If there’s one policy that both Labor and the Coalition agree on its immigration and both sides will take a policy of a significant cutback in the total number of new arrivals. The only difference will be the number targeted by both sides, with last year’s record intake of 510,000 substantially whittled down.

Labor is a little clearer on what’s likely to happen, promising in December to “halve” the intake. But halve what number?

Back then, The Guardian’s Paul Karp reported the following: “It’s clear the home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, and the immigration minister, Andrew Giles, are seizing the levers they have to restrict what the migration strategy describes as ‘back doors and side doors’ into Australia to tune the dial back away from Big Australia.”

He went on: “The aim of reducing the intake is explicit: O’Neil and Giles refer to ‘rebuilding social licence by returning migration levels back to normal’. Permanent migration is being cut from 195,000 last financial year to 190,000 in 2023-24.

OK, but how does that numerical goal look believable when, as The Australian today reports, for the 12 months to July last year, the number came in at 510,000?

The Coalition’s immigration spokesperson and former Minister of Immigration Dan Tehan refused to give The Australian’s Eleanor Campbell a number!

That said, the forecast of 1.6 million immigrants over four years is unsustainable, especially with our hopeless delivery of new housing and the difficulties that Australians have seeing a doctor, he told the ABC’s Insiders program.

These numbers are a long way from what the Albanese Government promised last year, but what was said then gives us a clue of what Labor will want going forward.

On 9 May last year, the Australian Government announced that the planning level for the 2023–24 permanent Migration Program would be set at 190,000 places. The Government told us that it had designed the 2023–24 permanent Migration Program to address persistent and emerging skills shortages and to attract people with specialist skillsets that are difficult to find or develop in Australia.

So, how come a number like 510,000 shows up? There are a lot of foreign students in those numbers, and you might be surprised to learn that we had 783,369 here hitting the books for the January to November 2023 period.

Of course, they haven’t all come into the country in one year, but it does show the size and the implied importance they are for our key export sector of education. However, foreign students look set to be targeted. “Mr Tehan said the intake of foreign students into Australia ‘absolutely’ needed to be reduced, calling Labor’s response a ‘knee-jerk reaction’,” Campbell reported.

The interesting little-known fact is that foreign students are very important to the labour force. We saw what happened when the Coronavirus sent home some 500,000 baristas, waiters, and other casuals from overseas.

Then we were pleading for them to come back. They have but this ‘crazy’ country can’t provide enough homes and doctors for them. This failure of governments, from both sides of politics, might partly explain why prime ministers don’t last all that long nowadays!

And the difficulty of the immigration issue that many Australians don’t understand was explained to me by Paul Nicolaou, Executive Director of Business Sydney.

Nicolaou explained that if we cut back on foreign students, many pubs and cafes will be in trouble because these students are crucial as employees in that part of the economy.

History has shown that locals aren’t good substitutes for these hardworking casuals with educational aspirations! It might be a sad reflection on our own, but it’s the message that employers in the sector often complain about.

The good politics of promising fewer immigrants could have serious implications, such as higher wages, higher inflation, and higher interest rates for longer than interest rate sufferers really want.