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Australia’s migration debate is obsessed with the wrong question.

The question is usually: are too many people coming to Australia? But that framing is misleading. The better question is: how should Australia manage the growing number of temporary migrants already living here, and how should that population be linked to housing, infrastructure, jobs and social cohesion?

In principle, Angus Taylor is right to say migration needs to be linked more closely to planning. But that has become harder over recent decades as Australia’s temporary migrant population has expanded, meaning we now have a growing number of people onshore who are effectively in a second-class status: living and working here, paying taxes here, but not fully included in the community.

That is the real issue. Not daily arrivals and departures, but the scale and character of temporariness in Australia.

The Coalition’s plan to link migration numbers directly to housing completions fails to address this. Of course, migration and housing should be planned together. Housing, transport, health, education and migration are all connected. But a one-to-one link between migration and housing completions is more a reaction to a political problem than a solution to a planning problem.

The logic seems to be: people are talking about housing and migration, so let’s give them something about housing and migration. But just because people are blaming migration for the housing crisis does not mean migration is the main cause of that crisis.

Housing is a big puzzle. Migration is one piece of it. It affects demand, but it also contributes to supply. Migrants work in construction, infrastructure, care, education and the many other sectors needed to make a growing society function. If we choke off migration in a blunt way, we may also restrict the labour force needed to build the houses, roads and services we say we need.

The better approach would be to focus less on the flow of people across the border and more on stabilising the size and composition of the temporary population. Canada has recently moved in this direction, and Australia could develop a smarter version of that approach. We should ask: how many temporary migrants are here, what rights do they have, how long are they expected to remain temporary, and when should there be a pathway to permanence?

That is where the real policy work is.

The Coalition’s proposal to bar non-citizens from welfare and the NDIS is even less convincing. It is a solution in search of a problem. It plays into a well-worn stereotype, found around the world, that migrants come to live off benefits. But that stereotype is false. As a group, migrants contribute more in taxes than they consume in benefits. And temporary migrants – a large and growing part of the system – generally do not have access to welfare or the NDIS in the first place.

The irony is that many temporary migrants pay taxes that help fund services they cannot use. Meanwhile, permanent residence in Australia is usually granted to people who already have jobs, skills or family ties here. Many permanent migrants have already spent years in Australia on temporary visas. They have studied here, worked here, built networks here, and gained local experience. They have effectively served a kind of probation period.

It does not make sense to send those people home and replace them with a new crop of arrivals. Nor would it be smart to weaken their access to the social safety net they help fund. If we care about productivity, integration and social cohesion, permanent residence needs to mean something.

The political problem for the Coalition is clear. It is not really aiming at Labor here; it is aiming at One Nation. But as Penny Wong and Julian Hill have put it, you cannot out-Pauline Pauline. The more the Coalition leans into tough talk about migration, the more it risks feeding damaging stereotypes while alienating business groups that rely on migration.

Australia does need a serious migration debate. The temporary migration system has grown too large, too complex and too disconnected from settlement. It has contributed to exploitation, infrastructure stress and social fragmentation. But chasing net migration targets or blaming migrants for welfare costs will not fix that.

The task is to manage temporariness better: fewer people stuck indefinitely in limbo, clearer pathways for those already contributing, stronger protection against exploitation, and better planning for the population we actually have.

That would be a serious migration policy. The rest is just politics.

• Alan Gamlen is a professor at the school of regulation and global governance at the Australian National University and director of the ANU Migration Hub