Australia’s national debate over migration is being wrongly framed around annual Net Overseas Migration numbers that ignore the structural changes that have occurred in migration over the past 20 years, according to a leading academic.

Professor Alan Gamlen, of the ANU’s Migration Hub, says that Australia is no longer simply a country of permanent settlement with cyclical temporary inflows.

“It has become a society in which temporariness is structurally embedded in the labour market, in higher education, and in urban and rural life,” he says.

In a new paper titled ‘Governing Temporariness in a Settlement State’, Prof Gamlen says Net Overseas Migration (NOM) is the wrong policy target and is an accounting outcome, rather than a policy lever.

“Reducing NOM does not necessarily address the pressures governments and the public are concerned about,” he says.

“The real issue is the temporary population. Australia’s temporary migrant population grows when temporary inflows exceed transitions to permanent residence, and that is what has driven the recent post-COVID surge.”

Prof Gamlen says migration policy should be tied to settlement capacity.

“Instead of chasing annual NOM figures, government should align temporary migration more closely with the number of people able to move into permanent residence each year,” he says.

“The political backlash now evident is not merely a reaction to “high migration” in the abstract. It reflects unease about the scale and durability of a population living in conditional status — contributing economically, often deeply embedded socially, but without secure long-term belonging.”

Prof Gamlen says infrastructure pressures, housing stress, labour market vulnerability, and concerns about social cohesion and exploitation intersect and draw focus to the temporary population.

“The size of the temporary population is not determined by aggregate net migration figures alone. It is governed by the relationship between temporary net inflows and transitions to permanent residence.

“When inflows exceed conversions, the temporary stock grows. When conversions match inflows, it stabilises. This is not a matter of political interpretation but of demographic arithmetic.

“From this perspective, net migration targets are a category error. They attempt to control an aggregate outcome rather than the structural drivers of population change. Arbitrary stock targets, while more aligned with the problem, still require a mechanism linking inflows to permanent absorption capacity.”

In the paper Prof Gamlen points to Canada’s approach to the issue, saying Canada’s target is a policy-constructed and administratively operationalised benchmark.

He says Australia should make migration mechanisms explicit by anchoring Temporary Net Overseas Migration to the rate of conversion permitted within the permanent migration program.

This would see the system align short-term mobility with long-term settlement capacity, he says.

“The permanent planning level becomes the central policy lever, governing the scale of durable population growth and providing a stable basis for infrastructure and fiscal planning,” prof Gamlen says.

“This approach does not eliminate trade-offs. It constrains short-run labour flexibility in favour of long-term demographic coherence. It shifts political pressure onto the permanent migration program. It requires administrative competence and transparency.

“But it replaces headline number politics with structural governance. Ultimately, the question is not whether migration should be higher or lower in any given year. It is how a settlement state should manage temporariness.

“What proportion of the population should consist of temporary migrants? How should temporary labour mobility relate to permanent belonging? And how should governments align migration policy with infrastructure capacity, labour demand, and social cohesion?

“Answering these questions requires moving beyond debates over a single net migration number. It requires a framework that distinguishes stocks from flows and aligns policy instruments with demographic mechanics. If temporariness has become structural, then it must be governed structurally,” Prof Gamlen says.

Read the paper here: Governing temporariness – 13.4.26.pdf