Jess Bennett finished an occupational therapy degree at the University of Tasmania's Launceston campus in November 2024, spent six weeks applying for jobs on the north-west coast and in Hobart, and in January 2025 accepted an offer in Bendigo, Victoria — a shorter commute to a bigger hospital, a higher graduate salary, and a rental market she could actually get into. Her story does not make headlines, because it is not unusual. Tasmania has the oldest population of any Australian state and a decades-long pattern of losing more of its working-age residents to the mainland than it gains, even as the government spends heavily on migration campaigns and skills programs built to reverse exactly that flow. Jess still calls Launceston home. She has no plan to work there again.
What the government did
Tasmania's population strategy did not begin with Jeremy Rockliff, who became Premier in April 2022 and has led a minority Liberal government since the state election of March 2024, an arrangement repeated after the snap election of March 2025 returned another minority parliament. The current framework traces to the Population Growth Strategy released by the Hodgman-Gutwein Liberal government in 2019, which set a target of around 650,000 Tasmanian residents by 2050, up from a base of roughly 510,000 in 2011 (Tasmanian Government, Department of State Growth, Population Growth Strategy, 2019, approx.). Rockliff has kept the strategy's architecture rather than replacing it: a state-nominated skilled migration stream that fast-tracks visa nomination for occupations on Tasmania's skills shortage list, "move to Tasmania" style marketing aimed at both prospective overseas migrants and Tasmanian expatriates on the mainland, and relocation incentives layered onto the government's separate housing and skills programs.
On retention specifically, the government funds University of Tasmania scholarship and clinical-placement places intended to keep nursing, teaching and allied-health students training, and working, in the state that trained them, and runs JobsTasmania programs meant to connect Tasmanian employers with the existing workforce before they turn to interstate or overseas recruitment. The government's headline metric is population size, and on that measure the strategy has coincided with real growth: Tasmania's estimated resident population climbed through the 570,000s by the mid-2020s, up from roughly 510,000 at the start of the decade the strategy was designed to cover (ABS, National, State and Territory Population, various releases, 2020-2025, approx.). Net overseas migration, not the graduates the strategy was partly designed to retain, has done most of the work.
The 2025-26 Tasmanian Budget continued funding for these programs through the Department of State Growth's population and migration line, alongside a separate, larger allocation for the Tasmanian Skills Fund aimed at training more of the existing population into shortage occupations rather than relying only on recruitment from outside the state (Tasmania, Budget Paper No. 2, 2025-26, approx.). Rockliff has also linked the population strategy explicitly to workforce planning in health and aged care, arguing in Budget statements that migration is necessary to staff services an ageing population needs, not simply to grow the economy for its own sake — a framing that at least concedes the state's demographic problem is now a service-delivery problem, not only an economic one.
The strongest case
A strategy that has, on its own headline number, worked
The government's defence starts from a fact its critics rarely dispute: Tasmania's population has grown, and grown faster across the 2020s than the state's long-run twentieth-century average, a genuine turnaround for a state that spent decades being told it was shrinking. During the pandemic, Tasmania recorded net interstate migration gains for the first time in a generation, as mainland Australians relocated for lifestyle and remote work — a shift the government's marketing capitalised on rather than caused, but one it did convert into permanent residents through land release and, at the time, comparatively affordable housing. The skilled migration stream has filled real gaps: aged care, disability support and construction trades in particular have drawn overseas workers the local labour market was not producing in sufficient numbers on its own, at a moment when an ageing population needs more, not fewer, care workers. And Tasmania's demographic profile — the oldest median age in the country — is not something four years of one government created. It is the accumulated result of a birth rate that has been below replacement for decades and a youth-outflow pattern that predates Rockliff, predates Hodgman, and stretches back to at least the 1970s, when the state's mining and manufacturing base first began shedding jobs faster than Hobart and Launceston could replace them.
The evidence
Two figures frame why "population growth" and "brain drain" are both true at once. The first is age: at the 2021 Census, Tasmania recorded a median age of 42 years, the highest of any state and four years above the national median of 38 — a gap that has persisted through every Census since the 2000s and is projected to widen, with Australian Bureau of Statistics long-run projections identifying Tasmania as one of the first jurisdictions in the country where annual deaths are expected to exceed annual births, plausibly within roughly a decade (ABS, Census of Population and Housing, 2021; ABS, Population Projections, Australia, 2023 (base)-2071, approx.). The second is migration composition: ABS regional migration data show that in almost every year over the past two decades bar the pandemic anomaly of 2020-22, Tasmania has recorded a net loss of residents to the rest of Australia, and that the single heaviest-loss age bracket, year after year, is Tasmanians in their late teens and twenties leaving for university, training or their first professional job on the mainland (ABS, Regional Internal Migration Estimates, Australia, released periodically, approx.). Tasmania's labour force participation rate has also run below the national rate for the length of the published series, meaning the state loses productive capacity even among some of the working-age residents who stay (ABS, Labour Force, Australia, various releases, approx.).
The pandemic-era reversal was real but short-lived. Net interstate migration turned positive in 2020-21 and stayed positive through 2021-22 as remote workers and retirees moved south, before reverting to Tasmania's historical pattern of net loss as mainland labour markets reopened and Hobart's housing costs and wages failed to keep pace with Sydney and Melbourne (ABS, National, State and Territory Population, quarterly releases, 2020-2025, approx.). Overseas migration has been the more durable growth engine: net overseas migration stayed positive throughout, and by the mid-2020s was doing more to grow Tasmania's population than natural increase and interstate migration combined (ABS, National, State and Territory Population, 2024-2025 releases, approx.). That composition matters for the brain-drain question specifically, because a state that grows mainly by importing working-age migrants while continuing to lose its own university-trained and locally-raised young people is solving a headcount problem without solving a retention problem — the two are not the same policy challenge, even though one number, total population, can make them look identical on a press release.
The critique
The tension in Tasmania's population strategy is that it treats population size as the target and migration composition as a footnote, when for a state worried about brain drain the composition is the whole story. A strategy that reaches 650,000 residents by 2050 mostly through overseas arrivals, while continuing to lose Tasmanian-educated nurses, teachers and tradespeople such as Jess Bennett to Victoria and New South Wales, will still register as a success on the government's own headline metric even as it fails the workforce the strategy was partly designed to build. Overseas skilled migrants are not a lesser substitute — many fill roles, particularly in aged care and disability support, that the local labour market was not filling at all — but importing workers and retaining home-grown ones are different policy problems requiring different levers, and the government's public reporting rarely separates the two.
Housing cost is a retention lever the strategy does not fully price in. A graduate choosing between a share house in Glenorchy at Hobart's near-record rents and a comparable, often cheaper, share house in a mainland regional centre with a shorter commute to a bigger hospital is making an economic decision no marketing campaign can outbid. Wages compound the problem: Tasmania has consistently recorded average weekly earnings below the national figure, and a graduate's first-job pay gap against Melbourne or Sydney, even adjusted for the lower cost of living, is large enough to explain much of the outflow the government's own migration data records every year among Tasmanians in their twenties (ABS, Average Weekly Earnings, various releases; ABS, Regional Internal Migration Estimates, approx.).
The state's population growth is also unevenly distributed in a way the strategy's single statewide target obscures. Greater Hobart and the fastest-growing outer suburbs have absorbed most of the net gain, while several rural municipalities — the West Coast, Central Highlands and parts of the North-West in particular — have recorded outright population decline for years, compounding workforce shortages in the smaller hospitals, schools and aged-care facilities that serve them (ABS, Regional Population, Statistical Area Level 2 releases, approx.). A statewide target of 650,000 by 2050 can be met in full while entire regional communities keep shrinking, because the strategy sets no floor for regional distribution, only a ceiling for the state total.
Tasmania is ageing faster than it is growing, and growing mostly by importing the population it cannot retain.
None of this is solely the current government's making. Tasmania's youth outflow predates Rockliff by half a century, and the state's low fertility and ageing structure are shared, in milder form, by every advanced economy. What is within this government's control is the pace and honesty of its response: whether the Population Growth Strategy's headline target is reported alongside retention data, not just headcount data, and whether the skills and housing programs feeding into it are resourced at a scale that matches Treasury's own demographic projections rather than the more optimistic scenario the marketing implies. On the evidence to date — a population strategy unchanged in its core targets since 2019, a housing market that has pushed Hobart's rents close to Melbourne's, and interstate migration that has reverted to net loss after the pandemic interruption — the government has continued the previous administration's approach rather than adapting it to a labour market that has moved against it.
The risk to the future
An ageing state funding its ageing on a shrinking working-age base
Tasmania's fiscal position is unusually exposed to its own demographic trajectory. The state already carries the country's oldest population and, on the ABS's own long-run projections, is on track to be among the first Australian jurisdictions where deaths outnumber births, a milestone plausible within roughly a decade (approx.), while GST distribution and Commonwealth health and aged-care funding are both sensitive to population size and age structure (ABS, Population Projections, Australia, 2023 (base)-2071, approx.; Productivity Commission, Report on Government Services). If the state continues to grow its headline population mainly through overseas migration while its own graduates keep leaving for the mainland, the working-age tax base funding an increasingly elderly population's health, aged-care and disability costs will not grow at the pace those costs do — a structural mismatch that shows up first as workforce shortages in hospitals and aged-care homes, and eventually as budget pressure Tasmania, with the smallest economy and among the highest reliance on Commonwealth funding of any state, has the least fiscal capacity in the country to absorb.