The peopling of Australia : United Kingdom immigration
Creators: name: Pope, David Hewitt
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 1976
Subjects: subject: Australia Emigration and immigration

description: The years that span the Federation of the Australian colonies in 1901, and the onslaught of the Great Depression, witnessed a conscious drive to populate and develop Australia more rapidly. The country looked upon as the source of additional population was the United Kingdom. The thesis examines the supply and demand behavioural responses behind UK migration to Australia together with the formation of migration and development policy of Australian governments,Settling UK migrants upon the land was not, as is commonly supposed, a sine qua non of Australia’s migration policy, nor was development policy restricted to the expansion and diversification of rural activity. Rather, Australian governments intervened across a broader front in support of output, employment and high standards of living, and directly, and indirectly, in support of population growth. The latter, in turn, conveyed an ever growing army of consumers, producers and taxpayers into the future. It also meant greater national security. The structural equations estimated in the second part of the thesis cast further light on the demand for UK immigrants and also on why people came. The model differs from earlier Australian and overseas studies in that population is distinguished from labour, supply and demand are specified as 'excess' curves, and the traditional emphasis on 'free market' labour transfers is largely replaced by an emphasis on government intervention. It is difficult to directly compare the empirical results with past research based on different models. This is particularly so in the case of Australian studies which have been wholly confined to single equation push-pull models, whereas one of the advances made in this study is the estimation of separate supply and demand functions. One general observation can be made. The only factors detected in previous studies relating to Australia have been unemployment rates. In contrast, the current study has uncovered a wide range of determinants of migration. My estimation of the inverse demand function (government subsidies to migrants being taken as the left hand side variable), suggests that variation in demand was predominantly determined by the short term absorptive capacity of the Australian economy; the significant explanators were public investment, wealth-cum-budget capabilities, and the degree of tightness in the labour market. On the supply side, the preponderant influences behind migration were the expected income gains accruing to human capital, and the costs of migrating - the latter entailing the costs of transport and job search. Governments most directly influenced transport costs via contract rates and passage subsidies. Though less directly, their intervention in support of jobs and wages, most likely also operated to increase supply. Within the context of the broad targets of population additions set, Australia, it is argued, obtained the numbers she sought. But there were many inherent weaknesses and implicit costs in the strategy of peopling Australia and already by the eve of the depression,the presumed efficacy of policy was under attack.