Tony Burke on Labor’s immigration shake-up

0:00This is the Guardian. I'm Tom McElroy, the political editor at Guardian Australia, recording in Canberra on the lands of the Nunnawal and Nambri people. As the migration debate rages, my guest today is the minister for home affairs, immigration and citizenship, Labor's Tony Burke. Burke was scheduled to give an address on policy changes to the National Press Club six weeks ago, but the speech was postponed at short notice. A mid-internal negotiations within the Albanese government and days after one nation announced their policy to significantly cut the number of temporary migrants in the country, Burke returned to the press club on Thursday. He announced a suite of reforms, which are designed to move the system away from demand-driven settings and to help the government achieve forecasts for net overseas migration. The norm measures the difference between the number of people coming and going from Australia

1:00after a period of at least 12 months. We need immigration. We just need to make sure that it is targeted for the needs of Australia in numbers and across the different categories that work for our economy. Under the changes, most new international students will be restricted from bringing family members to live with them in Australia. There will also be new measures for visa overstayers, including more compliance officers and places in immigration detention. What we will do is simply go back to what Australia always did before 2015. This is not the sort of operation that some people have seen on TV happening in other countries. The minister openly admits that he doesn't have the support of the coalition to legislate a wider set of proposals and will push on using power he already has. So is this announcement enough to address the threat of one nation leading the public debate about migration? This is the Australian Politics podcast.

2:02Well Tony Beck, welcome to the podcast. Good to be back Tom. You're the man of the day, so thank you very much for making time for us. We're speaking just after your address to the National Press Club and you've announced changes to the migration program essentially designed to meet the net overseas migration target. Give us a sense of the problem that you're trying to solve as a starting point. Yeah, look, there's a lot of a lot of challenges that are put out there that I that I don't think are real. The thing that I think is real is our immigration program needs to slow down a bit to give housing supply a chance to catch up. Now the problem we have is not actually immigration's fault. Australians have changed how many people they want to live per house. So you know, you go back to the hawk years and people work saying we don't have enough homes since then. Housing supplies doubled and populations only gone up 75% but what's changed in that time is the household size of Australians has changed as people have a right to. So back living in one house. Yeah, so back

3:05then it used to be 2.9 people in a house. Now it's 2.5 and you sort of think oh, what's the difference? Every time you move one decimal point, you have to find an extra 450,000 homes. Wow. And so the challenges we have now are not people shouldn't look at the immigration program and look at it and think it's somehow it's their fault. It's not it's something else that's caused it. But at having been caused, we now need to get housing supply back in front. And that does mean we need to temper the size of the immigration program for a few years. In your speech, you acknowledge that the Australian economy relies on migration and you talked about some of the sectors universities is a good example that temporary residents make a big contribution to. You also talked about doctors, construction workers, aged care, nursing for example. How do you get the balance right because even a small change could have a big economic impact? Yeah. And this is where some of the some of the arguments that have been out there have just been wild. And effectively, there's sort of this new form of nimbyism where instead of not in my backyard, it's people saying, I I want

4:09fewer. I want immigration levels down, but I want the same number of immigrants who work in my community. And so that's we've, you know, and that argument often revolves around people saying, oh, but we need immigrants in the regions and fruit picking and harvesting and agriculture and hospitality. And that's all true. But we shouldn't pretend that immigration isn't also essential to the functioning of our cities. There are a whole lot of people whose jobs rely on overseas students. They've got real jobs. The economic contribution matters. In terms of services that people rely on, you know, the the handsome policy that's out there presumes that for our temporary workforce, temporary work visas, you could just say, oh, well, you can't bring your family anymore. And they'd all still come. Now, you take the the four big categories that, you know, there's a lot of immediate public understanding of the need for construction workers because of trying to build houses. That's part of what, you know, see, construction, skilled workers, doctors, nurses and aged care workers.

5:13At the moment, for the first two of those, construction and and doctors, half of them bring family with them. If they're not allowed to bring their partner, they're not coming. And similarly for nurses and aged care workers, two thirds of them bring family with them. So while people might say, oh, these numbers, you know, these really low numbers are something that people would imagine might work. The reality is, once you look behind the veil of, okay, what would that mean? It'll mean your aged care homes wouldn't be able to function. Your hospitals would be chronically short of nurses. You would have areas not just in the regions, but in the cities where you simply can't access a doctor. And the whole problem we're trying to solve being housing supply would move more slowly because you end up with a skills shortage for parts of the project. Yeah. There's a shortage of electricians. There's a shortage. And like for building, for example, one of the ones that I often think about in the cities is plasterers. Now almost every home, you

6:13need to have a plasterer in before it's ready to live in in Sydney and Melbourne. Two thirds of our plasterers are born overseas. Wow. So the immigration program, we, this is where you can have whatever conversation you want about the total numbers. Until you get to what these are in class, so you're talking about you're not in a real conversation. And that's where I'm desperately trying to move the debate because, yeah, we've got political opponents out there on each side as everybody does in politics. That's not for attending. That's a problem. That's a democracy. But on one side, people saying we shouldn't do anything to detail immigration. And that would just say, well, we're not going to get a give housing supply a chance to catch up. And I don't think that's a reasonable position. But separately to have radical cuts in immigration, just means fundamental services that we rely on in Australia, disappear. And all of this is before you get to the concept of all the other just benefits to society we have from being a modern multicultural nation.

7:17Let me come back to that in a moment. And I also come back to one nation. You mentioned Paul, Hanson's policy. You were talking about the importance of some skilled workers being able to bring their families because they might otherwise not come. Doctors are good example. The flip side of that is international students, the government's trying to disincentivise them, perhaps a little bit and limiting their ability to bring family members. Yeah. So there's, there's two things here. First of all, the global supply of international students with the universities and others running the right strategies, we believe they'll still be able to get the students that they need. The second thing to remember is students are more likely to be younger. And so therefore the likelihood of them being permanent structural relationships in that way, it's not the same order as it is for the other occupational. Sharks are not true. But the final thing I'd say is of a student comes as a single. They can live in student accommodation. Student comes as a family. They're out there in the housing market with everyone else.

8:18Yep. So students coming as singles and one of the things we've been doing with the planning levels university by university is basically for the ones that haven't been pulling their weight on student housing, saying to them, well, until you do, we're not giving you extra student places. Yeah. But of course, all of that becomes a bit silly if they provide a whole lot of student accommodation and we're letting people come in with their whole families because they won't be able to use it anyway. Of course, of course. It shows the complexity of making changes here and the difficult job that you've got in front of you. I'm a volunteer. You said that some of the measures have been under development for, I think you said since February last year, February this year, I started intense work on this straight after the election. I had a view, a very strong immediate view that effectively, we needed to be part of the solution on housing supply, but we needed to find a way of doing that that wasn't going to create significant economic problems or structural problems with who we are as a society.

9:20So the work started last year and all the different measures that I've announced today, everything gets tweaked a little in the process, but basically all of these components have been around since February of this year. And I, the only reason I normally I want to even go to that sort of detail, because it goes to cabinet process to some extent. And I'm pretty strict on sometimes my indeterminate, I'm not back around thinking about that. But I took the view that there is something that is demonstrably untrue that people will fall back on. And that, you know, I know the Greens are already accusing us of claiming that all of this is somehow a response to one nation and to a political debate, given that it's demonstrably not that, and we'd started at the work so much earlier than any of that per unit show. I thought it was important to give people public confidence that what we are grappling with is a policy challenge. People will talk about the political dimensions of it and that's the world we're in. But there is, in fact, a policy challenge here that people need governments

10:23to grapple with. That's how can you pull back immigration enough that housing gets back in front without causing, you know, ricochet serious damage to other parts of what it is to live in Australia? Obviously, the policy doesn't happen in a vacuum from the politics. And you've mentioned one nation and some of the questions of the press club were along these lines, is the public confidence that's so important in the immigration program being damaged by the current political debate? Oh, it's bi aspects of it, absolutely. And the rather than pull at any party, I think just the online world itself becomes so factory and becomes so willing to find somebody to blame that we end up with people of goodwill, basically believing things that just aren't true. And so, you know, that was why at the start of the speech today, I went through

11:27the absurdity of mass migration as a term. Like it's it's using Europe, it's using the UK. The truth is when we get to 2031, we will still be below the population of Australia that was projected before the pandemic in the international report. And similarly, this claim that really gets to me, you listeners might be in a happy enough algorithm that they haven't confronted this one, but effectively this claim that gets made all the time that we're bringing in more yoga teachers and construction workers. It's one of the lips talking points and it gets to run and then in some of the darker places of the internet, it's this view all everywhere and I get, you know, all these, if I have a brave enough to go into my direct messages, is lined up with this claim. And it's just so untrue. Like just unpack it because you had the numbers and you explained the background on that. Yeah, yeah. So the, and people can do the maths themselves. Construction workers coming in used to be four and a half thousand and we've got it up now. We've, we've more than tripled it. The latest figures we've had have been 15,000 for the last

12:30financial year. So construction workers have been going up a lot. Yoga teachers, the number for the whole life of this government has been zero. But they, they turn up on the skills short each list. The reason they turn up is there is a trade agreement that says they have to be there. Right. And that trade agreement was put in place under the previous government and announced by Dan Tee and when he was assistant trade. So effectively they've, they've planted this. It turns out like India, it's part of the agreement with India. So yeah, we'd lose other things if we undid it. There's no reason to undo it. But at least under the life of this government, not a single person has used it. But it's become one of these weaponized talking points in a world of some people wanting to get into algorithms that, that spread things that are fictitious and the ones saying it apparently don't really care. We'll be right back. On parliamentary negotiations, you started your speech with quite a frank admission, I thought.

13:31And I can't remember a time I've heard a politician say something of this ilk. You said that you thought that the package you were putting forward was significant, but it didn't go as far as you would like. Tell us why that is the case and the politics underlying. Yeah. So effectively, if we did know measures, the projections that we have at the moment will still reach the budget numbers, which is not nothing because we've missed the numbers in the past, haven't we? That's right. That's right. So the, because the numbers are treasury projections, they've never actually been a target. But now, because of what's happening with the housing debate and everything, there's an expectation on governments to get there. And net overseas migration includes a whole lot of things that governments are not in control of. So we're not in control of the number of citizens who go back and forth. There's an agreement with New Zealand. So basically, when our economy is stronger, more of them come here if their economy strengthens some go back. But since John Howard in particular, some of this started under Hawking Keating, but since John Howard in particular, temporary work visas when their employer sponsored 100% demand driven. There is no

14:35ministerial control over the metal. Your department deals to make sure that they're in accordance with the act, but you don't control the numbers. And similarly, UK backpackers, a free trade agreement that was settled just before we came to office has UK as the full three years with no obligation to work in the regions. And when they signed the agreement, there were 17,000 in Australia. There's now 80,000. So there's different parts of the system that are fully deregulated and have been the whole way through. If as a government, we're going to do what I was talking about with housing and be able to pull them back, then the more levers we have to be able to pinpoint where we can pull back different parts of the system, be it different occupations or whatever it might be, then the more effectively, we can make sure not only we get the numbers, but we get the numbers in a way that has the easiest landing place for the Australian economy. So there are some powers that I've already

15:40got through regulation. And today I announced all the things that we'll do with that. There are some powers that I have with the department just on straight policy, and we announced that as well today. There are some additional challenges that are challenges that I'd like to be able to do something about that I can only do with legislation. And at the moment, the opposition had started the talks. I thought they were going really well. They weren't coming back saying that anything that we were proposing was problematic. But for whatever reason, at this point, they've said there's no way they'll support a legislative response at all. Now, if we can get extra legislation through, then effectively, I've got additional leaders. And the two key areas that I referred to in the speech today, the first one is what we call an expression of interest framework, which allows you to say for a visa class, okay, for these ones, you don't go straight to application, you express interest in it, and then we look at the expressions of interest and invite people to apply. What

16:44that effectively does is allows, it gives you a situation where somebody who's making clearly fraudulent or, you know, unmeritorious claim is probably better term than fraudulent and unmeritorious claim. Because they haven't got to the application point, they don't suddenly have a whole lot of appeal rights where they get the same outcome just by going slow on the appeals. And it's a good power to have it would, it would like it to allow us to be much more pinpointed. The other thing that I've been trying to work through is on protection visas. It is absolutely important to this government and I was so important to me personally that for people who have genuine protection claims that they're able to make them and that Australia is able to show ourselves be a good and compassionate country. But it is also true that some of our coast load comes from the at five eyes countries, Western Europe, Scandinavia, people where the chances of getting over the line are very close to Nile. But effectively those applications slow down all the genuine ones

17:48as well. And while they're in the system, those applicants, even if they know it's completely fraudulent, they get knocked back by the department, they can appeal to the ART, they appeal to the ART, that can take up to three years. And then they fail again, they can put in the application to the federal court and wait it out, sometimes people waited out for nine years for a claim that never had merit. And there must be a way that we can distinguish those sorts of applications from the ones that are the reason we have an asylum system. All right, Tony Burke, we're out of time, but we'd love to have you back soon to talk about other parts of your Ministerial Responsibility, especially the ART, something that Guardian readers care about. Let's do that soon. You're on. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks for joining us this week. Remember, we're bringing you daily updates from Canberra in our new newsletter, Politics Really. Make sure you sign up at thegardian.com slash newsletters. And on next week's podcast, Guardian Australia's economics editor, Patrick Commons and I,

18:48will be discussing the latest intergenerational report said to be released by Treasure Jim Charmers on Monday. So make sure you subscribe to Australian politics wherever you get your podcasts. The executive producer of the show is Alison Chan. I'm Tom McAulroy, have a great weekend. And keep things exhumed in.