Temporary migration and its implications for Australia

With 6 million people or 27% of the population born overseas Australia has---apart from the city-states of Singapore and Hong Kong---the highest proportion of overseas-born residents of any country in the world. This reality is so entrenched, so normal, so much a part of our daily lives, that we rarely stop to consider how migration works and how it might be changing; to ask whether migration today is the same as it was ten, twenty or thirty years ago. Of course we have an acrimonious debate about how to respond to asylum seekers arriving by boat, but that is a question of refugee protection and border control rather than migration. Important and politically fraught as the issue is, the arrival of asylum seekers by boat has only a small impact on the future shape of Australian society. In terms of population size and demographic mix, migration is the main game and skilled migration is the increasingly dominant component in the mix. The thrust of my argument in this lecture is that Australia's migration program is changing in quite fundamental ways. In fact we may be witnessing the biggest change since the abolition of the White Australia policy forty years ago, but these changes are not widely recognised or discussed. The implications of these changes are not entirely clear or predictable, but they may well be profound.