Australia is awash with immigration rhetoric, but little of it is grounded in evidence, clear definitions or serious policy alternatives. Rather than an informed public debate, Australians are being offered slogans, blame and ambiguity.

Anyone who looks at the Australian media would be told that there is an immigration debate occurring.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with having a debate on immigration. It is undoubtedly an effective way to ensure that Australian immigration policy remains robust and well targeted towards Australia’s needs. Immigration numbers need to be moved both upwards, and downwards, from time to time. Policy settings need to be constantly adjusted.

But in practice there is no real immigration debate.

A worthwhile debate would be based on competing rational propositions and arguments, grounded on sound data and analysis. That is not what’s happening. What we are actually seeing is the blaming of migrants for both real and imagined problems in the community (housing shortages, cost of living, congestion and sometimes just looking different), devoid of any evidence or serious alternative propositions. This is accompanied by political opportunism and rhetoric to capitalise on grievance. It is also fertile ground for those with racist motivations.

The anti-immigration rhetoric we are hearing has a strong familiarity with the noise coming from Donald Trump’s America. We are told by some right-wing politicians that Australia is being overwhelmed by “mass migration.” Of course, it’s just a throwaway line, because no actual numerical meaning is given to either “mass migration,” a medium level of migration or indeed a small level of migration and no alternative optimum migration number is proposed.

Similarly, the Opposition has chosen to label the Labor government as promoting a “Big Australia” – whatever that means. Once more there is no definition of what constitutes a big Australia, medium Australia or a small one. No genuine alternative migration target is offered. Ironically, the evidence is that, if anyone, it has been Coalition Governments which have driven bigger numbers.

We have also heard from a right-wing politician that Australians “ feel like strangers in their own country” due to “unsustainable” immigration. It is unclear how many Australians he is referring to. Of course, we get no indication of exactly what a “sustainable” level of immigration should be.

Where can the community turn to be informed by independent expert knowledge of Australia’s current immigration policies and future needs? Who will help them evaluate competing propositions, if any? There is a systemic problem here. The Coalition government abolished the expert national Bureau of Immigration and Population Research three decades ago. The mainstream media either have very little subject matter knowledge of migration issues and/or are conflicted by having their own specific agenda.

Think tanks are similarly patchy. The incorrect use of data by one of them led to the Australian Bureau of Statistics publicly issuing advice that its data should not be used to artificially inflate immigration figures.

Astonishingly, despite Australia being a major historical immigration country, Australian universities have been extraordinarily slow to develop any useful system-level expertise in this area. Against this trend, the recently established Migration Hub at the Australian National University (with which I am affiliated) offers promising green shoots with its well-informed analysis.

In the meantime, the big immigration issues for Australia’s future are not being dealt with in public discussion. For example, few in the community are exposed to knowledge about Australia’s demographic issues and the contribution that migration will continue to make to reducing the age of the workforce – even though more observant Australians might notice on a daily basis how absolutely vital migration is to a functioning aged care and medical system. Similarly, they might not notice how Australia gets a free kick from temporary migrants who pay taxes without getting the same benefits as citizens and residents. Behind the scenes, huge immigration processing (and removals) backlogs need to be cleared.

Instead, with the forthcoming new Coalition policy on immigration, we are likely to get rhetoric about a smaller, “sustainable” immigration program. We are told that the Coalition will not actually name their preferred immigration level. Who can debate an unknown number? I guess they will be relying on the vibe of the thing.

We are also hearing talk of more questions for aspiring migrants about “Australian Values.” The Coalition started using this tool in 2007. But do we all have exactly the same values in Australia anyway? Does asking migrants about any of these things actually make a difference? No one has ever bothered to check, because migrants were never the target. The underlying purpose of these questions has been to make the Australian resident community feel that migrants are being made to jump through more hoops. For similar reasons, we might hear proposals to add more questions to the Australian Citizenship test. That lemon has been squeezed repeatedly since its introduction by the Coalition in 2007. There seems to be no problem that can’t be solved by adding another question to the test, to ensure that people who have resided in Australia for four years, and possibly decades, think exactly like “us.”

It will be a long hard road, but the Coalition needs to re-develop the genuinely high level of expertise it once had in immigration policy and practice, prior to 2007.

But the Australian government is not above blame here.

If the government has an active program of explaining to key interest groups and the broader Australian community precisely what benefits we are all getting from immigration, it’s invisible. Some Australian governments in the past have successfully worked hard to get the message out so that misinformation and disinformation do not rule. The government has also shown excessive slowness and caution implementing recommendations of its own Parkinson review, such as a longer-term immigration planning framework. This would give more certainty around direction, without absolutely binding them to any particular outcome.

It does not help that the quantitative measure of the impact of immigration on Australia used in relatively recent times – net overseas migration – is quite complicated and completely opaque to most people. Despite its intrinsic worth, the fact that it includes both permanent and temporary movements as well as movements of Australians and New Zealanders results in much larger, and scarier, figures being constantly in the public domain compared to the old permanent migration program figures.

The ever-increasing complexity and sophistication of our migration system (e.g. various Pacific work and engagement schemes run by different departments) means that the Australian government needs to develop an updated and coherent narrative on how and why Australian immigration policy works for the country.

Once again, burying the immigration function within a much larger security portfolio severely limits the time that Ministers and senior officials have available to explain Australia’s immigration future. A separate Department of Immigration and Citizenship might help.