Australia population explorer — user guide

Start here

1. Open the explorer. It starts with BAU, short for business as usual. Your own scenario starts with the same settings, so its teal line sits on top of the BAU line.
2. Compare the four futures. The cards show the number of residents in the year selected below the charts. The starting year shown is 2045.
3. Try one change. Scroll to Students under Migration levers. Set Arrivals to 5%. You can move the slider or type 5 into its number box and press Enter.
4. Read the result. This example adds about 7,836 arrivals a year while the change is fully applied. The teal line and result card show the effect of your edit.
5. Try Undo and Redo. The four comparison futures stay the same. Only your own scenario changes.

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Before leaving the explorer, use Save scenario ↓ if you want to keep your changes. Opening the guide replaces the explorer in the same tab. Returning to or reloading the explorer may lose unsaved edits.

Choose a starting future

Select Use Labor, Use Coalition, Use One Nation or Use BAU on a card. That future becomes the starting point for your own scenario. The selected card then says Your starting future.

Changing the starting future keeps any slider edits you have already made. For a fresh comparison, select Reset, then choose a future. Reset takes effect straight away; Undo reverses it.

The Coalition’s financial years appear on the charts by their ending year: 2029, 2030, 2031 and 2032. For 2027–2028, the explorer uses the Labor figures until the Coalition schedule begins. After 2032, it assumes 160,000 a year. These extra years are model assumptions.

Your scenario is the dashed teal line. It starts from your chosen future and adds your changes. You can always compare it with the four unchanged reference lines.

Change migration settings

Each of the eleven migration categories has Arrivals and Departures controls. A positive percentage increases that flow; a negative percentage reduces it. The scale comes from that category’s recorded 2024–25 numbers.

For example, 5% on Students arrivals means 5% more than the recorded student arrivals used by the explorer. It does not mean a 5% increase in Australia’s population. More arrivals increase net migration; more departures reduce it.

Categories discussed in the policy research appear first. Within each group, larger effects from a 5% change appear higher up. This helps you find the bigger flows; it does not mean those changes would be easy to achieve.

Find the controls behind a policy

Open Policy & controls on a category card. The panel brings the sliders and party descriptions together. Cards without a specific policy discussion use Details & controls.

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To explore…	Open…	What you can change
Students and accompanying family	Students → Policy & controls	Student arrivals and departures, and Student family arrivals avoided.
Graduates	Other temporary · including graduates → Policy & controls, or Graduate-related controls inside Students	The wider temporary category, and Graduate arrivals avoided.
Skilled workers and accompanying family	Temporary skilled or Permanent skilled → Policy & controls	The category’s flows and its separate family-arrivals control.
Visitors counted as residents	Visitors counted as residents → Policy & controls	Arrivals, departures and Extra resident-visitor departures.
Visa enforcement	Visa compliance → Policy & controls	Extra compliance departures.
Other migration groups	Their category cards	Arrivals and departures for working holidays, permanent family, humanitarian and special eligibility, Australian citizens, New Zealand citizens and other permanent migrants.

“Arrivals avoided” means how many fewer people you assume would arrive each year. These extra controls start at zero because the research does not give a reliable annual number for each effect. Choose a value to test, rather than treating it as a measured party promise.

Your category edits are added to the selected future. They are not a breakdown of that party’s total. Count each change once: if you reduce arrivals with one slider, do not subtract the same people again elsewhere. Visa places, grants and people already holding visas are not the same as new annual arrivals.

Use Reset this category to clear that group’s edits. Use ← All migration levers, or press Escape, to return to the cards.

Read the results

The first chart starts with Resident population. Select its title to choose another measure, such as people physically here, an age group, births or deaths. The second chart shows Annual net migration: arrivals minus departures. A negative number means more people leave than arrive.

The Inspect slider chooses the year whose numbers you read. It does not change when your policy edits begin; use Timing for that. The 2026 point is the model’s starting population. Future annual flows begin in 2027.

The teal card always shows residents and the difference from your unedited starting future. Select Numbers & changes below the charts for annual results and a list of your edits.

Read the axis labels. The population chart does not start at zero. Overlapping lines can mean the results are the same.

People physically here adds visitors to the resident population and subtracts residents temporarily overseas. These are counts at June, not the number of trips over a year. 65+ per 100 aged 20–64 compares age groups; it does not measure employment or government costs.

Explore the past

Select History beside Projections. Use Inspect year ending June to choose a year. The cards show that year’s numbers; the charts show the available history.

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Scroll to Look inside migration and select a category, such as Students. Its chart shows arrivals, departures and the difference between them. The category order matches Projections.

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All eleven broad migration categories have history here for years ending 2005–2025. More detailed effects, such as student-family restrictions, graduate-only changes or visa enforcement, do not have separate histories in these data. Data coverage & gaps explains these limits.

A dash means a value is missing or does not apply. It never means zero. The extra Unknown visas / rounding category helps reconcile historical totals; it has no projection slider. A separate physical-presence dataset includes 2025 residents; it is not joined onto the population chart.

Expand a numbers & download section for a table and a CSV file you can open in a spreadsheet. Download all category history saves all category records together.

Return to Projections to continue your experiment. Browsing History does not change your projection settings.

Other assumptions

Open Other assumptions above the migration cards when you want to test changes beyond migration flows.

Birth rates and death risks are harder for governments to change directly, so they sit behind the migration controls. Changing them does not change the starting future’s migration schedule.

Save your work and get help

Save scenario ↓ downloads a settings file to your computer. Keep it to return to your experiment. Use Load to open it in the explorer. The file saves your projection settings, not your History selections. There is no automatic save or cloud upload.

For a spreadsheet, open Numbers & changes and select Download all futures as CSV or Download category changes. The policy panel also offers Download policy comparison. You can print the guide or explorer using your browser’s print command.

With a keyboard, use Tab to reach a control and the arrow keys to move a slider. Press Enter after typing a number. Use Left/Right on the Projections and History tabs to switch views. On a phone, the page stacks vertically and wide tables scroll sideways.

Research and limits

The explorer answers “what happens if these assumptions hold?” It does not predict what will happen, endorse a party, or prove that a proposed policy will produce the chosen change.

The guide’s update date is not a data refresh. Labor and One Nation use research checked on 21 September 2026. Coalition uses the 6 October 2026 announcement, checked on 18 October 2026. Historical series end in the years listed above. The explorer does not check for new announcements automatically.

The model uses simplified assumptions about ages and later departures. It does not calculate housing prices, jobs, government costs or individual visa outcomes. It still needs further checks against real demographic results and testing with users. Past changes alone do not show which government policy caused them.

Read the source links beside the policy controls and in History → Data coverage & gaps. The main historical sources are ABS population, ABS overseas migration 2024–25, ABS physical presence and Home Affairs migration statistics.

By Rick Molony, Our Resilient World. Developed with AI assistance. Original content is licensed under CC BY 4.0; source data and software keep their own terms.