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UK nurses and carers: why Australia's 40-year forecast is built on migration

News · 2026-09-22 · 4 min read

Most of the talk about Australia's new Intergenerational Report has centred on gloomy deficit figures. Read a little further and a more useful point for anyone planning a move appears: the government's long-term economic plan only works if people keep arriving from overseas, year after year.

If you work in health, aged care or disability support in the UK, or in any skilled job, here is what the report actually assumes and why it is relevant to you.

A country heading for more deaths than births

Australia's birth rate has been below replacement level for more than half a century. The report has now lowered its own assumption again, from 1.62 children per woman in 2023 to just 1.34 by 2065-66. On the government's official modelling, by the 2060s more Australians will die each year than are born.

Plenty of wealthy countries are already shrinking under ageing populations, Japan, Germany, Italy and South Korea among them. Australia is not on that path, and the reason is spelled out plainly: net overseas migration, assumed at 235,000 people a year, every year, for the next forty years. That one assumption holds up the whole 40-year forecast.

Younger arrivals slow the ageing

One detail is easy to miss. The median age of someone migrating to Australia is 26, compared with 38 for the people already living there. So migration does more than add to the headcount. It is the biggest single factor holding back the ageing of the workforce.

Without it, the projected growth in the working-age population (people aged 15 to 64) would not happen. Australia is one of the few developed countries still expecting its labour force to grow through the middle of the century, and newcomers are doing nearly all of that work.

The care jobs behind the headlines

The report names a clear shift towards a care economy: health, disability support through the NDIS (the National Disability Insurance Scheme) and aged care, all growing as the number of people over 65 nearly doubles and the over-85 group nearly triples.

These sectors have long relied on workers from overseas, from hands-on care staff to the wider health workforce. If demand rises as forecast, visa pathways into care-related jobs are likely to become a more central part of Australia's settings rather than a side issue.

The optimistic numbers rest on the same assumption

The report's brighter projections are worth knowing:

• an economy roughly twice its current size by 2065-66
• real incomes 55% higher
• unemployment settling near 4.25%

Every one of those depends on the 235,000 figure. Bring the intake well below that and the ageing curve steepens faster, putting earlier and heavier pressure on health and aged care spending with fewer taxpayers to fund it.

Where the politics could bite

Here is the tension. Both the Coalition and One Nation have campaigned on cutting migration well below the level the report builds in. That sets the government's economic modelling against the policies being floated by the opposition.

So the figure to keep an eye on is not the projected population of 39.3 million. It is whether the intake that makes that projection possible survives the next few elections. The report itself says migration gives Australia a demographic resilience its ageing peers lack, and the open question is political appetite, not economic need.

What to do with this from the UK

A forecast is not a visa, so the practical steps stay the same: find the visa that matches your occupation on the official Australian visa listing, check what that visa asks of your occupation, and if a UK police certificate is requested, it comes from ACRO Criminal Records Office.

For more background, see our look at what the Intergenerational Report means for you and why Australia needs more workers, not fewer. Then see current jobs in Australia, including care and health roles.

#intergenerational report #australia #care economy #aged care #net overseas migration #jobs in australia for uk citizens