Australia Talks of Cutting Migration, Yet Its Own Treasury Sums Say the Opposite

News · 2026-09-22 · 3 min read

Turn on Australian news in an election season and you will hear plenty of noise about bringing migrant numbers down. Look past the speeches, though, and the government's long-term economic forecasts point the other way. On those figures, a smaller intake does not fix anything. It makes the bill bigger.

Not enough babies to replace the next generation

For roughly fifty years, Australian women have had fewer children than the 'replacement' rate of 2.1 births per woman. The current figure sits close to 1.5, and official forecasts see it sliding to around 1.34 across the coming four decades. Somewhere in the mid-2060s, the country is expected to record more deaths than births for the first time in its modern history.

The present Treasurer has said plainly that there will be no return to baby-bonus payments and no lectures to families about having more children. With that option off the table, migration is the main tool left for anyone who wants the population and the labour force to keep growing.

Who pays when the workforce shrinks

This is a numbers problem before it is a values debate. An older country has more retirees needing hospitals, pensions and aged care, and fewer working-age taxpayers covering the cost.

Economists track this with the 'dependency ratio': how many people aged 65+ there are for every 100 Australians of working age. Right now that sits near 27 per 100. With normal migration settings, it is forecast to reach 40 by the 2060s. Trim migration and it goes higher still, to 43 per 100.

That gap lands straight on the federal budget. The government's long-range fiscal modelling shows what a lower-migration path would do:

by 2065-66, the underlying deficit grows to 2.4% of GDP, up from an already worrying 1.8%
public debt, measured against GDP, ends up nearly 10 percentage points higher

Put simply, whatever migration is said to cost is small next to the long-run cost of running short of migrants.

Reading the signal from Johannesburg or Durban

Treasury modelling can feel far removed from your CV, but it tells employers, agents and applicants where policy is heading underneath the short-term politics:

Skilled migration is treated as a core economic need, not a nice-to-have. Treasury's baseline planning assumes net overseas migration of well over 200,000 people a year simply to stop the fiscal picture getting worse.
Migrants help hold the whole system up. Younger arrivals of working age pay tax today, while an ageing local population leans harder on public services.
Economic strategy and multiculturalism are now spoken about together. Official language describes migration as building the economy through skills, innovation and international links, not merely adding heads.

What a South African applicant should do with this

Every few years migration becomes an easy target at the ballot box. The government's own long-range numbers make an awkward point for the critics: cutting the intake does not relieve the budget or public services. It speeds up the very ageing squeeze they say worries them.

Whether you are an employer, an agent or someone weighing up jobs in Australia for South Africans, the long-term direction holds steady whatever the political mood. Australia's future depends on steady, well-run migration, not less of it. Don't let one loud headline put you off. Keep your trade certificates, references and English test results in order so you are ready when the right role opens.

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