According to www.news.com.au Politicians use a simple trick to hide your shrinking economic slice. They increase mass immigration to drive population growth in times of trouble. More people means more transactions and so more GDP. A larger pie. Of course, more people amid a downturn means an even smaller slice of economic activity for you than otherwise, but because nobody reports the latter, it doesn’t matter. The pollies get to claim there is no recession and parade themselves as great successes. How did it come to this? In the good old days, pollies would cut immigration numbers during downturns. This mitigated the impact of a downturn on Australian living standards. But after 2012, during the great mining bust, the Coalition government kept its foot on the immigration accelerator for the first time during a downturn.
