The Australian Population Research Institute is an independent research organisation. It is devoted to understanding and communicating the nature of Australia’s demographic and economic situation and the policies and factors influencing this.
It is a not-for-profit Institute with no funding from corporate Australia. Its members are all participating researchers who contribute to the Institute’s work.
Tony Abbott, 13 November, 2023, posted 6 December 2023
Remarks at the Quadrant Dinner at the Windsor Hotel, Melbourne, Monday the 13th of November, 2023
As well as talks by Tony Abbott and Gary Johns, the Quadrant dinner also featured the re-launch of a book by Tapri member, William Lines, called Romancing the Primitive: the Myth of the Ecological Aborigine. The book investigates how aspects of indigenous culture have for centuries been idealised by those preoccupied by ‘civilisation’s discontents’.
William’s book had been launched soon after the referendum proposing an indigenous ‘Voice to Parliament’ was solidly defeated by Australian voters. However, it was also honoured at the Quadrant dinner where William spoke to attendees about the work.
The former Liberal prime minister, Tony Abbott, gave an off-the-cuff address. He started his talk by discussing the main players in the successful ‘No’ campaign against the Voice.
He then went on to discuss the desire of ‘No’ voters for security, both cultural and economic.
The latter will involve a new approach to industry policy and the former a clear and inclusive approach to our history.
Mr Abbott’s remarks were recorded and transcribed by John Masanauskas, and are reproduced here with Mr Abbott’s permission.
Adrienne Millbank, 8 October 2023
The Voice: self determination is the problem not the solution
Adrienne Millbank is a founding member of Tapri.
She was a senior researcher in the Parliamentary library from 1992 to 2008. She managed the Immigration and Ethnic Affairs desk, which by that time also included Aboriginal affairs.
After her retirement from this role she was a member of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) from 2016 to 2021.
She was also a director in the administrative unit set up to assist Lois O’Donoghue in the lead-up to the establishment of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in 1990.
Adrienne was born in Alice Springs and lived there for 17 years, and has subsequently visited Alice Springs.
She is well versed in the historical background to the campaign for the voice, and the change in policy from attempts at assimilation to separatism.
Her paper outlines the history leading up to the politics of the voice and the relevance of that history today.
Bob Birrell, 8 October 2023, new blog post
Migrant deluge creates a giant wave of problem
Bob Kinnaird, Obituary
Our friend and colleague Bob Kinnaird, a founding member of The Australian Population Research Institute, has died. Those who knew him personally are grieved; other will miss his aid in their research and deeply regret his loss. His obituary is here.
Research report, 30 August 2023
Bob Birrell and Katharine Betts, Why the voice referendum is failing
This report seeks to explain the decline in voter support for the voice in recent months. This fall has generated bemusement and hurt among supporters, including Labor leaders. The decline is also a major surprise given the domination of Labor and the Greens at the May 2022 election and the apparent public support for their progressive economic and cultural agenda.
However, Labor’s strength on economic issues (in most voters’ eyes) hid their vulnerability on the cultural front, which the voice initiative has exposed.
Commentators have put forward many explanations for the decline in voter support.
Chief among them is that voters have been scared by claims that the voice will deliver much greater policy influence for Indigenous leaders than has been admitted by proponents. Other commentators claim that cost-of-living stresses on lower-income households, together with resentment towards elites advocating for the voice, are prompting its rejection. The fallback position for some who struggle to find an explanation is that much of the No vote is based on racism.
Our analysis of the polls shows that the fall-off in support for the voice is mainly among non-graduate voters.
In our view the main explanation for this is that the voice is seen by many voters (especially the non-graduates) as a challenge to their nationalist values. From their perspective a strong and united nation is important as a protector of their economic interests. So is the maintenance of strong national unity and loyalty. Our polling evidence indicates that they see the voice as advancing the autonomy of the Indigenous community and thus as weakening this unity.
Some voice advocates have reacted to the slip in the voice vote by pressing the moral intensity of their cause, with the implication that a No vote is shameful, even racist.
Shaming is not working because, at the core of non-graduates’ nationalistic values, is the belief that all Australians are equal regardless of the community they identify with. For them it is voice advocates who are racists, because they are advocating for separate political representation and sovereignty for one racially distinct group, the Indigenous community.
Research Report, 26 July 2023
Katharine Betts, Free speech on immigration versus the guardians against racism
This paper analyses the Tapri September 2022 survey paper on attitudes to population growth, taking it from the perspective of voters’ capacity to debate immigration-fueled population growth fairly and respectfully.
It finds that many cultural progressives believe that critics of high immigration are usually racists. These are termed ‘the Guardians against racism’. They are a small but influential minority who have been able to shame many doubters into silence. There is also a tacit bipartisan agreement between Labor and the Coalition not to debate immigration policy, especially at election times. These two pressures together have led to a stifling of information and opinion on a policy which is instrumental in shaping Australia’s future, for good or ill.
Book review, 4 July 2023
A review of Sheila Newman, Land-Tenure & The Revolution in Democracy & Birth Control in France, 2023, by Joseph Wayne Smith
Sheila Newman is a sociologist with a good knowledge of French, and of French historical sources. Her new book, reviewed here by Joseph Wayne Smith, is the third in her series Demography, Territory and Law.
In this volume she makes use of the concept of greater population viscosity in France (ie limited dispersal, and thus higher genetic relatedness) compared to that of England.
Marital fertility in France began to decline in 1800, well before the advent of industrialisation. Thus French history provides a counterexample to the demographic transition thesis.
In Smith’s overview of Newman’s work, population viscosity helps explain both France’s political revolution and its demographic history.
Research report, 1 March 2023
Katharine Betts and Bob Birrell, Driving without a licence: voters’ views on Labor’s immigration agenda
Based on the September 2022 Tapri survey of voters’ attitudes to population growth
In September 2022 The Australian Population Research Institute (Tapri) conducted a national survey of Australian voters which sheds light on what voters think of aspects of this new agenda.
The survey went to a large national sample of over 3000 voters. It examines their views across three dimensions: Labor’s progressive cultural positions, its neoliberal economic strategy (reflecting the Hawke/Keating legacy), and its high immigration program.
The report shows that on all three dimensions most voters do not support Labor’s agenda. In regard to high immigration, only a small minority of voters (18 percent) endorse the policy to expand immigration to ‘Big Australia’ levels, a policy that was not put forward during the election campaign.Most voters (65 per cent) do not think Australia needs more people.
Despite this disconnect between Labor and voters nearly all commentators think Labor is in a strong and enduring electoral position.
This report provides some support for this view. It shows (for the first time) that an unprecedented majority of voters who are university graduates (a group that dominates opinion in the media, and political and educational circles) supported left of centre parties at the May 2022 election. This share had increased by September 2022 when the Tapri study was in the field.
With such strong elite endorsement, it is hard to envisage any serious political mobilisation against the Labor agenda.
Yet the disconnect remains, mainly within the 65 per cent of voters who are non-graduates. It is clear on cultural and economic policies, but it is especially pronounced on immigration policy. Most voters think that immigration-fed urban expansion feeds congestion, and competition for health services and increased housing costs.
The Labor Government has come to office with an inheritance of neoliberalism, from the Hawke/Keating years. But it has deviated from this by acting to control coal and gas prices and by requiring producers to divert some of their product from export to domestic markets. It is unclear how far it will go along this new path.
The Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, has set out a moral basis for the action on coal and gas by declaring that Labor must listen to the voice of voters.
However, the government is not listening to voters’ views on its cultural agenda or its immigration agenda.
The latter is likely to become a focus of public concern. The Tapri survey shows that a high proportion of voters (45 per cent) feel financially insecure and that this insecurity is concentrated among people who are renting.
The Labor Government is making the situation worse for renters, and for all voters who hope to enter the housing market, through its high immigration policies.
Housing availability in the major cities is already very tight. Immigration at ‘Big Australia’ levels will require a huge expansion of housing stock, especially in Sydney and Melbourne. This will be above and beyond that needed to accommodate the requirements of existing residents. This extra demand will surge at a time when there is already a desperate shortage of rental accommodation and when housing construction levels have fallen.
The Labor Government has also recently announced that overseas students who graduate in Australia will be treated as an integral part of the Government’s strategy for boosting the supply of skilled workers. This will be at the expense of opportunities to for domestic workers. It is a policy repeatedly opposed by most voters and one that will add further tinder to voters’ concerns about the ‘Big Australia’ agenda.
Research report, 9 December 2022
Bob Birrell and Ernest Healy, The skills crisis, university culpability and the overseas student industry
Since the September Skills Summit the Albanese Labor Government has adopted an unprecedented skills manpower policy.
It is to make overseas migration, and the graduates from the overseas student industry in Australia, an integral part of this manpower policy.
The façade that the overseas student industry is about training students who then return home has been shattered. It has also obliterated the longstanding public assurances that the industry will not harm the educational opportunities of aspiring domestic students.
The report shows that the share of the universities’ training effort allocated to overseas students has become enormous; equal to 40 per cent of all graduations (domestic and overseas) by 2020.
This focus on overseas students is already diminishing opportunities for domestic students, including in the key fields of IT and engineering, where the universities provide more places for overseas students than they do for domestic students.
Australia’s universities do not accept any obligation to prioritize training for domestic students in fields where there are national skill shortages. Successive Australian governments have allowed this practice and it is the stated policy of the Albanese Labor Government to allow it to continue.
The intention, instead, is to increase reliance on immigration and on overseas students who graduate here to fill the gaps.
The report shows that this policy will mean a sustained increase in the level of overseas migration with the main source deriving from the overseas student influx. The result will be a return to the ‘Big Australia’ migration levels that prevailed prior to the pandemic.
Research report, 19 November 2022
Michael Moynhan, Australia’s medical workforce: maldistributed and lately never enough
People are worried that there is a serious shortage of doctors, especially GPs and especially in regional areas. But, by international standards, Australia is well supplied with doctors. There are more doctors per 1000 of the population in Australia than is the case in most other OECD countries.
The number of working doctors (in full-time work equivalence) in Australia per 1000 of the population has actually increased by 46 per cent since 1996.
However, the increase has primarily gone into the hospital workforce and into private, non-GP, specialist practice. The number of full-time equivalent (FTE) hospital doctors per 1000 of Australia’s population has increased by 145 per cent between 1996 and 2020, and the number of non-GP specialists has increased by 51 per cent. However, the number of FTE GPs per 1000 has decreased by six per cent over this same period.
The hospital-based doctor workforce has gone up from being 28% of all working doctors to 45% of all working doctors. Meanwhile the GP workforce has shrunk from a half of all working doctors to a third. Moreover, too many of them are now in the older age-group categories.
There have been major increases in the number of medical graduates over the past two decades. But despite this, most of them have been attracted into the hospital workforce (which is uncapped) and into non-GP specialist practice.
These trends have resulted in a shortage of GPs, especially in regional areas. The shortage has been covered, in part, by high levels of overseas doctor recruitment. However, these overseas-trained doctors mostly move to metropolitan areas when they can legally do so. This pattern is leaving a chronic dependence on more overseas recruitment for regional areas as well as increasing reliance on overseas trained GPs in metropolitan areas.
Despite Australia’s strong doctor supply, there never seems to be enough. This report explains why this growing medical workforce is not being deployed in the best interests of Australians’ health and what we can do about it.
Mike Moynihan is a retired rural GP with experience in Healthcare Planning.
Media coverage , The Herald Sun, 19/11/22, p. 35
Research report, 20 July 2022
Bob Birrell and Ernest Healy, The Suburban Rail Loop: Not needed, not fit for purpose and a debt bomb
The Suburban Rail Loop SRL) (SLR) is an orbital heavy rail line between Melbourne’s middle suburbs, eventually intended to link Cheltenham with Werribee.
The Victorian Government frames the SRL as the pinnacle of its Big Build. This has become the political focus of the Government, representing its can-do, no-delay capacity to tackle Melbourne’s transport problems.
So it is with the SRL. It was announced as a visionary project just prior to the 2018 State Election. That was it. There was no opportunity for any public examination of its merits.
In pursuing the Big Build the Victorian Government has committed to massive capital expenditure and borrowings. The latter reached $60 billion in 2019-20, doubled by 2021-22 to reach $119.4 billion, and are projected to reach $182 billion in 2024-25. This number does not include the cost of the SRL, which will be at least an extra $34.5 billion, just for the first stage to Box Hill.
The SRL is justified by the huge growth in traffic expected to flow from the State Government’s confidence that Melbourne will grow from 5.1 million today to 9 million by 2050. Much of this traffic is expected to stem from higher density housing in established suburbs. The SRL is intended to provide new public transport options from these suburbs to activity centres on its pathway.
Melbourne has 20 per cent of Australia’s population. Over the past couple of decades it has been attracting a third of Australia’s net migration intake. It has also attracted a large net inflow of residents from elsewhere in Australia.
No longer.
Melbourne’s population is more likely to reach 7 million than 9 million by 2050. This is because Melbourne is losing its comparative advantage in providing affordable housing, relative to other locations in Australia.
By late 2021 Melbourne had become the fifth most expensive city in the Anglo world for separate housing. As a result, the overseas migration influx has slowed and existing residents are voting with their feet to move to more affordable locations.
The housing affordability crisis is driven on the demand side from an increase in young adult households looking for family friendly separate housing. This mainly derives from migrant households stemming from the surge in young migrants to Melbourne since the early 2000s.
They confront supply side constraints resulting from the Victorian Government’s restrictions on fringe housing development. A further constraint is that over half the existing stock of separate houses in Melbourne is occupied by householders over 50 years of age. This proportion is certain to increase.
The situation will be long lasting, thus generating a prolonged demand/supply imbalance for such housing and continuing affordability problems.
Though Melbourne will continue to grow, it will do so more slowly than the planners assume.
It is not just that the overall size of Melbourne’s population will be less than the Victorian Government expects. The housing affordability crises also challenges the SRL planners’ assumption that there will be high levels of infill in the middle suburbs. The high cost of housing sites for closer density means that new family friendly flats and town houses are also becoming unaffordable.
The SRl planners do not acknowledge that there are other cheaper and more flexible ways to provide public transport options than the heavy rail SRL. Buses are the obvious alternative. Nor do they consider the likelihood that increased working from home will remove much of the SRL’s prospective patronage
The SRL is a debt bomb. It will add to existing infrastructure debt at a time when there are far more important uses of investment funds. One is the State Government’s aspiration to complete a renewable energy transition. This will require far more State investment than is presently assumed. A second is the aspiration to modernise the Victorian economy.
The Victorian Government will have to make choices. The SRL is a third-order priority.
Victoria is a mendicant State. It needs to borrow just to finance the operating costs of providing health, education and caring services for its expanding population, let alone the escalating costs of its Big Build. The State Treasury has been telling Victorians that this is not a problem because of low interest rates. It is a problem now. For new borrowings the Government will have to pay the much higher rates that lenders are demanding.
Unlike other Australian States, Victoria cannot rely on revenue from commodity exports. This is why the modernisation of the economy is so important. Victoria needs new competitive industries.
By 2021 Victoria’s exports of Elaborately Transformed Manufactures had flat-lined at $10 billion. Meanwhile imports of these goods have surged to over $60 billion.
This situation will not change without a State-led industry policy in which the State shares the capital investment costs.
Research report, 17 June 2022
David McCloskey, Impacts of Structural Changes In Australia’s Economy (2006 – 2016) on labour productivity, income inequality and competition in local markets June 2022
Economic policies have an impact. The ‘reform’ and trade liberalisation agendas of the 1990’s have been touted as the key to Australia having a record of more than 20 years of uninterrupted nominal economic growth.
But what has been the cost of this nominal growth? This study has examined the impact of the open market policies and reforms on the structure of Australia’s jobs and industries over the period from 2006-2016. It identifies the actual changes in Australia’s economy that have occurred under these policy settings.
Calls for more reform and more labour market deregulation are based on the idea that they will promote improvements in productivity, better allocation of resources to productive sectors of the economy, and will lay the foundation for future economic prosperity.
These ideas are mistaken. While nominal economic growth has been achieved the policies have had perverse outcomes. High productivity sectors, such as manufacturing have experienced a structural decline of 60%, while there has been a boom in low productivity jobs (both high and low wage) in people servicing industries.
Our analysis of the structural changes that have taken place in the Australia’s economy from 2006-2016 shows that these policies have led to the off-shoring of jobs (more than 210,000). They have also been accompanied by an increase in automation which has led to the loss of at least 223,000 jobs, with a further 150,000 loss of jobs due to digital transformation.
The study also highlights the impact of the concentration of market power on jobs in the retail sector and the failure of the ACCC to maintain competitive retail markets.
Many middle-income jobs have been lost through these structural changes. They have been replaced with both more low-paid, insecure jobs and also more very highly-paid jobs, leading to a hollowing out of middle-income jobs.
At the same time these structural changes have increased our dependence on imported essential items. Market competition has also suffered with the concentration of market power into the hands of large businesses through their purchasing policies, market saturation and selling price policies.
To compound these problems our economy has become heavily reliant on an aggressive China for export sales of coal, iron ore and gas (employing a minimum number of people).
At the same time we have become dependent on China for manufactured goods (employing many Chinese people).
The structural changes identified in this study suggest that Australia is increasingly vulnerable to economic shocks with a huge reliance on high commodity prices. There is an urgent need for smarter, evidence based economic policies to be developed that will allow Australia to compete in the high productivity knowledge jobs of the future.
Blog post, 25 November 2021
Different survey methods, different results: What do Australians really think about immigration numbers?
There have been two recent opinion surveys about Australians’ attitudes to immigration numbers: TAPRI’s and one by Essential Research. They yielded markedly differing results. This blog post analyses the reasons for this. There are important implications for survey design and interpretation of results
Research report, 14 October 2021
Katharine Betts and Bob Birrell, Politics and the population question during the pandemic: The 2021 TAPRI survey
Survey results: There is a huge gulf between Australia’s elite and Australia’s electorate on immigration policies – a gulf which has hardened since the Covid pandemic began in March 2020.
The Coalition government, as well as leading business and employer groups, have declared that they wish to see Australia’s immigration intake restored to around net 240,000 a year when Australia’s borders are opened. This is the Big Australia target.
TAPRI’s survey found that, in late July 2021, only 19 per cent of voters agreed with this target. The rest supported lower levels, including 28 per cent who wanted the inflow and outflow of people from Australia to be the same. That is, they wanted nil net migration.
This outcome is despite 18 months of advocacy since the pandemic began on the part of the Government and business interests for a revival of Big Australia.
This advocacy has fallen on deaf ears.
The report sets out the data and then goes on to analyse their implications for the 2022 Federal election.
Blog post, 4 May 2021
Bob Birrell’s op ed from the Herald Sun, Feds must resist visa push from business, published 26 April 2021 is now online.