Former immigration minister Philip Ruddock says declining job market should see cut to migrant intake

April 15, 2015

(Translation of this article appears in Arabic section)

A former senior federal government minister has called for a cut to the migrant intake due to the worsening job market.

Highly respected Liberal MP Philip Ruddock, who was immigration minister from 1996 to 2003, said there was falling demand for skilled migrants and fewer jobs available for less qualified family reunion arrivals.

“It’s all right to talk about high levels of family reunion, but what you’re talking about is a population that’s going to be highly welfare-dependent,” he said, adding Australia’s international competitiveness had decreased as had our job-creation capacity.

“I would suspect the overall migration program ought to, in those terms ... be coming off,” he told the Herald Sun.

Mr Ruddock made the comments after he was alerted to a speech he made in 2000 when official projections suggested that Australia’s population would reach about 24 million by 2050, including 4.5 million in Melbourne.

Just 15 years later, those population targets have almost been reached and experts now predict on current trends the nation could have 40 million people by 2050, with Melbourne almost 8 million.

Mr Ruddock said in the speech that he expected annual net overseas migration to average out at 80,000 over the long run, but the figure actually reached about 300,000 in 2008 and has been well over 200,000 since then.

Mr Ruddock blamed later Labor governments for allowing family reunion.

“What happens is, if you take your eye off integrity you find that people use family migration for backdoor entry,” he said on Wednesday.

“If you’re bringing here people who have never worked, never contributed, who are going to draw benefits, the community asks should we be paying benefits to them?”

Low migration advocate, federal Labor MP Kelvin Thomson, said: “The effects on cities like Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane will be very adverse — declining housing affordability, traffic congestion and lack of open space.”

Our greater focus on skilled, educated, English speaking migrants within the permanent migration program has contributed to this structural shift.