ANU Migration Hub – immigration gaslighter of the year

"First of its kind in this region", ANU Migration Hub is led by Aotearoa expat Alan Gamlen. Itconvenes leading experts to "share knowledge, collect evidence, question assumptions, and inform solutions to major challenges concerning the movement of people."

It's a migration lobby, right?

Scarcely an orphan, among the shoals of pro-migration "stakeholders" inside Australian politics and bureaucracy, states and cities, industry and developers, media, universities and unions, think tanks and interest groups.

Like its troubled federal "research university" parent, the Hub enjoys good access, to Canberra corridors of government and officialdom. Including Home Affairs.

Australian immigration has gone off the charts since 2022, as the "Friday the Thirteenth" December 2024 ABS release now reconfirms. Nearly one million in net-migration, in two years flat. Almost doubling, the lofty two-year mark posted by Kevin "Big Australia" Rudd.

In Hub world, what's happened looks quite different. After five years of "disruption", the pandemic may have left a lingering "shortfall" in immigration.

And "contrary to claims of record-high migration, Australia is still far from catching up to the levels of migration that, in the pre-pandemic world, we expected to have had by now."

The brief itself

The Hub policy brief of 4 December is pitched as "evidence-based" expertise for Australia. It's called When will migration levels return to 'normal'? The answer seems too obvious – never – but let's try not to jump the gun.

Author Gamlen claims to adduce the three "main Australian methods being used to define normal [migration]". His first method uses June 2019 as the immigration baseline, while the second adopts a 2020 Treasury scenario, and the third extrapolates the 2013-19 trend.

Employing these three methods, he claims a net-migration "shortfall" via the pandemic of 445,000 ranging to 508,000, and a "rebound to date [March 2024]" of 340,000-425,000. Plus, a "projected remaining rebound [to March 2025]" of 86,000-132,000.

Under the third method, the author expects to see migration to return to "normal" by early to mid 2025. By then "Australia will have accumulated a net-migration shortfall of 82,000 [508,000 – (340,000 + 86,000)] over five-plus years of pandemic disruption". Under the first and second methods, the shortfall becomes a small "excess".

Disliking the net migration (arrivals minus departures) measure, he also resorts to the (deservedly) less common measure of total migration (arrivals plus departures).