Rich Harvey

All these migrants right now are coming in.

where are they going to be living?

We're already starting to see it with students coming back.

Like a lot of those suburbs around the city fringe, we're starting to see the rents now having an impact in those student markets as well.

Australia is competing with many, many other countries for skilled migrants, and we have to attract more migrants to get back into Australia.

But it is going to take a little while to get back up to full volume again.

It's funny you mentioned employment there, because if we look at the national unemployment rate at three and a half percent, honestly, that's the lowest figure I've ever seen and lowest figure I ever know in living memory.

Being an economist in my former life, I used to track all of those numbers and I still do.

And we basically have a massive labour shortage.

You know, you only need to walk down the street.

and see the vacancy signs in all the cafes and other places and just look at all the job boards to see how much we need to fill positions and see the evidence there.

But the key sectors that rely on migration are the education sector, tourism and hospitality, as well as a lot of other highly skilled sectors.

And we used to, as I said before, we used to get between 200,000 to 250,000 people.

And that generally keeps us on track.

You know, there's some that argue that we should have a zero population growth

But in fact, for economic growth, that is a really bad policy.

But we also have to combine all sorts of other environmental and sustainability policies with this.

But if we just look at migration, we have been the world's most successful multicultural integrated country in the world.

And it's wonderful.

Like, I just love all the different cultures we have in this country.