This 'Jobs and Skills' Summit is sending us straight back onto the Big Australia hamster wheel

SPA offers the standard retort, that every single migrant incurs a fresh $100,000 in infrastructure needs. Largely shouldered by state-local governments, and not considered in the federal Budget as it ought to be.

Remember, the economy well survived Morrison's locked border. Australians enjoyed bumper employment, if not wage rises.

So, before we rev up the hamster wheel once again, how about we "address barriers to Australians undertaking and completing training" or "finding entry-level jobs"? For SPA and others, continually "importing nurses and teachers" is no answer to lousy pay and conditions.

There's the rub. The Issues Paper recycles dubious promises made by John Howard and Kim Beazley back in 2005. When they first signed off on humungous immigration, under the handy cover of a mining boom.

So, this year's lame excuse, for the nth time, is that mass migration will "complement, not substitute" local training. Yeah right. We've all seen how that movie ends.

Local training remains ditched and dateless, as cut-price migration marries off to gleeful employers. Include here, the returning droves of students, with bigly expanded work rights and seeking residence.

Our reductionist Treasury, though fully responsible for our population policy, is still allowed to largely bypass the electoral and environmental considerations. So wrong.

That Treasury still welcomes raw GDP growth. Never mind if it's pumped more by population than productivity. Love that hamster wheel.

Re population, big decisions may or may not come from the Summit itself. In any event, the crux is not "permanent" migration, already near-certain to hit a new record. It's how Treasurer Chalmers plays net migration. That's the key number, when estimating population growth.

Over 2020-2022, then Opposition Leader Albanese said nothing in reply, as Treasurer Frydenberg's Budgets targeted net migration in the mid to high 200,000s. Following which, predictably, Liberal and Labor kept their mass migration memorandum well away from the election contest.

Albanese has no mandate, for his making sky-high immigration the No 1 policy priority. Check this motherhood in the Labor platform :

The size and composition of Australia's migration intake will take into account net overseas migration, its effects on employment and training opportunities for Australian residents…