One of my politics lecturers in university always said that budgets are useful because you can cut through all the spin and see for yourself what governments are actually planning to do. And this is certainly the case in the recent Federal Budget.

For the past year, the Albanese government has been arguing in public that they have been bringing migration numbers down significantly. It is true that they have reduced them from the frankly absurd peaks of 2022-23, but they remain well above ‘normal’ levels, and the Budget reveals that Labor have now decided to increase planned migration again.

Over the next five years, Labor now wants to bring in 55,000 more people than previously planned, with a total of 1.22 million new migrants on a net basis before the end of the decade. Considering the fact that they have failed to meet their own (very high) migration targets, letting in more people than they said they would every single year, it is likely that the Albanese government will exceed even this number.

What the Budget reveals is a doubling down on the strategy of high migration to prop up headline economic growth. The size of the economic pie does grow when more people are brought into Australia, but that growth rate has to be higher than the migration rate, otherwise the slice given to each Australian will get smaller.

A smaller slice is exactly what Australians have been given over the past four years.

According to the most recent data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, at a headline level the economy has grown by about 6.8 per cent since Labor came to power. But once you adjust this for the increase in population over this time, the economy has actually shrunk in size.

This is one of the core problems of Australia’s current migration system: it is making Australians poorer.

Back in February 2023, then Labor Minister for Home Affairs, Clare O’Neil, gave a remarkably candid speech when she acknowledged that Australia’s migration program had not been working in the best interests of Australians. According to O’Neil, Australians had been the victims of an ‘uncapped, unplanned temporary program’ which was ‘the centrepiece and driver of our migration system’.

This ‘uncapped, unplanned’ migration program was ‘the source of huge problems’ and had ‘enormous economic and social consequences’.

‘In 2007 we had about 1 million temporary migrants in Australia, excluding visitor and transit visas. Today that number is 1.9 million. This rather staggering shift in direction has happened without any real policy debate or discussion. It happened not through thoughtful planning and strategy, but by negligence and continental drift,’ then-Minister O’Neil said.

That was over three years ago. There has been plenty of time for the Albanese Labor government to change the migration system, to put an end to this ‘uncapped, unplanned’ system of migration which was the cause of so many economic and social problems.

So what has the result been? Looking at the latest data for the measure which then-Minister O’Neil used, there are currently more than 2.6 million temporary migrants in Australia. That is up from the 1.9 million which she strongly critiqued as being the result of ‘negligence and continental drift’ just three years ago.

If we just listened to what federal Labor politicians said in the media, we would think that they have Australia’s migration program under control. We would think that they have reduced migration numbers, ended the system of relying on temporary foreign workers, and put the interests of young Australians ahead of the interests of certain vested interests who want ever-higher migration to prop up property prices and aggregate demand.

It would be sensible if they had fixed the migration program, because the overwhelming majority of Australians want significant cuts to the current program.

A few months ago, the Institute of Public Affairs commissioned a poll asking Australians what level of migration they would be comfortable with. Just under 80 per cent said they wanted 100,000 or fewer (interestingly, 31 per cent said it should be either zero or negative). The Budget shows Labor plans to run it at an average level of 243,000 instead.

The Budget itself tells you everything you need to know. Labor have been running the largest mass migration program in post-second world war history, and now they want to expand it.

Cian Hussey is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs and writes No Permanent Solutions on Substack.