Entrepreneur Dick Smith has issued a stern warning to Anthony Albanese about record high immigration levels in an open letter.
“Prime Minister and Prime Ministers, what is your population plan?” Smith asked in an advertisement published in a Sydney newspaper on Monday.
‘Our original Australians lived here for 60,000 years with a population never exceeding 1 million.
“First Nations people clearly knew there was a limit to growth in this finite land. Prime Minister and Prime Ministers, do you also believe that there is a limit to growth?’
Immigration levels in Australia have risen to record levels – above 500,000 a year amid a housing and rental affordability crisis.
But economic activity is still at a very weak level. In the last federal budget, Labor promised net overseas migration would slow to 260,000 by 2024-25.
But in the year leading up to September, 449,060 foreigners came to Australia to live.
Mr Smith argued that every Australian family in fact has a population plan, as they carefully choose to have only as many children as they can provide for a good life, even though they could potentially have many more during their lifetime.
‘How many people can Australia give a good life to? What do you think? 30 million? 100 million? A billion?” Mr Smith asked.
Entrepreneur Dick Smith has issued a dire warning to Anthony Albanese over record high levels of immigration
‘Where should the extra fresh water, food and energy come from?’
Mr Smith said neither the government nor the opposition had any plan to control Australia’s population growth, and warned something had to be done before it was too late.
‘Until the time of John Howard we had an immigration of about 70,000 net a year for decades, and that gave us a beautiful Australia to cope with. [and] housing was affordable,” he explained.
‘That was the optimal number, about 70,000 per year, and that is what I support. Now it is about 300,000 per year, or (in the 2022-2023 financial year) it was 500,000.’
A record 518,000 people moved to Australia in the 2022-2023 financial year, putting net overseas migration at a level more than double the 200,000 level of the 2007 mining boom.
Until the late 1990s, annual net overseas migration levels had not reached six figures and middle-income workers could afford a home in Sydney – something now impossible on one income.
Australia’s influx of skilled migrants and international students has almost tripled under Howard’s watch, with both the Labor and Coalition governments increasing population growth since the 2000s.
Despite his vast wealth, the millionaire admits he worries about the future of his nine grandchildren given record immigration in Australia.
The entrepreneur published an advertisement in The Daily Telegraph warning of the consequences of high immigration
Immigration levels in Australia have risen to record highs of over 500,000 amid a rental and housing price crisis (pictured are pedestrians in Sydney)
‘In the interests of our children and grandchildren, we must have a population plan. It’s a dry, arid country and yes, I have no doubt we can bring in 100 million here, but there will be a lot of poor people,” Smith said.
‘They will be crammed into high-rise buildings like termites and battery chickens. We are already building our first high-rise schools, so they don’t even have a schoolyard to play on.
“So with a country that has so much open space, we’re going to end up with termite mounds and it’s going to be a huge leap backwards because of our own stupidity.”
Australia has been in per capita recession since early 2023, with output declining for every Australian.
Despite the influx of population, the economy is growing at the slowest pace since the 1991 recession.
The 1 percent growth in gross domestic product is also half of the population growth of 2.3 percent.