The System Is Out of Control

It’s the issue already breaking Britain and the US – and Australia isn’t far behind. The latest data only turns up the heat down here.

That issue is mass immigration.

In Britain, it’s causing riots. And in the US, it’s dominating the presidential campaign. In both countries, it’s widely associated with lawlessness and violence, mostly due to the massive cohort of illegal immigrants swarming across the Channel and the Rio Grande.

In Australia at least, thanks to the Howard and Abbott governments, illegal immigration is mostly – for now – under control. But legal immigration is completely out of control, thanks to an open-ended migration system and a greedy university sector determined to cram in as many Chinese and Indian students as a fleet of 747s can carry.

As a result, Australia has the second-highest population growth in the developed world, just behind Ireland (where IRA and Ulstermen have joined forces to protest). It’s higher than many African countries.

And it’s driven entirely by immigration.

Almost two million international migrants – more than the current population of South Australia – have arrived in Australia since the end of Covid restrictions in late 2021.

The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show the nation’s population has pushed past the 27 million mark, growing by 615,300 people or 2.3 per cent in the year to March 31. The March quarter alone had a population increase of 164,600.

Migration outweighs natural increase by five times: 83 per cent of population growth is from migration.

And the Albanese government is completely useless.

While the Albanese government’s May budget had projected NOM at 395,000 for the 2023–24 financial year, the total for the first three quarters to March is 388,000, indicating there will be a significant overshoot. The budget NOM forecast for 2024–25 is 260,000.

Opposition immigration spokesman Dan Tehan said annual migration was on track to be beyond 400,000 for the second year in a row, and could even reach 500,000.

“The Prime Minister needs to explain where all these people are going to live,” Mr Tehan said. “Australians are experiencing a housing and rental crisis, but the Prime Minister seems to be unaware.

“Labor kept their plans for a Big Australia secret before the election, and Australians are living with the consequences.”

Labor are blaming the ‘system we inherited’: which begs the question of why, after two-and-a-half years in government, they’ve done nothing to fix it. Instead, they’re running a system where the answer to the question, ‘How many migrants can come here?’ is ‘As many as they want.’

The existence of multiple open-ended visa classes and the Department of Home Affairs acting essentially as administrators, subject to ministerial directions, mean that the numbers entering the country each year are largely unconstrained. This is subject to the speed at which the public servants can process the visa applications.

But the incoming Labor government obliged by significantly ramping up departmental resources – a decision taken by then home affairs minister Clare O’Neil – to quickly allow in more migrants, particularly international students […]

For all the carry-on about wanting to reduce the migrant intake, it is obvious that the government doesn’t really want to see the numbers significantly lower. It’s how GDP has continued to grow while per capita GDP has gone backwards for six quarters in a row. We may be avoiding a technical recession but so what: living standards are falling.

Universities are addicted to migrants posing as international students (very few ever leave), because the full fees they pay are a river of gold. Witness the lengths universities went to, during the pandemic, to work around supposedly closed borders. We already know that foreign students with meagre-to-no English are dragging down results – it only adds insult to injury that so many are rampant cheats.

At the University of Sydney, 999 of 1259 cases (close to 80 per cent) of student misconduct received by the Student Affairs Unit in 2023 identified student visa holders as respondents. That’s more than 10 times the number of cases for domestic students […]

Separate 2023 academic integrity data released by the university revealed almost 100 per cent of exam misconduct referrals to the Student Affairs Unit involved international students – with 616 relating to undergraduate students and 265 to postgraduate students.

All that cheating comes with a high cost.

Sydney University’s misconduct report noted “each of these cases requires significant time and effort to prepare notices of alleged misconduct and conduct investigations”, and required the university to engage more casual case managers and investigators to adjust to the “unprecedented demand”.

Experts who spoke to the Australian said the cost of a university engaging a solicitor to investigate individual academic misconduct cases could be between $1500 and $5000, depending on the complexity of the matter.

With typical shamelessness, though, the international student industry claim this only proves we need more foreign students.

Herman Chan, principal advocate at Academic Appeal Specialist […] said the recent policy on limiting the number of international students at Australia’s elite universities “might push talented students to choose other countries, like the UK or the US, and leave Australia with lower-quality applicants”.

On the other hand, putting the brakes on such an obvious grift would help solve a lot of problems, not least the housing crisis.