Birth comes at you fast. If you are lucky. One minute, you're home trying to wrangle the bassinet, change table, expensive yet useless musical mobile. Next minute, in hospital groaning, cursing and shouting.

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Then you get your tiny darling. Not that mine were all that tiny - finished up with a 4.7-kilogram dumpling who barely slept for two years.

Last year, according to those fabulous people at the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there were nearly 300,000 darlings and for the sake of their mothers, I hope they were tinier than mine. I did quite a number of those perineal exercises and pelvic floor routines but it was all a bit of a stretch. Sorry.

Death comes at you fast, too. My old dad wasn't that old, just 57, when he died from a pulmonary embolism. Mum was just 62, lung cancer got her in the end. My sister? Just 57.

My parents were Holocaust survivors and refugees always die early. But while they were alive, they worked hard, contributed to the economy, provided three more taxpayers. And they were so loved. As I write this, I think about the Australia which welcomed them. For some reason, there is an insignificant group of Australians not at all interested in welcoming migrants. Apparently, migrants take Australian jobs.

So I decided to ask actual experts about what politicians might describe as the settings of Australian migration policy - and what I discovered rocked my socks.

Alan Gamlen, director of the ANU's non-partisan Migration Hub and professor in the school of regulation and global governance at ANU, is clear on this: "Getting it right in Australia? Roughly speaking yes, we get it probably more right than most countries in the world. We have a very finely tuned, well-oiled machine for managing migration of........

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