Advance Australia has discovered that hard-working Australians are sleeping in cars. They’ve also discovered, what luck! Exactly who’s to blame: a million migrants whom Anthony Norman Albanese personally let in while you weren’t looking.
It’s bollocks, naturally. But it’s expensive bollocks, amplified through 44 separate Facebook ad campaigns, 1.5 million impressions, and the kind of repetition that would make Goebbels or Fox or Pravda, The Global Times burst into applause. The mining lobby didn’t get where it is by accident.
“Anthony Albanese and the Labor Party have just let in more than 1 MILLION migrants. Hard-working Australians are now sleeping in cars. Our way of life is being pushed to breaking point.”
On another page they insist the “housing crisis is caused by immigration” and mock Labor for trying to “fix it with more immigration”. Breitbart, eat your heart out.
It is pure horse shit. Yet it works because it is simple, emotive and free of anything so inconvenient as data, history, or a passing acquaintance with arithmetic that hasn’t been tortured into a confession.
So let’s do the unfashionable thing and look at the numbers. Imagine Craig Kelly pulling a reverse ferret. Then let’s look at who’s paying for the ads telling you not to look at the numbers.
1. The “million migrants” scare in context, or, how to lie with statistics you made up
Yes, there was a post-COVID surge. Borders slammed shut in 2020, then reopened and we got the catch-up rush that every serious demographer predicted, including the ones the government employed specifically to predict this sort of thing.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics, (experts whose actual day job is counting things) shows:
- Net overseas migration (NOM) peaked at about 528,000 in 2022-23.
- It fell to 446,000 in 2023-24, a 16 per cent drop.
- Treasury and the Parliamentary Library expect it to fall again to around 260,000 in 2024-25, then to roughly 225,000 by 2026-27—back in the pre-pandemic range.
So yes, if you count everyone who crossed the border twice, count the tourists, count the departures as negative arrivals, throw in a few backpackers who came for the cricket, not to mention the odd au pair, add up three different years, and squint really hard at the NPLT data that the ABS explicitly says NOT to use for migration statistics, then yes, you can get to “more than a million.”
Who needs AI hallucinations when the political system is already on a psychedelic bender?
You can also claim Australia has negative population if you count backwards. Neither exercise tells you anything except that someone is actively trying to deceive you.
Former Immigration deputy secretary Abul Rizvi, an honest scholar who actually ran the migration program for a decade, as opposed to shouting about it from a Facebook ad, has been pointing this out for years.
“An honest broker in a field crowded with partisan megaphones, Rizvi notes that net migration surged after COVID because both Coalition and Labor governments monkeyed with student and temporary visa settings, then panicked when the predictable spike arrived.
More importantly, Rizvi stresses that net migration has already fallen over 40 per cent from the 2022-23 peak to around 315,000, and is still trending down. 
Hardly “out of control”. More like Morris Minor turn indicators on a truck, a badly signalled U-turn that’s already happened while Advance was still commissioning the billboard about how it needs to happen.
Rizvi’s real criticism is not that migration is too high or too low, but that there is no coherent population plan anchored in long-term targets and frank public explanation. In the vacuum left by that failure, he warns, “misinformation and extremist views flourish”.
You do not have to look far to see who is flourishing. Or who’s paying for the horse manure.
2. Advance, the mining lobby and the business of fear, follow the money
Australia’s mining oligarchy has been running this play since the gold rushes. When workers started organising in the 1890s, the mine owners discovered Chinese labour, and suddenly Chinese labour became the threat. When unions got too strong in the 1950s, we needed to worry about Mediterranean migrants taking jobs. In the 2000s it was boat people. Now it’s international students and skilled workers.
The enemy changes. The enemy’s purpose, divide and distract, never deviates.
Guardian reporting shows Advance has pumped out at least 44 anti-immigration ads on Meta since the 2025 election campaign began, with more than 1.5 million impressions, drenched in talk of “mass immigration” and “threats” to Australian values. Some Liberal MPs have called the campaign “disturbing” and warned it will poison relations with migrant communities. 
But disturbing is rather the point. As H.L. Mencken observed: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
Independent analyses of Advance over the years have mapped its tight links to the Liberal right, coal and gas interests, and the broader ecosystem of think-tanks and donor networks that never met a fossil fuel they didn’t want to subsidise or a renewable they didn’t want to strangle in red tape.
Gina Rinehart. Matthew Canavan on the advisory board. A direct line from the Minerals Council to the Liberal Party room to these Facebook ads. When someone shows you who they are, as Maya Angelou said, believe them the first time.
It is the politics of the mining state: keep wages low, keep regulation light, keep the electorate angry at someone, anyone, other than the companies bankrolling the show.
Migrants are perfect. They cannot sue. They do not own TV stations. They don’t donate to political parties or sit on corporate boards. And most importantly, blaming them means you never have to talk about who actually has their hand in your pocket.
As George Orwell noted: “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Advance’s ad campaigns are pure wind, expensively amplified. X is a buzz with drones delivering disinformation every minute of the day. Craig Kelly, for example, clearly uses one of those automated social media publication software kits that flood the zone with shit, 24/7.
3. Housing: the lie at the centre of the scare
Advance’s favourite line is that “high house and rental prices from mass immigration are pushing people to breaking point”, and that cutting migration is “how you fix the housing crisis”. 
Blaming migrants for housing shortages is like blaming patients for hospital waiting lists. It’s technically true they’re using the service, but it rather misses the point about who defunded it.
Even the business-friendly Institute of Public Affairs, which hates migration almost as much as it hates unions, admits the real story is that governments promised 1.2 million homes under the National Housing Accord and are already 55,000 dwellings behind schedule. 
We have:
- A decade of chronic under-building,
- developers sitting on approvals like poker chips, waiting for prices to rise,
- planning and zoning rules that move at glacial speed,
- governments that sold off public land instead of building public housing, and
- negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions that turned housing into a speculative asset class instead of shelter.
In other words, a supply system rigged for speculation rather than shelter. A business model, not a migration crisis.
Economic modelling by KPMG, reported in The Guardian, shows that if Australia slashed migration heavily over the next decade, house prices in the mid-2030s would actually be about 2.3 per cent higher than if migration stayed at current levels. Fewer migrants also means fewer workers to build homes and weaker economic growth. 
You would think that might slow the panic a little. Yet the scare merchants just shout louder, because as Mark Twain observed, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Not that we can be certain. Twain’s corollary is that most quotations are apocryphal.
And Facebook’s algorithm travels faster than both.
4. The human cost—but not the one they’re selling
Advance’s ads show Australians sleeping in cars. Fair enough. That’s real and it’s shameful.
But they somehow never mention Ravi, the Indian carpenter sleeping in his ute in Penrith because he can’t afford the $350/week for a room in a share house, while he spends his days building $2 million townhouses for investors who’ll never live in them.
Or the Sheila, the Filipino nurse paying $500/week to share a garage conversion in Parramatta, working double shifts in aged care for $28 an hour while the facility owner banks a tidy profit margin.
Or Prakash, the international student from Nepal who paid $45,000 in fees to a Group of Eight university, got told there’d be “plenty of part-time work”, and is now doing 30 hours a week in a 7-Eleven on a student visa that legally limits him to 24, because his boss knows he’s got no recourse and needs the money to eat.
Or the Al-Khalil refugee family from Syria, resettled in Dandenong, Tarek, Lina, and their two kids, who’ll be blamed for the housing crisis, the jobs crisis, the infrastructure crisis, and, if Advance can work out the angle, probably climate change, wage stagnation, supermarket shrinkflation and potholes on the Monash, as well.
That’s not a migration crisis. That’s a business model. And the people running the business would very much prefer you blamed the worker from Mumbai rather than the landlord in Mosman, the developer in Toorak, or the gas company CEO posting record profits while households shiver through winter.
The real victims aren’t just the Australians sleeping in cars. It’s the migrant workers building the houses they’ll never afford, blamed for a crisis created by negative gearing, land banking, and thirty years of treating shelter like a casino.
5. Misusing the numbers—statistical vandalism as a contact sport
Part of the trick is deliberate statistical vandalism.
Abul Rizvi and other demographers have had to repeatedly correct commentators and lobby groups who grab raw border-crossing data, the stuff that includes tourists, business travellers, students going home for Christmas and coming back, and literally anyone who crosses an international border in either direction and pretend it is official net migration, inflating the numbers by hundreds of thousands.
The ABS has explicitly, repeatedly, warned that this so-called NPLT data is not designed to measure net migration at all and should not be used that way. 
But why let methodology get in the way of a good scare? Or a well-funded Facebook campaign?
It is the same pattern when Angus Taylor solemnly intones that Australia is “approaching 2 million new people in just five years”, without mentioning that:
- This includes a one-off post-pandemic catch-up that was both predicted and temporary,
- it mixes temporary and permanent migration like you’re making a statistical fruit salad,
- Treasury itself is forecasting a sharp fall in net migration from the peak, and
- if you’re going to count temporary movements, you might want to mention the departures too, unless arithmetic has become optional.
The number is not wrong as arithmetic, it’s just fundamentally misleading as policy analysis. Which is of course the point.
When you’re selling fear, precision is the enemy.
6. What the serious research actually says—or, what happens when you let experts do their jobs
Strip away the slogans and a remarkably consistent story emerges from Treasury, the Productivity Commission, the Parliamentary Library and Home Affairs’ own research:
- Migrants are strongly concentrated in prime working ages, which nudges up labour force participation and helps offset population ageing.
- Over time, migration improves the Commonwealth’s fiscal position, because migrants pay more in tax than they draw in government services.
- Productivity Commission work finds little evidence that immigration causes unemployment for existing residents; impacts on wages are neutral to slightly positive when migrants’ skills complement local workers.
- Housing pressure from migration is real but minor compared to the structural failures in supply: decades of under-investment in public and social housing, planning systems designed to maximize prices rather than shelter, and tax settings that reward speculation over occupation.
Rizvi, who actually ran the migration program for a decade before politics turned into one long Facebook ad, just wants the political class to tell the truth: explain that migration has benefits and costs, manage it sensibly, plan for infrastructure and housing, and stop outsourcing the conversation to trolls and mining lobby fronts. 
This is not utopian. It is literally his job description from the 1990s, before evidence-based policy became a term of abuse.
7. So why the obsession with migrants?—the decoy explained
Because migration is the perfect decoy. The ideal distraction. The hobgoblin that never stops giving.
If you are a fossil fuel billionaire, or a big developer in Queensland or Western Australia, or a gas company executive explaining this quarter’s super-profits to shareholders, the last thing you want is a national conversation about:
- Price-gouging on energy while companies post record returns,
- gas companies making super profits while households cop $2,000 quarterly electricity bills,
- banks and landlords extracting record rents from a deliberately constrained housing supply,
- negative gearing costing the budget $50 billion over four years while governments plead poverty on public housing,
- developers sitting on approved sites, land-banking while prices rise,
- the lobbying that wrecked serious climate policy and stalled the transition to cheaper renewable power for a decade.
You certainly do not want someone pointing out that your donations to political parties, your seats on advisory boards, your media investments and your think-tank funding have systematically undermined every serious attempt at housing reform, climate action, or energy transition for thirty years.
Far easier to point at “them”. The student from Mumbai. The nurse from Manila. The refugee family from Damascus. The people cleaning the mines, nursing the old, stacking the supermarket shelves at 11 pm, building the houses they’ll never afford.
You get the division and fear for free, plus a handy wedge issue at every election.
It’s not new tactics. It’s just new technology. The enemy changes; the grift stays the same.
8. What a grown-up conversation would look like—if anyone in power was brave enough
A serious government that was not terrified of Advance’s next billboard would do three basic things:
First, publish a clear population and migration plan with transparent NOM targets over ten years, and explain how these line up with housing, infrastructure and climate goals, as Rizvi has argued for years.  Treat the electorate like adults. Show the trade-offs. Explain the benefits. Acknowledge the costs. Stop pretending migration policy can be run on vibes and focus groups.
Second, turbo-charge housing supply through massive investment in public and social housing, faster planning, penalties for land-banking, and an end to tax settings that reward speculators over occupiers.  You cannot fix a supply crisis by cutting demand while leaving the supply system broken. That’s not policy. That’s prayer.
Third, crack down hard on exploitation in sectors that rely heavily on migrant labour—agriculture, hospitality, aged care, construction, so that migration does not become a business model based on wage theft, sham contracts, and regulatory avoidance. If employers want access to migrant workers, they can bloody well pay them properly and provide decent conditions. Funny how that never makes it onto Advance’s Facebook ads.
None of that fits on a fear-mongering Facebook tile. All of it is more honest than “stop mass immigration and put Australians first again”.
But honesty was never the point.
The Stakes
This is the test. If Australians fall for the mining lobby’s latest immigrant scare, we deserve what comes next: more gas, more coal, more profits for the few, more precarity for everyone else. More rent extraction, more wage stagnation, more public services cut to the bone while corporations post record returns.
And when the rivers run dry and the summers run hot, when the housing crisis deepens because we cut migration but didn’t build anything, when aged care collapses because there’s no one left to do the work, Advance will have another Facebook ad ready. Probably blaming the Sudanese family in Dandenong for climate change.
The choice is simple: believe Gina Rinehart’s marketing department, or believe the ABS. Believe the people who profit from your fear, or believe your own eyes. Believe the mining lobby’s Facebook ads, or believe the economists, demographers, and policy experts who’ve been trying to have an honest conversation for years.
Mass migration crisis or mass disinformation campaign?
Only one of those is real. And it’s not the one being shouted from a million Facebook ads.
As Orwell knew, the purpose of propaganda isn’t to persuade. It’s to humiliate. To make you doubt your own judgment. To wear you down until you’re too tired to check the numbers, too confused to follow the money, too angry to ask who benefits.
Advance is counting on you being too tired, too confused, too angry.
Don’t be.
Clarke and Dawe: The Great Big Huge (Whopping)Migration Crisis
(Clarke, in suit and tie, sits at a desk with “EXPERT” placard. Dawe stands with microphone, concerned expression.)
Dawe: Mr Clarke, thanks for joining us. There’s been a lot of talk about a migration crisis.
Clarke: Oh yes, it’s very serious.
Dawe: How serious?
Clarke: Extremely serious. Catastrophically serious. We’re talking about more than ONE MILLION migrants.
Dawe: One million?
Clarke: More than. Could be one million and one. Could be one million and several. The point is, it’s a very big number.
Dawe: And when did they all arrive?
Clarke: Well, not all at once obviously. That would be a logistics nightmare. No, they came over several years.
Dawe: How many years?
Clarke: Three years. Possibly four. Ten. The exact number of years isn’t really the point—
Dawe: So roughly 250,000 to 330,000 per year?
Clarke: (irritated) Well if you want to divide the number, yes, but that makes it sound much less frightening, doesn’t it?
Dawe: Is that not accurate?
Clarke: Accuracy is beside the point when you’re trying to create a sense of crisis. The important thing is the cumulative figure. ONE MILLION. (makes expansive gesture) It’s a lovely round number. Very memorable. Fits nicely on a Facebook ad.
Dawe: Speaking of which, who’s paying for these ads?
Clarke: Concerned Australians.
Dawe: What sort of concerned Australians?
Clarke: Mining billionaires mainly. The occasional gas company CEO. Some very concerned property developers. People who care deeply about the housing crisis.
Dawe: Property developers care about the housing crisis?
Clarke: Oh enormously. They think about it constantly. While sitting on approved developments. Waiting for prices to rise.
Dawe: And the mining billionaires?
Clarke: They’re worried about Australian workers. Worried they might start asking for higher wages. Or questioning why gas prices are so high when we export the stuff. So naturally they want to help by blaming migrants.
Dawe: That seems… circular.
Clarke: It’s very sophisticated political strategy. You see, if ordinary Australians are busy being angry at the nurse from the Philippines, they’re not angry at the gas company executive or the landlord or the mining magnate who just paid zero tax on $2 billion in profits.
Dawe: So it’s a distraction?
Clarke: It’s a diversionary tactic.
Dawe: What’s the difference?
Clarke: About $1.5 million in Facebook ad spend. (pause) Look, the formula is very simple: find a group that can’t fight back, preferably one that’s actually building the houses or nursing the sick or stacking the shelves—
Dawe: The essential workers?
Clarke: Exactly. Blame them for everything. Housing crisis? Migrants. Health system crisis? Migrants. Climate change? Migrants, probably. Traffic congestion? Definitely migrants. Rain on the weekend? We’re still workshopping that one.
Dawe: But the Australian Bureau of Statistics says migration has already dropped 40% from the peak and is heading back to normal levels.
Clarke: (waving hand dismissively) The ABS are experts. We don’t trust experts anymore. They use data. Very suspicious.
Dawe: You don’t trust data?
Clarke: Not when it contradicts the narrative, no. You see, we’ve got this thing called NPLT data.
Dawe: What’s that?
Clarke: Nobody knows. But it’s got a lot of border crossings in it. Tourists, business travelers, students going home for Christmas and coming back, anyone who crosses a border twice gets counted twice. It’s magnificent. Absolutely useless for measuring actual migration, but very useful for generating big scary numbers.
Dawe: But the ABS says you shouldn’t use that data for migration statistics.
Clarke: They would say that, wouldn’t they? They’re the ones who count things for a living. Can’t have that sort of expertise interfering with a good scare campaign.
Dawe: So what’s the solution to this crisis?
Clarke: Cut migration immediately. Stop all the people who build houses from coming here. That’ll fix the housing shortage.
Dawe: Won’t that make the housing shortage worse?
Clarke: (pause) You’re thinking about it too much.
Dawe: Sorry. So if we cut migration, who’s going to build the houses?
Clarke: The Australians who are currently sleeping in their cars, obviously.
Dawe: They’re going to become builders?
Clarke: It’s a natural transition. Car sleeping to house building. Very logical.
Dawe: And who’s going to nurse the elderly? Who’s going to pick the fruit? Who’s going to—
Clarke: (interrupting) Those questions are exactly why we need the Facebook ads. To stop people asking questions like that.
Dawe: I see. And how long has this strategy been running?
Clarke: Oh, about 150 years. Give or take. We blamed the Chinese in the 1850s. Very effective. Then the Italians. Then the Greeks. Then the Vietnamese. Then the Muslims. Now we’re back to a general “migrants” category. Keeps it fresh. The important thing is the target keeps changing but the technique stays the same.
Dawe: And nobody notices the pattern?
Clarke: Oh they notice. But by the time they notice, we’re already running the next campaign. It’s very efficient. Like a production line. A fear factory, if you will.
Dawe: A fear factory?
Clarke: Exactly. You put in some statistics, add a dash of xenophobia, process it through Facebook’s algorithm, and out comes division, distraction, and another term in government for people who’ve never met a fossil fuel subsidy they didn’t like.
Dawe: That’s quite cynical.
Clarke: It’s not cynical if it works. (leans forward) Look, the alternative is we’d have to talk about who actually owns the country, who’s making the profits, who’s extracting the rents, who’s buying the political parties. Much easier to talk about migrants.
Dawe: So there’s no actual crisis?
Clarke: Oh there’s definitely a crisis. Just not the one we’re advertising.
Dawe: What’s the real crisis?
Clarke: That people keep falling for this. (pause) But we’re working very hard to make sure they keep falling for it. That’s where the $1.5 million comes in.
Dawe: Mr Clarke, thanks for your time.
Clarke: My pleasure. Though I should point out, this interview probably won’t get 1.5 million impressions on Facebook.
Dawe: Why not?
Clarke: Facts don’t travel as well as fear. Something about the algorithm. It’s very technical. You wouldn’t understand.
Dawe: I might if you explained it.
Clarke: That’s exactly what we’re trying to avoid.
(Dawe stares at camera. Clarke smiles pleasantly. Fade to black.)
END
Urban Wronski Writes 