Media crackdown
As regular readers will know, each month I post a chart or two and a few comments on the latest overseas arrivals and departures figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), including on the monthly and annual figures for net permanent and long-term immigration.
On Friday this week, the ABS put out a media release here noting that the monthly figures for border crossing should not be used to estimate future inflows of net overseas migration.
I've been at a festival in the glorious English Cotswolds for the past four or five days and in an internet black hole, so haven't been willing or able to blog anything for a little while.
It appears that admonishing emails were sent to MacroBusiness and the Daily Mail Australia requesting that they amend their reporting of immigration figures, while ABC Media Watch and other Big Australia advocates piled in to criticise the Institute of Public Affairs and 2GB - essentially the immigration hawks - for their misuse of statistics.
Leith van Onselen of MacroBusiness posted a response here, and you can see the ABS email copied below, with some surprisingly strong wording applied (click to expand):
This is a bit odd to say the least, since for as long as I've been writing about the Aussie economy, this is what economists and analysts have always done with the data, with the net figure for permanent and long-term arrivals and departures serving as a reasonable indicator for what to expect from the official immigration figures when they're finally reported.
My best guess is that this has the fingerprints of Treasury/the ALP media spin doctors on it (in part because years ago I contributed to the writing of a report on property tax reform, and within moments of its release the Labor team were on the phone to the media in an attempt to control the narrative).
Dr Cameron Murray did a thorough job of running through the key points as to why this represents political capture on X here.
Leith van Onselen of MacroBusiness also discussed the crux of the issue with Ben Fordham on 2GB here.
Reasons
There a a few fairly similar reasons why I think this is the wrong approach from the ABS, the government, or whoever it is that's demanding a crackdown on the reporting of statistics.
Firstly, while the figures derived from border crossings may not be an exactly accurate measure of immigration, on a net basis - after accounting for the monthly ins and outs - they're probably going to be a pretty good indication of where net overseas migration is heading, at least directionally speaking.
Justin Fabo of Antipodean Macro overlaid the two data series in the chart below, which shows the historical correlation, and as previously noted on this blog, this suggests that net immigration has probably accelerated over the past six months based on the monthly figures...although granted we won't know for sure for some time.
Even briefly eye-balling this chart, the arrivals and departures stats are clearly useful, if not exactly fool-proof.
In fact, in 2021, the ABS itself suggests that the monthly data may provide a useful early indication for migration trends, even if it will never match exactly to net overseas migration figures.
The government's own Centre for Population has noted the same thing, but more explicitly, as was pointed out by Cameron Murray.
Secondly, the crackdown is clearly one-sided has only been applied to immigration hawks; it's never been a problem previously when it's been used by advocates of Big Australia.
Thirdly, the official net overseas migration figures are so lagged that they're not very useful for debating what's happening with immigration now.
The latest available official figures relate to all the way back in calendar year 2024 - and in any case the figures on the estimated resident population may not prove to be precise between Censuses.
In 2017, for example, it was reported that the ABS population clock would be wound back by around 300,000, as more timely and accurate data came to light.
Is all debate on current population statistics to be paused because of lagged data? That doesn't seem like a smart idea.
Fourthly, in real time it seems to us as buyer's agents that immigration has picked up again.
All of our landlord clients are renting their properties out immediately, and in many cases with a good deal of competition and rising rents.
Other private data series show that rental vacancy rates have been tightening again over recent months, both asking rents and actual rents have been re-accelerating, and more anecdotally there have been rental open homes with scores of attendees lately (which is normally an indicator that something has materially changed in market fundamentals).
Freedom of speech
With regards to this particular political issue, I'm generally speaking a pro-immigration sort of person, so it's always tempting to say "oh well, who cares?" when it's the other side of the debate being instructed to zip it, and simply move on.
However, cracking down on public debate in this manner can prove to be the thin end of the wedge.
In the UK, over the years people publicly questioning the shift to mass immigration since around the turn of the Millennium have variously been gagged or silenced, forced to publicly apologise, de-platformed, and in the more extreme cases driven out of the country...or even, lately, jailed for allegedly incendiary social media posts.
For a democracy to become more resilient free speech and robust debate is paramount - it's in effect an example of what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
Controlling what people are allowed to discuss and censoring how they are allowed to discuss it is unquestionably effective in the short-term.
But in reality this may provide only an illusion of stability before things explode further down the track.
In the UK this week protests about asylum seeker and illegal immigration policies are planned in no fewer than 26 towns and cities around the island from Aberdeen to Bournemouth and from Leicester to Leeds by folks who are tired of voting for one thing and being delivered another.
A good deal of data has been covered up and only freedom of information requests have gradually uncovered, by way of just one example, statistics relating to serious crimes by migrants and by country of origin.
Indeed, the 'progressive' left side of politics has been growing increasingly authoritarian across a range of issues over recent years.
We already have a soft version of this in Australia. I've had a couple of public-facing figures message me directly about fears for the safety of their families following gang violence and home invasions in Melbourne, but they're understandably too concerned about the potential repercussions to discuss this publicly.
As it turns out, in Australia we'll get an update on the latest net overseas migration statistics up to 31 March 2025 on September 18, but regardless of what's actually reported it's important that people are allowed to interpret and openly debate statistics without being shut down.
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