I built this Explorer to help move our immigration debate beyond “One Nation says this, Labor says the opposite” and towards understanding the trade-offs between their policies.
Watch this short demonstration to see how you can compare the parties’ policies, change the migration settings and explore Australia’s population history.
Why I built it
Our political conversation on immigration is stuck at “The Coalition or One Nation says this, Labor says the opposite”. Moving away from ‘he said, they said’ to understanding and agreeing on trade-offs will be required to support an effective ‘participatory democracy’, one where people have real input into how much migration, and what type, is right for Australia at this point in time.
What is the Australian Population Explorer?
The Explorer lets anyone see the impact of the announced immigration policies by Labor, One Nation and the Coalition in Australia. It allows anyone to experiment with the major ‘levers’ that will shape Australia’s population to 2045.
To understand where we might be heading, look at where we have come from. The History tab shows twenty-five years of population change and lets you examine individual migration categories.
The Explorer also allows you to select a category of migration and see how this category has changed over the previous twenty-five years.
This ‘Explorer’ simulation if the first of a number I intend to build this year to help people understand the dependencies between our systems and to allow our political conversation to change from One Nation says this, Labor says the opposite and move toward discussions which focuses on trade-offs between options.
How did I build the simulator?
In an early substack article Our Resilient World, I explained how that most serious problems facing us do not neatly fit in our traditional government systems:
Since then I have built five AI generated simulations including this one. My goal has to been to demonstrate how with the help of AI a non-programmer like myself has been able to use AI models to build quite simulations that allow people to explore interacting systems and to start to understand the consequences of making choices between the main elements of these systems.
What next?
The Australian Population Explorer is the most sophisticated so far. It was built with the AI Product Flow (AIPF) Framework, which Ghulam Akbar and I have been developing, and the Kangentic agentic development environment.
Together they turn the Explorer’s workflow and interface into a reusable pattern, so I can build new trade-off simulators on almost any topic that AI models can research and analyse, at the scale of a community, a country or a coalition of democratic countries.
What would you like to explore?
Tell me in the comments which topic you’d like a simulator for. I’ll build the most-requested one next and share it here.