Australia’s immigration levels have soared to a new record high – months after Prime Minister Scott Morrison promised to slow down the rate of population growth.
In 2018, a record 832,560 permanent and long-term migrants decided to call Australia home, marking a 7.1 per cent increase compared with 2017.
With the number of people leaving Australia for good taken into account, the nation’s annual net immigration rate stood at 291,250, the highest in four-and-a-half years.
The vast majority of new arrivals settled in already overcrowded Sydney and Melbourne.
The new figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics come just three months after Mr Morrison, a former immigration minister, promised to reduce the immigration rate.
‘They are saying: enough, enough, enough,’ the Prime Minister told the Project Sydney Bradfield Oration in November last year.
‘The roads are clogged, the buses and trains are full. The schools are taking no more enrolments.
‘I hear what you are saying. I hear you loud and clear. That’s why we need to improve how we manage population growth in this country.’
Mr Morrison, who was treasurer before taking over as Prime Minister in August, stressed however that population growth had ‘played a key role in our economic success’.
While Australia has not been in recession since 1991, Australia’s net annual immigration rate hovered around the 70,000 mark during the last decade of the 20th century.
Net immigration numbers soared above 100,000 in 2002 when John Howard was Liberal Prime Minister and surpassed the 200,000 mark in 2012 under Labor’s Julia Gillard.
In August last year, Australia’s population surpassed the 25 million milestone, 22 years earlier than predicted in the federal government’s first inter-generational report of 2002.
The 2018 permanent migration intake of 832,560, before long-term departures were factored in, dwarfed the 539,000 intake for the 2016-17 financial year, which was then a record.
Source:
