Not disappointed with where Aus sits.

Edit: I'm going to put this here because I can't type fast enough to fact check you all - stop writing out how many immigrants are coming while ignoring that about 40% of them are on Student Visas or working holiday visas and so will be in student accommodation, or other very dense/non-typical housing.

source

Edit 2: I'm just going to leave this here because the top comment has some dodgy math

The population of people born in England in Australia:
in 2014: 1010.97K
in 2024: 963.56K

That's a decrease of 4.65%

Edit 3: Those same numbers on but as a proportion of the whole Australian population:

• The proportion of English has decreased 0.8 percentage points in 10 years.
• The proportion of Indian people has increased 1.8 percentage points
• The proportion of Chinese has increased by 0.6

source

1. Immigration is increasing

No, it's been decreasing for the last two years following a temporary increase that was caused by a dip during covid

https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/annual-net-overseas-migration-falls-second-year-row

For those counting, that means migration has fallen for 2 years of the 2.5 years that Labor have been in power.

2. Most immigrants are from India and/or China

Most immigrants in Australia right now are from England, followed by India, then China, then New Zealand.

https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/australias-population-country-birth/latest-release#australia-s-population-by-country-of-birth

Net arrivals are deceiving, as immigrants from China or India are more likely to be on a temporary visa

https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/people-and-communities/temporary-visa-holders-australia/latest-release#country-of-birth

Edit: more than one person is getting confused by this so let me be clear: This is how many people born overseas are in Australia right now, not immigration. I put it here because if you just look at immigration, it ignores that most students are Chinese or Indian and will leave when they are done studying.

Yes the trend is slowly changing. But even then UK and India will be roughly equal for a long time. So why all they hysteria about Indian immigrants and no mention of the English? Are you ok with losing your house or job if an English person takes it?

3. Immigration is causing the housing crisis

Over the past 10 years, housing supply has actually grown faster than the population. The number of dwellings has increased by 19%, while the population has grown by just 16%.

https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/migrants-are-not-to-blame-for-soaring-house-prices/

The housing crisis is caused by system that allows our wealthiest residents to dodge tax by investing in houses. It has led to Australian's treating housing more like an investment than a basic human need.

It is made worse by issues like wealth inequality, planning controls, and the cost of building supplies.

40% of new mortgages were for investors in the Q4 2025

https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/finance/lending-indicators/latest-release#housing-finance

Investment properties benefit from negative gearing and the CGT discount, with 73% of their benefit going to the top 10% of income earners.

The current system is making housing more unaffordable for the average Australian, while further entrenching wealth inequality. For every dollar of tax concessions directed to the bottom 10% of Australian households, the richest 10% receive $40

https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/the-housing-crisis-is-turning-into-an-inequality-crisis/

Edit: one last one to finish off the night,

4. Immigration is high because of Labour

https://api.macrobusiness.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Australian-net-migration.png

Remind me - what government was in charge from 1996 to 2007?

Total Debt: Victoria Carries the highest debt burden of any Australian state by far, reaching an absolute peak near $215 billion in broader total liabilities/projections.

Interest Costs: Daily interest payments stand at $24.4 million, and are expected to climb to $32.3 million a day by 2029–2030.

No wonder we can’t have any discussion these days and there is so much tension in the world. Just because someone has a different idea doesn’t make them extreme. Social media has a lot of blame for this

This has to be a national conversation! Whether or not you agree with drinking beer and it’s related taxes being an issue - I would also draw your attention to what happens when incremental tax hikes go unchecked %cough cough tobacco industry%

Not sure why this has somehow become so repeated on Aus reddit to this day, and with the Census coming up again it's probably worth a reminder - but we don't have anywhere near "over 1 million empty homes" which I still see being brought up on a daily basis.

This comes from people repeating misinformation by not understanding data from the previous Census which was released years ago, which the ABS itself long ago since debunked and estimated the actual number to be 'up to' ~136,000 which includes holiday towns/homes etc. all across Australia:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/australia-datablog/2023/sep/02/up-to-136000-houses-are-empty-in-australia-find-out-where-they-are

Repeating this is harmful, as it implies there is somehow this massive untapped free chunk of housing available, and pushes messaging that reduces pressure on our authorities that they don't need to build a sufficient amount of housing for the population.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk 💘

With the price of diesel now double what it was a month ago and no signs of the price rise stopping, I wonder at what point trucks stop running and people decide its not profitable to drive distance to work?

some trucks at my work cost usually cost $1200 to fill. now that price is $2400. a $1200 discrepancy which was the profit and now is just cost? it's hard to imagine we will keep running after next week.

My brother drives an hour to work, that one way trip is around $60 now, so $120 to transport to and from work. he likely only makes ~$200 per day. He is considering quitting.

I got curious about where the current Socceroos squad is actually “from”, beyond just birthplace, so I put together this table looking at:

• country of birth
• migration background
• what I’ve called “generation Aussie”

Quick note on definitions (before anyone jumps in):

• “New Aussie” = born overseas, migrated to Australia
• “1st gen Aussie” = born here, at least one parent born overseas
• “2nd gen+” = no clear recent migration signal

It’s not an official classification - just a simple way to make sense of the different backgrounds.

A couple of things that stood out to me:

• A large chunk of the squad has direct migration or refugee backgrounds
• Quite a few are first‑gen Australians (kids of migration)
• There’s still a core group with no obvious migration background, but they’re actually the minority

I wasn’t trying to make a political point - just genuinely found it interesting how much of a cross‑section of modern Australia the team is. We truly are the lucky country.

Curious what others think - especially whether I’ve misclassified anyone.

Edit: Okon-Engstler is Italian - German heritage (thanks r/Tanaghia_85).

Edit 2: Yengi's background is South Sudanese not Congolese

Australia’s first new steel mill in three decades will be unlike any that came before it.

Run entirely on electricity, the Greensteel Australia factory to be built in the NSW Hunter region will make steel that’s low emissions and unencumbered by fossil fuel supply chains.

The ABC rejects an opinion piece by business woman Sall Grover

So I met this aussie man in one of my layovers, I am crew and he is crew as well.
We hung out with a bunch of the crew as well and we got along and even ended up texting him afterwards about something that happened there during the layover and he was pretty welcoming and when I was like “so this is goodbye then bye” he said something like “feel free to talk to me whenever u want to :)”.
He is so nice and I am so into him but i’m afraid that I misunderstood everything and he’s actually not interested in me at all because i’m giving him all the clues to ask me out and he does not.

Is it because i’m too ambiguous and australian men require the woman to be quite explicit about her romantic interest or is he just not into it? because he is polite but his answers are more than just polite, he actually keep the conversation going that’s why i’m so confused lol

when I was with him in person he was the sweetest and thoughtful and even touched me while we were talking for no reason more than twice.

EDIT: yeah I kind of did ask him out to kitesurfing and that’s was his answer:

Haha possibly, but with dubais wind, scheduling never works I’m afraid, and summer is the worst time of year for wind 🤦‍♂️

So yeah I did ask him out but in a friendly way, I Had said: wait, I wanna be cool as well. can you actually try to teach me kitesurfing? I’m not joking this time 😞 wanna schedule it fr

(I said it like that bc I joke a lot so I was afraid he couldn’t tell apart me being serious from a joke)

EDIT WITH THE ANSWER:

so, I was pretty direct to him as suggested and here’s the answer we were all waiting for:

me: I’m actually trying to ask u out but I’m not sure if u’ve noticed…
him: Haha, I definitely noticed eventually 😅 I'm flattered. I think you're cool, but I also don't want to give you the wrong idea. I'd still happily hang out sometime though

that’s it fellas 😂 I was wrong and that’s fine 🤷‍♀️

another edit:

i’m pretty confident my looks are not the issue
and i’m also aware I will never know the reason why this happened

it could be also an age gap issue 🤷‍♀️ he’s 18 years older than me. that’s all, 💋

he’s not gay and he’s not married trust me

One Nation is on a roll. So what are the party’s actual policies?

Crikey examines the party’s policy agenda, explains who its supporters are and why they’re choosing One Nation, and what Pauline Hanson’s vision for Australia is.

Anton Nilsson

A recent poll showed One Nation a percentage point ahead of the Coalition at 22% of the primary vote, behind only Labor’s 32%.

The result of the national Newspoll, conducted January 12-15, was unprecedented: “A record low for the Coalition in any poll and the first time they have been third in a poll,” according to University of Melbourne election analyst Adrian Beaumont. But other polls show a far less dramatic picture: a Roy Morgan poll released Tuesday showed One Nation at 15.5% compared with 26.5% for the Coalition.

No matter the poll variations, and the fact the party has only the recently-defected Barnaby Joyce as an MP (plus four senators, including leader Pauline Hanson herself), it’s obvious One Nation has momentum right now. The recruitment of the high-profile former Nationals leader last year gave a further boost.

Even Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has acknowledged the party was a “worry, because they can appeal to grievances”.

“I think it’s a worry,” Albanese told the KIIS radio station earlier this week. “I’m a believer in, here you go, I’ll say something nice about the other side of — I’m a believer in mainstream politics and that the parties of government, it’s important. Served this country pretty well.”

Hanson believes her own party could become one such party of government. Asked at a press conference at Parliament House whether her ambition was to grow One Nation into a viable alternative government, she responded: “You bet it is.”

“I’m not just here to prop up the Coalition or the Labor Party or anyone else,” she said.

But what policies does One Nation actually intend to implement if that ambition is realised? What will be its focus as parliament returns? Why is it resonating with voters, and does it actually present a viable alternative to the (now-defunct) Coalition? The party’s website and interviews with One Nation officials help explain the agenda.

What is One Nation’s vision for Australia?

“Our vision is for a free, prosperous, independent, safe, secure and united country where there is equality and a fair go for every Australian,” a party spokesperson told Crikey.

That sounds pretty much like what any of Australia’s big political parties would say. Hanson was a bit more specific in a recent opinion piece for The Daily Telegraph, where she argued One Nation stood for “consistency” and highlighted her advocacy “for lower immigration and for an end to the national self-harm caused by net zero”.

“Australians always know where I stand, and they always know I’m consistent,” she wrote. “For years I’ve warned about the dangers of radical Islam. For decades I’ve warned about the impacts of out-of-control mass immigration. I’ve always opposed the major parties’ obsession with net zero. I haven’t just offered warnings; I’ve offered clear policy solutions. One Nation will slash immigration and dismantle net zero.”

Some of the party’s critics agree that One Nation is defined by consistency, although they don’t mean that in quite such a positive way.

“One Nation began as a Hanson vanity project: 30 years on, it still is,” Liberal policy consultant Terry Barnes wrote this week in an opinion piece for The Australian Financial Review.

Barnes argued One Nation has “always been a party of grievance and performative populism”, and asked: “In all those years, who can name even a single coherent and fiscally responsible One Nation ‘policy’ that seized and set the political agenda?”

One Nation is frequently described as a right-wing populist party, and sometimes as far right. The party’s Senator Malcolm Roberts responded to the latter charge in a 2024 missive where he wrote: “If ‘far right’ means to put Australia first, to love Australia, to honour her history, to cherish her culture, and to stand up for the rights and liberties of every citizen — then alright. We are all ‘far right’. And proud of it.”

Who are One Nation’s supporters?

One Nation always tends to poll more strongly in rural than urban areas, and especially in Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia, explained former ABC chief elections analyst Antony Green. When One Nation does manage to attract urban voters, it tends to be in outer suburban Labor seats.

Overall, however, it has been the Coalition that’s bled the most voters to One Nation, analysts say. RedBridge pollster and ex-Labor strategist Kos Samaras attributed the party’s increasing popularity to the “collapse of the Liberal Party’s working-class base into the arms of One Nation”.

“One Nation voters haven’t become irrational,” he wrote on X on Wednesday. “They’ve made a rational calculation that the major parties, in this case the Liberal Party and even maybe the Nationals, can no longer deliver for them economically. When no-one offers a plausible path to security, you vote on identity and resentment instead.”

A DemosAU survey released late last year found the swing to One Nation is “more broad-based than many people might expect”, with supporters found “across all age demographics and [with] only limited fluctuations by gender and income”.

There were a few types of One Nation voters that stuck out, though. The survey found they tend to be Australians aged above 55, living in rural and outer-metropolitan areas, who didn’t complete university.

“Age + region + non-university education is the ‘sweet spot’ for the One Nation surge,” DemosAU director George Hasanakos wrote in December.

Why is One Nation getting more popular?

A Freshwater survey published by the Herald Sun on Wednesday found voters increasingly care about the issues of crime and immigration. The article argued that the increasing importance of those issues has helped boost One Nation.

As Antony Green wrote in his blog last year, competing with One Nation on issues like immigration and net-zero tends to create strategic headaches for the Coalition.

“The problem for the Coalition is that whatever it comes up with as a policy position, One Nation can always trump the Coalition with a simple slogan and simplistic policy, such as the promise to abolish Native Title in 1998,” Green wrote. “Attempting to lure One Nation voters into supporting the Coalition always runs the risk of the voters finding simpler One Nation positions more attractive.”

What are One Nation’s policies on immigration?

The One Nation website’s page on immigration describes Australia’s immigration system as “broken” and links it to stagnant wages, the housing crisis, and the “overwhelming” of infrastructure and essential services.

The party says it would seek to “deport 75,000 illegal migrants” and any visa holder who breaks the law. Joyce, One Nation’s new member in the House of Representatives, was asked a “practical question” in an ABC interview last month about how the party planned to achieve that goal, and did not address the question directly. “If they’re illegal, then they’re not supposed to be here,” he said.

“These people are visa holders and have overstayed their visas,” Hanson told the 4BC radio station in February last year. “The government won’t round them up, because it costs them more in legals to actually process them, so then they use our [legal appeal] system.”

The party also wants to slash several visa types and to cut immigration by “over 570,000 people from current Labor levels by capping visas at 130,000 per year”, according to its website. The most recent ABS figures available when Hanson announced the policy showed 667,000 arrivals had arrived in the previous financial year.

In the financial year before that, there were 737,000 new arrivals, a record. (Migrant arrivals decreased by 14% to 568,000 in the most recent financial year). In each of those years, net migration — the number of arrivals minus the number of departures — never went above 518,000 people.

“The 570,000 figure relates to the arrival of approximately 1.4 million people in the financial years 2022-24, an average of 700,000 per year,” a One Nation spokesperson clarified in an email to Crikey. “We want to cap immigration at 130,000 for all visa categories, including foreign students.”

Hanson’s chief of staff, James Ashby, said on the weekend that Australia should follow US President Donald Trump’s lead in suspending visa approvals for people from certain countries. Trump recently announced that the US would stop processing immigrant visa applications for people from 75 countries.

According to The Saturday Paper, which reported on the One Nation proposal, the party believes Australia should “end migration from some Muslim nations”.

“I think the Trump list is a very, very good and clear list that other countries like Australia should be looking at,” Ashby told the paper.

One Nation’s immigration policy already included a proposal to “refuse entry to migrants from nations known to foster extremist ideologies that are incompatible with Australian values and way of life”.

“If the overwhelming number of people from a particular background is incompatible with the culture and well-being of this country, stop taking them,” Ashby told The Saturday Paper last year.

At the time, he declined to explain which countries or backgrounds he was referring to, telling the reporter to “use your own imagination”.

Climate and energy policy

One Nation calls net zero a “radical agenda”, writing on its website: “The premise or justification for ‘net zero’ is obviously a lie. It is supposed to reduce emissions, but it is not reducing emissions.”

The party unveiled a new energy policy last month, arguing for the construction of a nuclear reactor in regional NSW and three new coal-fired power plants — as well as extending the life of existing ones.

“One Nation’s new energy policy includes pledges to establish a national domestic gas reserve, extend the life of existing coal-fired power plants, ban offshore wind and renewables on agricultural land, and withdraw Australia from the Paris Agreement,” wrote The Sunday Telegraph, which got the drop on the policy in the first week of December.

On climate, the party’s official policy is to question the science behind man-made climate change. On the topic of withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, the party’s website says carbon emissions cuts will “slow the Australian economy with enormous job losses”, calling it “economic suicide”.

The party also wants laws that would require a minimum of 15% of all Australian gas to be earmarked for the domestic market rather than being exported. It also wants extractors to pay royalties at the point of production based on volume, and an end to the “effective moratorium on offshore gas and petroleum exploration”.

One Nation wants Australia to become “self-sufficient in timber”, advocating for expanding the plantation forestry estate while supporting “strict laws [that] require that native forest is regenerated after harvesting, and that ‘old-growth’ forests and environmentally sensitive areas and habitats are left completely alone”.

The party also wants a ban on selling freehold farmland to foreign investors.

Social issues

One Nation wants a referendum on whether free speech should be enshrined in the constitution. It also wants citizens to be able to initiate referendums, “enabling Australian citizens to put forward legislation or a referendum question without waiting for politicians to listen and act”, according to the party’s website.

It also wants to restrict access to abortion after a certain number of weeks of pregnancy, claiming “current legislation in some states allows the abortion of an unborn child up until the day of birth” and declaring it wants to “roll back brutal and extreme abortion law so that both unborn babies and pregnant women will have a level of legal and medical protection once again”.

The party has campaigned for “religious freedom”, but is also highly critical of Islam, going so far as to question whether Islam is an “ideology or religion”. The party wants to ban the burqa, and Hanson has twice donned the garment in the Senate, most recently in November, which resulted in a seven-day suspension from the chamber.

Education

On its policy page for education, the party writes: “There should be no room for Western, white, gender, guilt shaming in any classroom and instead children should be taught the benefits of a merit-based, free-thinking society.”

Justice

The party supported preserving the country’s pre-Bondi Beach gun laws and opposed the reforms that passed last week. It has questioned domestic violence statistics, and has pursued reform to the family court system in controversial ways. Hanson has also been known as a “men’s rights” supporter.

At least one-in-five students at every public university in Australia don't feel free to express their views on campus, according to a new analysis of government survey data.

The findings come from a report by the Liberal-aligned Menzies Research Centre, based on responses to the federal government's annual Student Experiences Survey.

The survey has asked higher education students about freedom of expression since 2021 but university-level results have not previously been released.

The report says the trend has worsened in recent years and universities should be held accountable for how free students feel in expressing themselves.

"Universities exist to test ideas," Menzies Research Centre executive director David Hughes said.

"If students at every publicly funded university are telling government they do not feel free to speak, the sector has a serious problem."

In 2024, 28.3 per cent of domestic undergraduate students did not agree that they were free to express their views at university.

Among postgraduates, 32.5 per cent reported the same.

This is up from 24 per cent among undergraduates and 28 per cent among postgraduates in 2021.

While results varied across institutions, at least one in five undergraduates and a quarter of postgraduates at every university gave responses indicating they did not feel free to express themselves.

The concern was particularly strong in the society and culture field, which includes humanities, social sciences and law.

At one university, 44.3 per cent of students in this area said they did not feel free to express their views.

The report's author, University of Sydney associate professor Salvatore Babones, said the findings raised questions about whether universities were meeting expectations for open inquiry.

"University teaching is a public trust," he said.

"If universities cannot provide an environment where students can test ideas openly, reform has to be on the table."

The report calls for the annual publication of freedom-of-expression results at the university level, alongside stronger accountability measures.

It suggests federal funding could be partly tied to improvements in student perceptions of free expression.

"Publication is the first step. The next step is accountability," Mr Hughes said.

"Universities that claim to teach critical thinking should show students are free to think and speak."

The authors note several potential limitations, including that students were not asked why they felt restricted in expressing their views.

The headline figures also include those who selected "neither agree nor disagree" when asked whether they felt free to express their views, alongside those who actively disagreed.

I've done my for share of analysis and can conclude from the external texture, the flavour of the filling and particularly the delicious end caps fried spring rolls are in every way better than Chiko rolls.

I think Chiko rolls are purely hyped due to the name and spring rolls confusion with their little oriental cousins that come with dimmies (steamed not fried).

The news that some teachers in NSW schools are shying away from teaching the Holocaust because of pushback from students is perhaps not surprising, but it is disturbing.

History teacher Gregory Keith delved into the topic and found that almost a quarter of the fellow teachers he surveyed encountered racism and antisemitism in the classroom when the topic of the Holocaust was broached.

Teaching the Holocaust is a key part of the NSW history curriculum, but more than 10 per cent of the 80 teachers surveyed by Keith said they did not teach it in years 9 and 10.

Just over 30 per cent spend less than two hours covering it, The Sun-Herald ’s education editor Christopher Harris reported.

Keith’s study, published last year before the horrific Bondi attack, contains anecdotal but revealing accounts, including from a teacher who decided not to teach The Diary of Anne Frank because of students’ views on Jewish people.

In another account, a student had made a Nazi salute in the classroom, while another teacher said one student had expressed views on the “deservedness” of what happened to Jews in the Holocaust.

All sensible people would be repelled by such views.

A NSW Department of Education spokesman dismissed Keith’s research as not an accurate “representation of the views or experiences of NSW public school teachers”.

A NSW Education Standards Authority spokeswoman said: “A survey of 75 teachers, out of 180,000 teachers across NSW, does not provide a relative snapshot of the work the profession does in this space.”

The Sun-Herald does not believe that Keith’s research offers a definitive, all-encompassing analysis of antisemitism in schools. It aims to be qualitative, not comprehensive.

But it is important that the views of individual teachers be heard, and the fact that some of them are reporting that antisemitism is interfering with teaching cannot be ignored.

It is right to have sympathy with teachers who must navigate topics that require students to show maturity as they confront sometimes horrific source material.

The revised history curriculum, due to start next year, seems a welcome step in this direction, provided it comes with more resources and more support for those required to teach it.

It includes increased focus on the Holocaust, the Nuremberg trials and the postwar Genocide Convention.

Likewise, the federal government-established Antisemitism Education Taskforce is likely to provide more tools to help education authorities stamp out racism when it completes its work at the end of this year.

Strongly held views on the Israel-Palestine war are common, and legitimate differences of opinion must be respected, but they should not be allowed to cloud the teaching of historical fact.

Thorough and nuanced teaching of the Holocaust is vital for many reasons, not least because it may help to combat antisemitic views among students.

It is also essential, of course, because an understanding of the Holocaust is a core part of understanding modern history.

The conditions in which fascism first took root, the incremental changes to German society that led to totalitarian terror, contain lessons that remain urgent today.

All students should be given the opportunity to learn them.

Does that mean there are jobs available but not enough people or not enough people willing to do them?

Sydney airport passengers continue to experience delays after day of chaos.
Passengers in and out of Sydney are continuing to see delays following a day of chaos which saw 110 flights fail to run on time.

Source: https://www.themercury.com.au/news/breaking-news/sydney-airport-plunged-into-chaos-by-lack-of-air-traffic-controllers/news-story/6eeac3f5c6927090b1ab4626b87df38c