Net permanent and long-term (NP&L-T) movements data published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) was recently used by the far right Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) in a highly politicised analysis of the January 2024 data on NP&L-T movements. This ‘analysis’ was naturally picked up by the Murdoch press via the Daily Telegraph with very little scrutiny.
Using the NP&L-T movements data, the IPA extrapolates that net migration ‘this year’ could be 660,000. If ‘this year’ refers to 2023-24, the IPA makes no mention of the Government actual forecast of net migration of 375,000, the role of Coalition Government policies that contributed to the net migration blow out in 2022-23 or the fact that changing these policies and seeing the effects of these changes takes time. The IPA analysis makes no mention of the policy tightening implemented since July 2023 or other policy tightening that has been announced and will be implemented over the next few months.
It was a standard IPA hit job.
My analysis of the January 2024 net permanent and long-term data is........