Businessman Dick Smith has issued a dire warning to Anthony Albanese over record immigration levels in a public letter.
“Prime Minister and premiers, what is your population plan?” Smith wrote in an advertisement published in The Daily Telegraph on Monday.
‘Our original Australians lived here for 60,000 years with a population that never exceeded one million. First Nations people knew clearly that there was a limit to growth on this finite land.
‘Prime Minister and prime ministers, do you also believe that there is a limit to growth?’
Australia’s immigration levels have soared to record levels above 500,000 during a rental and housing affordability crisis, but economic activity is still at very weak levels.
Labor’s May budget promised net overseas migration would fall to 260,000 in 2024-25, but in the year to September, 449,060 foreigners came to live in Australia.
Mr Smith argued that every Australian family effectively has a population plan, as they carefully choose to have only as many children as can provide them with a good life, although they could potentially have many more in their lifetime.
‘How many people can Australia give a good life to? What do you think? 30 million? 100 million? ‘Billion?’ asked Mr Smith.
Businessman Dick Smith has issued a dire warning to Anthony Albanese over record immigration levels.
‘Where will the extra fresh water, food and energy come from?’
Smith said neither the government nor the opposition had any plan to control Australia’s population growth and warned something needed to be done before it was too late.
“Up until the time of John Howard, we had an approximate net immigration of around 70,000 people a year for many decades, and that gave us a wonderful Australia where we could get by (and) housing was affordable,” he explained.
‘That was the optimal number, about 70,000 a year, which is what I support. Now it’s around 300,000 a year, or (in the 2022-2023 financial year), it was 500,000.”
A record 518,000 people moved to Australia in the 2022-23 financial year, putting net overseas migration at levels more than double the 200,000 level of the mining boom in 2007.
Until the late 1990s, annual levels of net overseas migration had not soared into the six-figure range and middle-income earners could afford a house in Sydney, something now impossible on a single income.
The intake of skilled migrants and international students into Australia almost tripled under Howard, and since the 2000s both Labor and Coalition governments have increased population growth.
Despite his enormous wealth, the millionaire admits he is worried about the future of his nine grandchildren amid record immigration to Australia.
The businessman published an advertisement in The Daily Telegraph warning about the consequences of high immigration
Australia’s immigration levels have soared to record levels above 500,000 during a rental and housing affordability crisis (pictured, Sydney pedestrians)
‘In the interest of our children and grandchildren, we should have a population plan. “It’s a dry, arid country and yes, I have no doubt we can put 100 million in here, but there will be a lot of really poor people,” Mr Smith said.
They will be crammed together like termites and battery chickens in skyscrapers. We are already building our first high-rise schools so that they don’t even have a yard to play in.
“So in a country that has so much open space, we will end up with termite mounds and it will be a huge leap backwards because of our own stupidity.”
Australia has been in a per capita recession since early 2023, where the output of every Australian has been declining.
Despite the population influx, the economy is growing at the slowest annual pace since the 1991 recession.
The 1 percent expansion of gross domestic product is also half the population growth rate of 2.3 percent.