The Coalition promises the biggest migration cut in Australian history, but its policy confuses arrivals with net migration, oversimplifies housing pressures and mistakes political symbolism for serious integration policy.

Following months of discussions and partial announcements, Liberal leader Angus Taylor has unveiled the Coalition’s migration policy, including the “biggest cut to immigration in the history of this country”. One Nation and the government got in first, announcing their plans last month.

If elected in 2028, the Coalition has pledged to cut net overseas migration (called ‘NOM’) to 100,000 annually in its first two years of government. Currently, annual NOM is around 292,000.

The Coalition’s plan would also see a crackdown on visa-hopping, the abolition of temporary graduate visas and the number of new arrivals capped by housing completions – a measure the party had announced previously.

On the whole, the plan is based on a series of false or highly questionable premises. Let’s break down five of them.

Myth 1: Labor has ’lost control’ of migration

The policy is based on the false premise that Labor has lost control of migration.

Migration globally has been unusually volatile since the pandemic.

But that pattern has been repeated across much of the rich world. Has the Australian Labor government also lost control of migration in Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, the Netherlands and Estonia?

Clearly that makes no sense. Yet those countries have experienced broadly similar post-pandemic migration patterns.

So this is not simply a story of one government ’losing control’. It is a story of migration systems still working through the consequences of an extraordinary global shock.

Myth 2: changing NOM will fix the problem

The Coalition’s policy is also based on the premise that a much lower net overseas migration target will fix the situation.

Net overseas migration, or NOM, is a rough measure of overall migration, but it can be confusing because it’s calculated........

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