A Guardian Australia analysis of the proposal notes that extended periods of more people leaving Australia than arriving have only occurred during convulsive moments: a depression in the early 1890s and its aftermath, which kept net migration below zero on average over the 15 years to 1906; both world wars; and the Great Depression of the early 1930s, when unemployment reached as high as 32% in 1932. Migration has never been driven into reverse by design.
Mark Cully, an economist and author of Waves of Plenty: Immigration and the Making of Australia, said such a policy would be “unprecedented”. Governments had cut the migration program in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, he said, but never tried to push the permanent program to zero. Even Canada, midway through a radical migration “reset”, has not seen net migration turn negative.
Hanson is promising to engineer exactly that if One Nation wins government, arguing the plan would lower housing costs. One Nation's economic team says cutting temporary migrants by 766,000 over three years would reduce rental inflation by a total of 6.5%, saving the average renter $54 a week after three years. The party says the modelling is based on previous Reserve Bank research.
Peter Tulip, a co-author of that research and now chief economist at the Centre for Independent Studies, said the forecasts were not “implausible and unreasonable” given the scale of the plan. But he warned of other consequences. “There would be a big hit to exports [from the university sector] and also be a big hit to government revenue. So, economically, we would be worse off.”
The analysis concludes that Australia does have a migration challenge, but not the one One Nation and the Coalition describe.