Immigration remains at very high levels because there have been few adjustments to policy from the lax settings put in place during the resources boom. These are urgently needed to address the current oversupply of job seekers.

Net Overseas Migration is running at some 240,000 a year. The result is that, as of May 2014, the number of overseas-born persons aged 15 plus in Australia, who arrived since the beginning of 2011, was around 709,000. Most of these people are job hungry. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Labour Force Survey, 380,000 of these recent arrivals were employed as of May 2014. Over the same three years, the net growth in jobs in Australia is estimated by the ABS to have been only 400,000. This means that these recent overseas-born arrivals have taken almost all of the net growth in jobs over this period.

They are doing so at the expense of Australian-born and overseas-born residents who arrived in Australia before 2011. This is showing up in increased unemployment and decreased participation in the labour force in this resident group.

The hardest hit are amongst young people seeking entry-level semi-skilled jobs and recent graduates in a widening range of professions, including nursing, information communication technology and accounting.

This is not the way it was supposed to be. Successive governments have argued that high migration is beneficial because the migration program is targeting skills not available in Australia.