Australia’s Opposition leader Peter Dutton has abandoned his promise to nearly halve immigration, saying the Coalition will not set a new target until after next year’s federal election.
Mr Dutton was asked on Sky News on Sunday whether he was sticking to the 160,000 net migration target he set in May, Mr Dutton twice refused to recommit, but said that he still intended to reduce the number of permanent visas from 185,000 to 140,000, and take the humanitarian and refugee intake from 20,000 to 13,750.
Labor has allowed almost 2 million immigrants to enter Australia since the May 2022 election, resulting in a record-high net migration figure of 1.15 million and pushing Australia’s population over 27 million with the highest proportion of foreign-born residents since federation.
Peter Dutton has backtracked on his commitment to bring net migration down to 160,000, and refused to set a new target until AFTER the election. pic.twitter.com/FE3P9q0pJf
— The Noticer (@NoticerNews) December 8, 2024
“We’ll have a look at the economic settings – as we said at the time of the policy announcement. We’ll have a look at the economic settings when we come into government to determine exactly how much damage Labor has done and what we need to do,” Mr Dutton said when asked about his previous net migration target.
He also promised to boost housing construction, saying the Coalition had a $5 billion project to fuel the building of 500,000 new homes.
“That supply side has not been addressed by the government, and they only compound the problem by increasing the numbers in the migration program, as we’ve seen over the last two and a half years,” he said.
Earlier in the interview Mr Dutton said that Labor’s migration program has been taken advantage of by people who were refusing to leave, and that the Coalition would “manage our migration program to our country’s benefit”.
“We’re a great country in good part because of the migration over many, many years. But we’re not going to tolerate a situation where young Australians can’t find rental accommodation, or have no chance of ownership,” he said.
The Labor government claims that net migration will fall back to 260,000 this financial year, but their previous forecasts have all been far exceeded.
Labor originally set a net overseas migration target of 315,000 for the 2023-24 financial year after promising to cut immigration, but revised it to 375,000 in December 2023, and then again to 395,000 during this year’s Budget in May.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics is yet to release net migration data for that year, but figures from July showed that it was already at 445,510 with one month left to go, while the latest ABS figures confirmed it was at 388,000 after just nine months.
Mr Dutton’s backflip comes after he suddenly refused to support Labor’s international student caps last month, infuriating his voter base, joining left-wing extremist party The Greens to block efforts to reduce foreign student numbers to 270,000.
Header image: Peter Dutton meets a Chinese official, left, and panders to Indians, right (Facebook)
