Submission to the Senate Select Committee on Productivity

opening statement

Thank you for the opportunity to appear today.

Australians were promised prosperity, but what they have experienced is decline. 

The gap between what was promised and what has been delivered sits at the centre of this discussion. 

The current economic model has failed the people it was supposed to serve, yet Australians are still being asked to accept a bigger economy while they themselves fall behind in their own country.

Living standards have stalled or gone backwards, housing has moved out of reach for large parts of the population, and the cost of living continues to rise faster than incomes. Australians are getting poorer inside an economy that is still being described as a success. It is anything but.

A key driver of that outcome has been the mass migration experiment, and it has failed on every metric. It has not delivered prosperity where it matters, and it has made things worse for everyday Australians. Headline GDP has been nudged higher through deliberate efforts to expand the size of the economy, but GDP per person has gone backwards and people’s lives have suffered as a result.

Despite this, the economic establishment remains committed to continuing an approach that has already failed in practice and is now being felt in the daily lives of Australians.

Aggregate GDP should not be treated as the primary measure of a nation’s success. If the price of higher GDP is turning Australia into something like a Mos Eisley cantina, then the problem is not that we need to manage migration better, it is that we are chasing the wrong objective altogether.

A country is not an abstract economic zone whose purpose is to maximise output at any cost. It is a place with a history, a culture, and a people who have a right to continuity and stability in their own communities.

Once you accept the premise that any level of change is justified if it lifts a headline number, you have already conceded that the character of the nation is expendable. I reject that completely. Economic performance matters, but it does not override the right of Australians to preserve a country that remains recognisable, cohesive, and their own.

Australia is stagnating while the mass migration experiment continues. that alone proves the model has failed.

You cannot fix productivity, housing, or the cost of living while continuing to increase population under the same approach, because every one of those pressures is being intensified at the same time as policymakers claim to be solving them.

Australians are not widgets. They are not flesh-covered units of economic output to be scaled up or scaled down to improve a graph.

A nation is its people, not a set of numbers, yet the system we are operating under continues to expand without regard for the consequences, and Australians are carrying the cost of that expansion every day.

If this inquiry is serious about productivity, then it has to confront the structure that is producing these outcomes.

That means ending the mass migration experiment, resetting the model, and putting Australians first.

Full Submission to the Senate Select Committee on Productivity in Australia:

This submission focuses on paragraph B, which deals with a long-term national settlement strategy, and paragraph K, which allows for related matters. Both lead back to the same issue. You cannot deal with productivity, housing, infrastructure, or regional development without addressing the impact of mass migration.

Australia is now confronting the consequences of a failed policy model that has not delivered rising living standards for its people and is actively contributing to their decline. Governments have relied on high migration and rapid population growth to make the economy appear stronger than it is. That headline growth has been used as proof that the system is working. It has not. The policy was sold on the promise that it would lift productivity and improve living standards. It has failed to do both. Productivity has stalled and outcomes for Australians, measured per person, have gone backwards.

Australia is stagnating while migration continues at elevated levels. That alone clearly demonstrates that the mass migration experiment has failed, was always going to fail, and must be abandoned immediately.

When a system delivers worse outcomes for the people living under it, it is failing. GDP per person has gone backwards over extended periods, housing has become unaffordable for a growing share of Australians, infrastructure is under strain, and the cost of living continues to rise faster than incomes. These outcomes flow directly from the policy settings that have been chosen.

The current model rests on a simple idea. Bring in more people, increase demand, and the economy grows. That idea is flawed. It substitutes population growth for real productivity and calls it success, even when Australians are worse off.

Housing shows this clearly. Demand has been pushed higher year after year. Access to stable and affordable housing has deteriorated. These outcomes are driven by decisions that deliberately increase demand without regard for the consequences.

The impact on productivity follows directly. Growth driven by population rather than output per person weakens the system. Workers face higher costs and fewer opportunities to get ahead. Capital flows into land and housing instead of productive investment. Businesses operate under higher costs and tighter margins. Over time, this erodes the strength of the economy.

The policy implication is straightforward. You do not solve this by trying to absorb ever-increasing population levels through changes to the built environment. Turning suburbs into high-density, mass-produced dog boxes embeds the problem and shifts the cost onto Australians in their daily lives.

The only workable solution is to address the source of the problem. That means ending mass migration in the interests of the country. Without that, every other policy will be a stopgap while the system continues to add fuel to the fire.

This goes beyond economics. It speaks to the nature of the country itself. Australians expect continuity in their homes, their neighbourhoods, and their national identity. They do not expect a country that is constantly reshaped by policy decisions outside their control.

The whole world comes here, which raises a basic question about limits and continuity. If everyone can become part of the same system without constraint, the character of that system changes. A civilisation that expands without limit cannot remain stable.

Australians are governed by an establishment fixated on flawed economic models that treat expansion as an end in itself. This is wrong. It hollows out the country and leaves behind an empty shell, where a nation once defined by its people, its culture, and its history is reduced to numbers on a spreadsheet.

This approach reduces Australians to inputs in a system designed to push headline figures higher. When growth slows, the response is to increase scale rather than fix the underlying problems. The result is a model that prioritises expansion over outcomes and ignores whether living standards are improving.

Australians are not widgets. They are not flesh-covered units of economic output to be scaled up or scaled down to improve a graph. A functioning economy matters, but it is not the sole measure of a nation’s success, and when policy treats people as interchangeable inputs rather than citizens with a stake in the country, it loses its purpose and drives long-term decline.

That decline is already visible. Many individuals in Australia have lost a sense of meaning and direction because they are being pushed into a system that treats them as machines whose role is to generate ever-increasing output. The result is a culture that rewards short-term consumption and day-to-day living, which may improve headline GDP figures but leaves the country weaker.

Great civilizations do not operate like this. They lift people out of that abyss and give them something higher to aim at. That cannot happen if the country is run on the assumption that leaving the borders open and increasing population will somehow deliver prosperity, while GDP per person continues to fall and living standards continue to deteriorate.

A national settlement strategy cannot work under these conditions because spreading population across regions while continuing to increase it simply extends the same pressures rather than resolving them. Any serious long-term strategy has to focus on improving outcomes for Australians on a per-person basis, with higher living standards, lower costs, and a system that works in their favour, because without that focus the entire exercise becomes another attempt to manage the consequences of a model that is already failing.

That failure sits within a broader economic framework that prioritises scale and constant expansion without delivering results, and continuing along this path is not a sign of stability or prudence but an admission that the underlying problem is being avoided. Current settings are often treated as the safe option, yet rising costs, declining affordability, and weakening outcomes are steadily eroding economic and social stability and reducing the country’s ability to sustain itself over time.

Australia has reached a point where incremental change will not be enough. The path we are on leads to managed decline, and continuing along it will not stabilise the country, it will hollow it out over time. We are being asked to accept lower living standards, weaker communities, and a loss of continuity as the price of maintaining a model that no longer works. That is not a serious offer to the Australian people, and it is not a future that should be accepted.

What is required now is a decisive shift in direction that puts Australians first, restores a sense of ownership over this country, and rebuilds a system that serves its people rather than reducing them to inputs within it.

This will require political courage, because it means stepping away from a framework that has dominated for decades and confronting the reality that it has failed. It means choosing to lead rather than manage outcomes, and acting in the long-term interests of the country even when that breaks with established thinking.

There is no easy path from here, but there is a necessary one. The task is not to manage decline or to make it appear less severe. The task is to turn the country around, restore its direction, and ensure that Australia remains a nation that its people recognise, can belong to, and can pass on intact.

Recommendations

I recommend that the Committee endorse the following:

1. Formally acknowledge that mass migration has failed as a productivity strategy and is driving declining outcomes for Australians on a per-person basis.

2. Commit to a substantial and sustained reduction in net overseas migration to levels that serve the long-term interests of Australians, not short-term economic optics.

3. Establish as a core policy principle that improving living standards for Australians on a per-person basis takes priority over aggregate economic growth.

4. Replace aggregate GDP as the primary measure of economic success with metrics that reflect real outcomes for Australians, including GDP per capita, real wage growth, and housing affordability.

5. End demand-side housing policies that inflate prices and increase competition against Australians, including access by non-citizens to government-backed housing schemes.

6. Direct all taxpayer-funded housing, infrastructure, and social support policies toward Australian citizens as a first priority.

7. Recognise migration-driven demand as a central cause of housing unaffordability, infrastructure strain, and declining productivity, and treat it accordingly in all future policy design.

8. Undertake a full structural reset of the current economic model, with a clear mandate to move away from population-driven growth and toward a system that delivers rising living standards for Australians.

Yours sincerely,

Brian Marlow
Founder and Director - Revive Australia

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