about yet compared with previous “booms.”

The question that needs to be asked about all this is: is net migration a good thing? To me that depends. If population growth is fuelled by migration of lower skilled, limited resources migrants, that puts a strain on the receiving economy, because they consume more services than they contribute to (at least in the early years). But the arrival of highly skilled migrants with financial resources can contribute sooner. This is what happened in the late 1980s and early 1990s – interstate migrants came with a full-time job waiting for them, and surplus cash from the arbitrage of their house sale in Sydney or Melbourne.

What happens next after extended Covid city-wide lockdowns will be interesting. The 2032 Olympics lure and the jobs that could accompany it could see numbers to the SEQ Region lift in the medium to long term. But as with all things Covid, the question of what happens next is a lot of guesswork.

If you want to explore all the data yourself, you can download the raw numbers from the ABS website here: https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/regional-internal-migration-estimates-provisional/latest-release#data-download