Welcome to your new home: Italian migrants arriving in Australia in 1957. "Australia continues to be one of the more positive countries globally in terms of its view on immigration and refugees," says David Elliott, a director of the Ipsos Social Research Institute. "Despite the current political environment and media coverage of those with more extreme views on immigration, we still see ourselves as a multicultural society and see the benefits that brings." Australia stands out in another way – public attitudes on immigration are relatively stable here at a time when sentiment about immigration in most other nations has turned decisively negative. "Australia bucks the trend in this regard," says Elliott.

Even so, the polling points to a nation with a conflicted relationship to immigration. Australians are worried about the pressure that immigration-fuelled population growth has put on public services and infrastructure. A small majority agree that "immigration has placed too much pressure on public services in your country", two points higher than the global average. Only one in five disagreed. Similar sentiments have fuelled the growing public anxiety over soaring house prices. A relatively high proportion of Australians also fear immigration is making it harder to find jobs. Former NSW premier Bob Carr is one of the few prominent politicians on the national stage who have directly challenged the unspoken consensus between the major parties that Australia should maintain such a high immigration rate.

The figure – the government has a target of about 190,000 each year – is double what it should be, says Carr. Carr maintains that Australia's three largest cities cannot hope to absorb such high population growth without severely eroding the quality of life of their citizens and budgets of state governments. "Political leadership wants to look the other way while their constituencies, especially in Sydney and Melbourne, are being overwhelmed by their rates of increase," he says. Carr says that by the early 2000s the NSW government was spending about double what it had been in the 1990s on infrastructure and still struggling to keep up with increasing demands. He dismissed the argument that the population growth could be accommodated with better planning. "Any idiot can say 'it's just a matter of infrastructure', as though nobody had thought of that before.

"Every suburb of Sydney, except those with political protection like Point Piper and Ku-ring-gai, is being transformed." Carr also challenges the argument that high immigration benefited the nation by sustaining growth. "It is a pretty lazy growth model. It is as if we have given up any innovation for an economy based on throwing up apartment blocks and shopping malls." He believes high immigration is being sustained politically due to the disconnect between those who benefit and those who pay – federal governments benefit from economic growth immigration spurs, while a handful of state governments foot the bill. "It is effectively a Canberra conspiracy against the rest of the nation. Canberra doesn't even know what congestion is. The only congestion they see there is on a Thursday night during a [parliamentary] sitting week on the way to the airport when everyone is trying to get out. Canberra cheerfully asks Sydney and Melbourne to accept 90 per cent of the highest immigration of any developed nation on Earth." Carr does not believe that new immigrants can be encouraged to spread across the nation either, in part because unlike the United States it does not have a vast inland river system. Population, he says, will continue to gravitate to the south-east, which will soon attain levels of density "you can't even imagine".

But Carr dismisses any suggestion that Australia's civil society had suffered due to high immigration. Australia, he says, remains a happy and successful multicultural society. Carr is one of those who believe that successive Australian governments have talked tough on asylum seekers and citizenship tests in order to distract Australians from serious debate about the immigration rate. He is particularly scathing of the debate this week about tougher English language standards in the citizenship test, which he describes as "populist nonsense". "That is the most infuriating concept. Greeks, Italians, Balts and Maltese who came here postwar, very often without English, quickly became outstanding citizens, as did the Indo-Chinese." Another public figure to share similar concerns has been Dick Smith, who is in the midst of a quixotic self-funded campaign to force the issue to the forefront, promising to spend $2 million on marginal seat campaigns supporting candidates of parties that have a policy in place to limit Australian population growth.

Smith concedes that at present One Nation candidates would benefit most from the scheme, but he believes the major parties will come around. He rejects any notion that he has tarnished his campaign through association with One Nation, which many believe opposes immigration due to racism rather than concerns over population sustainability. Smith notes that he advocates for Australia's humanitarian intake to be increased and for our foreign aid to be linked to women's education and empowerment in an effort to curb population growth in recipient nations. Despite this, it is clear that minor parties such as One Nation and the Australian Conservatives are competing with one another for voters concerned about Australia's racial make-up. Pauline Hanson raised the spectre of Australia being "swamped" by immigrants twice in prominent Senate speeches, and the Australian Conservatives are focusing on what the party calls Islamification. This month the National Party's George Christensen echoed Hanson's call to ban burqas from government buildings, saying that his party was "bleeding to the right" on such issues.

While minor parties might enjoy some electoral success flirting with fringe elements, the sheer number of overseas-born Australians makes the politics of immigration complicated for major parties seeking wide voter appeal. The 2016 census showed 6.2 million people were born overseas, with nearly one million of them having arrived since 2011. Around four in every 10 people living in our two biggest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, were born overseas. Analysis of the latest census published by Fairfax Media last month revealed there is just one suburb in the whole of greater Sydney without a resident who had been born overseas. It was Wheeny Creek, a bushy neighbourhood in the lower Blue Mountains with a population of only 21. There are now more than 100 Sydney suburbs where more than half the population is overseas-born.

On federal budget day in each of the past three years, the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection has announced an annual "ceiling" of 190,000 permanent migration places, mostly for skilled migrants. While critics like Smith argue that the government is failing Australians by not having a clear population policy, a Productivity Commission report from last year says that the government's immigration policy serves that purpose. It said in assessing whether or not the policy serves the interest of existing citizens, its impact needed to be posed against "key challenges that Australia faces – slow income growth, slow productivity growth, an ageing population and environmental degradation". On those grounds, it found the policy hard to judge and its outcomes mixed. It said Australia did enjoy a "demographic dividend" from immigration, in that our ageing population would be served by welcoming younger workers into the economy. But it said in the long run, those immigrants would also need to be supported as they aged out of the work force.

It suggested this could be addressed by prolonging people's working life or even introducing "temporary immigration" of working-age people. "Overall, the commission considers that some positive rate of immigration within Australia's absorptive capacity is likely to deliver net benefits to the Australian community over the long term," said the report. "However, enhancing community-wide wellbeing is dependent on having an immigration system that attracts young and skilled people, and is responsive to economic, social and environmental conditions. Yet there are various weaknesses inherent in current processes surrounding immigration policy decision-making, particularly in terms of their ability to take into account broader and longer-term considerations. "Genuine community engagement, well-informed by evidence and a wide range of community perspectives, should be an important part of this process." Australia's population has been rising more rapidly than forecasters expected at the turn of this century. When the total hit 24 million in February last year, demographers pointed out that threshold was reached 17 years earlier than official projections published by the Bureau of Statistics in 1999.

The population jumped from 23 million to 24 million in just two years, nine months and two days. During the second half of last century it took around 4½ years to add each million to the national head count. Robust migration numbers combined with an uptick in the fertility rate and greater longevity have driven the faster-than-expected population growth rate. Australia added 373,000 people last year, with net overseas migration accounting for 56 per cent of the increase. The bureau's official population clock reached 24,652,788 this week, and Australia is on track to reach the 25 million mark in August 2018. If Australia's population continues to grow at a similar rate to the past few years, the bureau's population clock will climb over 40 million by mid-century.