MATTERS OF URGENCY
Senator BELL (New South Wales—One Nation Whip) (18:16): The motion before the Senate is straightforward. It calls on the Albanese Labor government to abandon mass migration policies that will add another one million people to the Australian population over the next four years on top of the population growth Australia has already experienced since Labor came to office.
The question for the government is very simple: do you really believe Australia can keep adding people at this pace when housing, infrastructure and essential services are already struggling to keep up? Since June 2020, Australia's population has risen from about 26 million to 27.8 million. Net overseas migration has been the major driver of this population explosion.
The government's own budget forecasts net overseas migration of 245,000 next financial year, followed by 225,000 a year after that. That is if you can believe them, because they constantly overshoot those predictions. We all understand that regional Australia needs workers and employers need access to skills that cannot be found locally, which is why our very sensible immigration policy that we have put forward this week addresses those issues.
Either the Labor government hasn't read them or they're choosing to continue to mislead the Australian people. The things that you claim do not justify migration levels that add further pressure to housing and services. The Australian Bureau of Statistics has found almost four out of five temporary residents live in capital cities, with half in Sydney and Melbourne.
Among international students, 62 per cent live in those two cities. So these large temporary migration numbers cannot simply be justified as being necessary for regional Australia. That's absurd.
It shows your argument to be absurd. One Nation's position is that any immigration should reflect Australia's need and capacity. Where there is a genuine skills shortage, fill it.
Where regions need workers, provide them. We also must look at training our own workers. We cannot simply use the easy excuse of mass migration to help prop up the GDP that the Labor Party so often falls back to.
We can look around the world. Canada reduced its temporary resident targets, and they're going forward. Their gross domestic product per capita has gone up.
Around the world, we see examples that prove what you say is untrue. The issue is whether Australia's migration intake should continue at your levels, and the answer is no. We hope that the Senate agrees to that.