Clare O'Neil review greenlights huge migration - gaslights huge reform

Once you excise family dependents, purported "skilled workers" are much less than half of our permanent or net migration tallies. That's unlikely to change. Plenty of Labor's post-COVID immigration deluge lies in poorly-regulated overseas student visas.

But this review sees trees not forest. Sure, O'Neil didn't want it examining Treasury targets. Yet how you can ignore them? If to deliver her "holistic" strategy.

It's as if: Step 1: At great cost, turbo-charge migration. Step 2: Make like, Step 1 never happened. Step 3: Time to fix the broken migration system.

That's ridiculous. Like shutting the stable door after converting the horse to petfood. To really fix the system, start from much lower migration.

For the nth time, Treasury and not Home Affairs, is the ultimate overlord of immigration. For years now, their Budgets have set these huge migration targets. Innocent "forecasts" in Treasury-speak. Insulated from voter opinion. Invisible in the Treasurer's speech.

How does Parkinson handle this larrikin Aussie tradition? He simply denies it. In a colossal report with 11 "reform directions" and 38 "supporting measures".

His first direction is, "develop a clear migration strategy". With four motherhood measures.

Second comes "redefine how Australia defines the size and composition of the migration program". The genius measure here is, "plan migration, based on net overseas migration". This zinger was also at point 82 of Albanese's election platform.

As they both well know, here's what Treasury already does: Plan population, based on net overseas migration.

But this report delinks our "slowest in 60 years" productivity growth from the addictive population growth. Its headline is "migration has boosted productivity".

Under "better target permanent skilled visas", key measures offered are "revisit the allocation of places" and "recalibrate the points test".

Eleven measures go to "temporary skilled migration". The devil's in the detail. Sure, let us "rely on Job and Skills Australia…remove labour market testing...increase the Temporary Skilled Migration Income Threshold…adopt risk-based regulation".