Departures were 62,400 (40,000 of them New Zealanders) making a net gain of 38,400, up from 7900 the year before. It is the highest net migration gain since the October 2003 year and compares with a 20-year average of 11,700.
ASB economist Chris Tennent-Brown expected net inflows to slow over the rest of this year, in light of the improvement in Australian labour market indicators.
"We expect annual net migration will peak around 42,500," Tennent-Brown said. "But at the moment the risk to this forecast is to the upside."
Deutsche Bank chief economist Darren Gibbs said the stronger-than-expected migrant flows risked reigniting the housing market and were a key source of upside risk to the Reserve Bank's growth and domestic inflation forecasts.
The bank's June policy statement sketched an alternative scenario where the annual net inflow of working-age migrants peaks at 45,000 or 8000 more than in the bank's scenario requiring, all else being equal, interest rates half a percentage point higher than they would otherwise be.
"In principle [that] provides some offset to recent bad news as regards global dairy prices," Gibbs said. "That said, we think that the Reserve Bank will have been pleasantly surprised at the lack of spillover from recent migrant inflows into the performance of the housing market.
"It could be that the composition of foreign migrant arrivals - heavily focused on visas that suggest a long-term visit, not necessarily a permanent arrival - means that pressures on the owner-occupier housing market, as opposed to the rental market, are less than total migrant inflows might suggest."
See more on the immigration stats here:
