The Citizenship Minister insists the government is working to move new migrants out of major cities as the nation passes a daunting milestone.

Just after 11 o’clock tonight, Australia’s population will tick over to 25,000,000 people, decades earlier than expected.

Previously, experts predicted we wouldn’t hit that mark until 2051.

If the current rate of population growth continues, we’ll hit 40 million by that year.

The rapid increase is mostly due to new arrivals, rather than births.

Minister Alan Tudge tells Ray Hadley the trend must be dealt with.

“We’re working on this.

“Inevitably when people come in the first time they’re on some sort of visa and we can put conditions upon those visas.

“And in addition, we can create further incentives for people to want to migrate to the regional areas or the smaller states.

“The big challenge that we’ve got is that nearly everybody who comes to the country wants to come to Melbourne and Sydney.

“Whereas other parts of the nation are actually crying out for people.”

Minister Tudge admits new migrants don’t appear to be adapting to the Australian way of life as well as they did in years gone by.

“I’ve been talking about these integration issues for some time now.

“Our multicultural success has been built on integration… and we want to make sure that continues.

“And there are some indicators that that’s not happening quite as well as it used to in the past.”

Click PLAY below for the full interview

AUSTRALIAN POPULATION CLOCK (11AM)

24,999,477

This projection is based on the estimated resident population at 31 December 2017 and assumes growth since then of:

• one birth every 1 minute and 42 seconds,
• one death every 3 minutes and 16 seconds,
• one person arriving to live in Australia every 1 minute and 1 second,
• one Australian resident leaving Australia to live overseas every 1 minute and 51 seconds, leading to
• an overall total population increase of one person every 1 minute and 23 seconds.