Why immigration is back on the agenda

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Australia is often celebrated for its multiculturalism and lauded as an immigration success story.

But in politics, debates over immigration are complex and long established through multiple political cycles, coming again to a head most recently following the horrific attack on Bondi Beach on Sunday.

After a messy internal period over energy policy, the Coalition is looking to familiar territory of immigration to lay down new battle lines. But what do the numbers actually show?

Today, in a special episode of Politics Now, Tom Crowley on the reality and the real politic of immigration in Australia.

And a note from us that this conversation was recorded before the events at Bondi Beach.

But with the attack further escalating the focus on migration into Australia, the content still feels pertinent to share.

Hi, I'm Patricia Carvellis. And I'm Tom Crowley.
And Tom, political debate over immigration is truly a tale as old as Australia, but also I don't think it's fair to just confine it to Australia.

The idea of who we are, who comes in, what our story is as a community is something that goes on around the world. Now I know you have an immigrant family, I do too.

In my own historical country, if you like, both my parents being born in Greece, there are debates about immigration, whether that affects their national identity.

I'm mentioning it on purpose to say it is not unique to the Australian story to have a debate about what immigration looks like, what the rates should be.

It's being had around the world, but our particular framing is interesting, I think, if I can kind of zoom out because we have, you you know, a settler colonial history, which is very fraught, which deals with dispossession of First Nations people, and then a nation entirely built on immigration.

These things happened. We're still debating immigration in this country.
Why?

Geez,

that's a tough question to get us started, isn't it? Have you met me and are you surprised by the framing? I'm not often lost for words.

Let me just make this kind of grand sweeping statement about all of human history.

I think the kind of the two reasons that this keeps coming back is that I think it's immigration and anger about it and anger about the other is this kind of pressure valve.

It's this pressure valve when people feel resentment about the kind of, you know, maybe isolation and sense of belonging and sense of community that they feel in their own society.

That's the kind of thing that can make people look over there, look at a group, look at a new group and kind of say, well, that's the root of the problem.

And then there's the economic dimension of the same thing. The, you know, we talked in the last episode that we did about housing.

I can't afford the sort of life that I feel that I should have, the sort of life that I feel that my parents used to have in this place.

Again, that's the kind of thing that can make you look over there. at the newest thing that has changed and go,

that's the root of the problem. That's the thing that I'm angry about.
We'll talk maybe more in this about how much is that the case, how much isn't that the case. But I think that's the why.

That's why this is the kind of the trope that keeps repeating not just here, but everywhere.

Now, before we get into the real details here, I just want to flag that this podcast is sort of a companion podcast to our explainer on housing, which looked at what the government has promised, what they should be promising, what they've actually delivered, what that looks like in a political cycle.

You can find that back in the podcast feed. I think it's important to say.

But Tom, I want to start by kind of demystifying the immigration statistics a little bit with you as we refine this conversation to what it's really about, because there's a few sort of columns.

It's about numbers. It's about the type of people we're letting in.
I think it's very much a complex conversation.

We'll start with the numbers and the idea that the numbers are too high and that they're having a major impact.

The framing certainly from the coalition at least, but I think more broadly, is that the numbers are too high for

what we provide, health, education, housing, that they're mismatched. Is that about right?

So I'm going to give you a peek behind the curtain on politics now here and say that our wonderful producer Lara has given me very strict instructions not to use too many numbers in this answer and I'm going to say that out loud.

She didn't tell me that, did she?

Well I'm going to say that not to not to throw Lara under the bus, but just so that I can hold myself accountable for this answer and you, the listener, can see whether I've done a good job of trying to kind of explain the shape of this without boring you to death with all of these numbers because it can.

It can get so technical. But over the very long run, let's kind of start the modern world at the end of World War II.

And over that period of time, our population has kind of grown consistently at around about 2% per year. And migration has consistently been a big part of that population growth.

That's a rate that's kind of, you know, moderate, but modest.

I think over time, migration has accounted for a little bit more of that because what's happened with the people who are here and the baby boomer generation in particular is that we have this big generation of people who didn't have that many kids and like a lot of rich countries we're getting a bit older, the kind of the population that's born here.

And so over time migration has been a big part of keeping us a little younger, a big part of topping up our workforce and accounting for, I guess, a larger part of the pretty steady population growth that we've had over time.

So nothing much has changed in terms of the number of people, but there is a little bit of a composition thing that's gone on there.

Within that as well, something that's happened, particularly over the last little while, has been a shift towards more temporary migration, where the word temporary is used a bit advisedly because something that this is actually Labor's review of the migration system in 2022 found what they described as permanent temporariness or kind of limbo temporariness where people stay for as much as a decade on a series of different temporary visas.

Maybe they start as international students and then they stay as temporary workers and then they're here for a long period of time. And it's sort of because our labor force maybe needs them.

They're doing jobs that other people aren't doing, but also because kind of a bit of a messy and maybe, you know, poorly planned system, I think there's broad recognition about that.

just creates this kind of precarious limbo, not really good for the people who don't know exactly how long they're going to be able to stay here.

They may be struggling to become permanent residents because there's a massive backlog, by the way, for permanent migration to actually become an Australian citizen.

The number of family members of current Australian citizens who are waiting in this queue to kind of get a permanent visa is enormous.

So you've got these people kind of stuck in this temporary situation. And I think there's maybe a broad recognition that that's not really something that's working for anyone.
And so

the number of temporary migrants, and here is, I think, the first time, second time I will use a number, is kind of growing, starting to accelerate a little bit.

And it's now at the point where we've kind of got 2.5 million, I think, roughly people here on temporary visas in Australia.

And that's the problem that I think is people are starting to recognize there's job insecurity and living insecurity for those people.

And then also, maybe that's part of what is, I think, bringing this kind of public focus, attention, and more recently, anger.

That's the broad tide.

But then in COVID, we had this massive jolt that I think has boosted the political salience and attention on all of this, which is that firstly when the borders shut, we had plummeting migration, a whole lot of people left.

The number of migrants in the country went all the way down to more like 1.5 million. And then when the borders open, we got this kind of jolt back, a big surge in the numbers of people coming in.

So we're not too far off the sort of long-term trajectory that we were on before.

But I think that that bumpiness as well has just sort of been noticed in a more tangible way.

And then coupled with high inflation, housing costs, or the economic anger has been part of why we maybe have this perfect storm, similar things happening in other countries too,

of anger about migration. Oh, massively, which is why I wanted to start the tone of the podcast with the international context, right?

Because I just think sometimes I hear from people in Australia some negative self-talk about our country, which is fair enough. People are entitled to their view, but I do think

it doesn't reflect reality. There is this stuff is going on everywhere, people, right? Like it's not unique to us.

And in fact, you know, we might be borrowing some of the Farage language from overseas or the Trumpian language. But my goodness, I want to say that we are in some ways the pioneers of some of this.

Pauline Hansen and her commentary in the 1990s, before you were all born probably, but I was around, not covering politics, I was too young, but like I remember it, was about being swamped by Asians, you'll recall.

I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians.

Between 1984 and 1995, 40% of all migrants into this country were of Asian origin. You know, all of this sort of language.
We've been doing this for a while before the sort of current trends.

Back to your numbers point, and you did very well not nerding out too much. We got the COVID surge and now moderation more so, but still that moderation isn't enough.

So the coalition wants to outbid Labour on the number. That's what they're doing.
I think it's important not just to talk about it in terms of just infrastructure.

I know the coalition keeps saying that's all it's about.

But I think there are some simple things here the government could do and things we will do around looking at our capacity as a country to house people who want to come here and make their life in Australia.

How many houses are we going to build over the next couple of years? How's our health system going to cope? How many extra beds are required in order to cope with

some of the other things they're saying?

It's not entirely only about that.

Listen to the words of prominent Conservatives, including Tony Abbott, who was the Prime Minister. When he talks, he talks about the kind of people coming into the country as well.

So let's not pretend that this is a conversation that is only numeric, that is only about volume, that is only about housing.

We are having a discussion about values, the kind of country we want to build. And while people are entitled to talk about numbers, which we are, and volume and meeting the needs and demands of that.

We cannot pretend that this conversation, Tom, is devoid of the other stuff. That is a big layer here

because it is not just some academic distracted from the kind of country we're building conversation.

There is clearly some real anxiety going on about the kinds of people coming into the country, their colour, their race, their practices.

And we know that because we've got some people going on the record now saying that they do think it should be about Australian values.

You know, I've had politicians say to me, oh, well, it should also be about, you know, whether you think gays are okay. Now, what's that a whistle to?

It's about the types of people you're bringing in. And that's our current immigration debate.
Have I got that right or am I over-recking it? Yeah, no,

it's there. It's absolutely there.
I mean, and I think... you know, you mentioned there, I think that it was a Bridget Mackenzie who made that comment.

You know, if you don't think women should be the Prime Minister of this country, if you don't

support our gay communities, if you want to burn our flags, are these literally people that we want to help us build our

and then you've got Jacinta Price talking about Indian migrants specifically, Andrew Hastie talking about becoming strangers in our homes,

Tony Abbott and John Howard.

You know, I mean, I think we can sort of name some names here in the sense that they're talking quite prominently these days about don't know whether multiculturalism is working, making points about integration and that sort of thing.

So, yeah,

it is a dimension, and the two things weave in and out of each other kind of uncomfortably a little bit, I think. And

I don't know. I mean,

I sort of struggle. I know, obviously, as you said at the beginning, you know, this is this story.
It's personal for so many Australians and

you and me among them. I tend to think, maybe there's some hope in this, but I tend to think that that that kind of racialised part of the argument is there but kind of washes away a little bit.

I think you look at Britain and it's way, way more front and centre there to the point where Keir Starmer, the Labour Prime Minister, also used that strangers in our, you know, island of strangers or something, kind of made a sort of a similar evocation to Andrew Hastie, and that's the Labour Prime Minister who's kind of so spooked by Nigel Farage that's where he's going.

I think,

I mean, just the face of Australia is quite different because we have over several generations we've become more of a multicultural country.

I think it's the leader of the nationals in New South Wales who's an Indian Australian. But doesn't really love being thought of that way, by the way.

My path to this parliament started over 120 years ago with the decision made by my great-grandfather, Bella Singh, to leave Punjab with 13 other men from the surrounding villages.

I'm proud of my heritage, but as you can clearly hear, I'm born and raised Australian, a product of Woolgooga Public and Woolgooga High. Which is interesting, you know, back to that idea of...

Sorry, being very, very, very philosophical, but I think the way we see ourselves, like I'll tell you, that's part of this debate, that when I call myself a Greek Australian, which I call myself because I am, and no one can take that from me, that's who I am, and

it's in my blood, it's in my DNA.

I have viewers, I'm going to let you in, this is a pod, that's what we do, who write sometimes and they say they don't like that framing, right? I should just be called an Australian.

Now, this is at the heart of this debate because

so many immigrant communities do see the duality of who they are. And that is part of the debate we're having as well.

Is it a duality or do we have to choose, right, just an Australian and have to demote the other part?

I don't think that's an irrelevant part of the political fight we're having, but there is a view about hang on a minute why do you want to even come to this country if you want to bang on about who you are so much you know what i'm saying yeah yeah

i guess it just it gives us a bridge to to kind of have have a slightly different kind of conversation right because i think even if you look at the kind of the australian far right it's quite multicultural.

Like, you know, the most right-wing member of parliament, Ralph Babette from the United Australia Party, is also from a non-white background, you know, just like me.

And I think that that, you know, that means that the conversation tends to be framed, I guess, a little bit more around integration, social cohesion, a range of different kind of euphemisms that get used for this kind of thing.

And I think we sort of teeter in a position where there are

two ways that you can

fix, solve, I use those words with heavy inverted commas,

this thing, because I think I bring it back to the economic thing.

This problem of permanent temporariness, where a lot of the kind of more recent arrivals are sticking around with precarious living situations, precarious incomes, doing low-income jobs that frankly are very hard to fill otherwise.

We also have this kind of housing crisis that is pushing often kind of people who are on lower incomes and therefore often a lot of recently arrived migrants to very sort of outer suburbs where they have to drive an hour and a half or two hours to get to work.

I think back to Victoria during the lockdowns and we saw this so often that this kind of the class-based divisions in a city like Melbourne and in cities like Sydney that meant the particular local councils where there were lower-income workers who didn't have the luxury of working from home during lockdowns, they were more exposed to disease, they were also being more heavily policed with lockdown fines and all the rest of it.

They just had a tougher time of it in those lockdowns.

And we could see what was a kind of a class division in our cities about the people who were able to lock down and the people who weren't able to lock down because of the nature of their jobs.

Well, once again,

there was a migration dimension to that because often those were the same communities where there were a lot of people who were recent migrants who are working in these sorts of jobs.

So I think that there's kind of an economic structural problem here in a sense where kind of like the new sort of precarious low-income working class is quite often actually a lot of recent migrants.

And even the physical structure of our cities is not leading to that kind of, you know, the integration that people sort of will look at Australia and say well I want you know multiculturalism to work I want everyone to kind of

you know get on together so I think that you can kind of

on the right the conversation is framed around and therefore we need to reduce the numbers or therefore you know we even need to kind of remove people from the country

on not just the left but in the centre and I think the centre right the conversation is instead about how do we kind of change the economic dynamics of housing and all the rest of it so that everyone is able to kind of participate in a good version of the Australian life and we can build that kind of social cohesion.

And I think that conversation is an urgent one. That conversation is so, so urgent.
Is it possible to have

a debate about immigration levels that are devoid of the other stuff, though? That's the big question I think that looms over all of this.

And to be able to have a system that is managed through through essentially supply and demand. Do you know what I mean? Like matching the economy to the numbers.

And there are some really big questions around

some of the more right-wing calls around immigration. I'm thinking about One Nation.
One Nation doesn't want to end immigration actually, you'll notice. Pauline Hanson said this.

The principles are that we need to cut it right back to around about 130,000 a year. I'm not saying no migrants.
We need to actually allow for migrants to come into the country.

But it is a much lower number they want to go for.

There are others in the protest movement, not that I'm saying, you know, there's some parts that I think are not fuelled with racism involved in that, others that are very racist, but who are calling for a pause, yeah, a five-year pause, I've heard, for migration, immigration.

Now, what would that do? I mean, put your economic hat on. Tom, that would be diabolical for our economy.
Diabolical. Yeah, it would be really diabolical.

I think, I mean, two things that a lot of kind of really essential workforces, particularly care workforces, but also construction to a point as well,

where we are just sort of struggling to get enough people to fill jobs that we need filled.

So there's that dimension of it. But also the other part of it is that Australia's migration program, really by world standards, is very targeted towards people with skills.

And that's particularly true for the permanent migrant program, but it's also true for temporary migrants as well. These are people who

often have a high skill set, they're high income earners, they pay taxes.

The typical migrant in just about every category pays more in tax over the portion of their stay in Australia than they receive in the form of subsidies and welfare and other government assistance.

That's not true for the typical Australian who ends up, I think, just in the red.

Now that's not to say that that's a problem, but it just reflects that the fact that the average migrant has sort of a higher skill level and is adding to the capacity of our economy and the productiveness of our economy in a way that the whole economy benefits from.

So there is, there absolutely is an economic cost to reducing migration. Having said that, I do think that the kind of the

anger and the sense that there is an imbalance at the moment, I actually do think that this is something that can be corrected with a tweak in policy settings in a way that might make most people kind of feel like at least something has been done.

Like I think you can look at particular categories

where,

you know, I think there would be recognition from Labor and moderate liberals that social license has been strained, that you can cut back on in a way that does have a cost, but that might kind of keep people broadly content with the whole migration system.

And I think those two are temporary workers and international students. I think with international students, it's partly a housing problem that we haven't kind of built enough housing.

So that's in particular suburbs sometimes putting a strain, for instance, on the rental market. We've got a big problem because that's a major export.
We make a lot of money out of that.

So that's something the government might need to think about the other dimensions of that problem.

How do we want our universities to continue to make money given that we've forced them to be reliant on international students?

But there is a way that you can rebalance that within universities and change that shift that makes them entirely reliant on international students essentially as the main source of their revenue.

And then I come back to the permanent temporariness thing, the Parkinson review that Labor commissioned back in 22, 23.

This is Martin Parkinson who led the public service for years, you know, kind of a very sort of reasonable, moderate bureaucrat.

And Grattan Institute and others have made similar arguments about the fact that you do need to give people more certainty, clear yes or no,

when they're on a series of different temporary visas.

If they're people who are ultimately going to be allowed to stay through the permanent program in Australia, resolve that quickly.

And if they're not, you know, ensure that they're not sticking around indefinitely on a series of kind of precarious rolling over, bridging visas, et cetera, et cetera.

And there's a recognition that a better targeted skill system at the moment, the skill system is just a bit of a hodgepodge. It's what employers say, that the skills list is a bit all over the place.

We're not really getting a lot of construction workers when we know we need them. There's that whole thing about yoga teachers being on the skills list, but certain types of tradies not being on.

There's a lot of work that can be done there in kind of sharpening up, you know, the way that we approach skills within the migration system.

I think if you do those two things, you actually do start to kind of shift it in a noticeable way.

And I think you can make an argument that we, you know, the word control gets used a lot, but you can make that sense of argument about, well, you know, this is the numbers are back within the kind of bounds that you might consider reasonable.

And we can say very clearly, you know, this is what we've done in international students, et cetera, et cetera. So I don't actually think this is is an intractable problem.

It's not an intractable problem, but before we wind up today's immigration chat, I do want to talk about the way the government's tackling it and how on both a structural level, like the actual policies from you, but also on the political level, because they are very alert to the politics on everything, let's be honest.

I think they've got a better run in their second term than their first, being aware of the sort of trains that are coming at them.

Do you think that on the policy level they're kind of tapering down the rate to sort of more moderate levels genuinely or are they being a bit dodgy?

And on the political level, I'm giving you two separate questions. Are they managing the freight train coming at them potentially?

Well, I think that they've got the wind with them this time as well rather than the wind against them because that post-COVID surge in the kind of net migration, temporary arrival numbers, that is subsiding.

A lot of it was actually actually kind of artificial because a lot of people who were here during COVID were allowed to stay for longer. And so there's, you know, they're counted in the statistics.

And as that starts to unravel, you know, the numbers I think will

fall and already are. And so that then allows them to kind of say, look, we're doing something.
We're kind of, we're keeping this within bounds. And there's an element of truth to it.

They have made a move on international students. They're still waiting really on this sort of whole migration system, skills system reform.

But there are some things I think quietly going on in the background that they might be able to point to by the end of this term. So I think that, you know, in that sense, they are

alive to it.

And I think they also recognise, again, the economic dimension of it.

You mentioned in our last episode on housing, how many labor frontbenches are so fixated on what they need to deliver on housing in this term.

I think you can say the same thing about energy bills and generally the cost of living.

I think this government is very alive to the fact that to keep the ship on the road when people are getting quite angry and restless, particularly on the right, when One Nation's primary is surging, I think Labor recognises that its task is to just make people feel as good as possible about their material circumstances and as much as possible that their material circumstances are improving.

And if they can do that, then I think the hope is that that plus being able to say we're doing XYZ on international students and all of that can start to kind of, I guess, keep the anger within bounds that aren't going to lead to a significant shift.

Yeah,

I think that the management of it all is going to be a slow burn, though, for the government, because sometimes when a perception starts,

you know, creeping in, and clearly, I'm not saying it's the mainstream view, because I think generally Australians broadly support immigration, but the idea that all immigrants, because we're an immigrant nation, support immigration you made that point earlier is silly too how they manage that and de-escalate and neutralize it i think tom like i think they're going to have to watch that closely i think they kind of know that a little bit and even some of the things you're seeing and i want to mention this because i think it's interesting and worth watching some of the tough talk from tony burke who's the home affairs minister where he sort of shuts down visas of radical people coming in but he makes sure that it's the

the sort of extreme anti-Jewish talk and the extreme anti-Muslim talk so that he sort of almost sends the message that he is against all of it rather than

giving any preference to anyone.

I think there's a really simple concept here that when someone's on a visa, they're a guest in Australia and almost every visa holder is a very welcome guest and they treat Australia with incredible respect.

But if someone turns up as a guest in your home, and they just want to create arguments, abuse people and wreck the place, then you ask them to leave.

That, too, is part of the immigration debate in a weird adjacent way, because it's about the way, the kind of values that you allow in your country. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, I do.

And I think,

you know, there's a parallel version of this for the Liberal Party, which I think is a lot starker in a sense, because I think Labor is broadly speaking with one voice on this.

And I think, you know, even within the Labor left and Labor right, to the extent that there are actually any meaningful differences between those two groups anymore and And the Parliamentary Labour Party, I think everyone kind of recognises the job that they've got Tony Burke doing and sees the electoral importance in that.

In the coalition, it's a much more of a live struggle about do we try and do a similar thing to Labor?

Are we a party that is tacking close to the centre and sort of trying to find a way to, you know, talk tough enough, but keep this all within reasonable bounds?

Or do we see the voters that are angry as the voters that are going to bring us back to power? And do we channel that anger?

And do we speak about it in a more of a declamatory way like we're seeing in other countries overseas and so I actually think you know yes I know people sort of sometimes say oh we talk too much about the coalition and they're irrelevant but I really do think the direction they decide to go on that fundamental question is such an important thing in terms of where this whole conversation goes because if the Liberals go down a really kind of hard route on that then that forces Labor to engage in that conversation in some way.

And I think it sort of ups the stakes of the debate. So I think that's a really important thing too.

And the immigration debate now is going to go off.

And there's a reason for that. The coalition has decided to make it one of their big issues.
So just expect it to continue.

In 2026, just like we said housing would continue to be a big one, immigration will continue to bubble away, whether it's the top priority or it's just always kind of inserting itself into our debates, Tom.

That's it for politics now today. Tom, you have smashed out these explainers, these existential moments of who we are and who we should be.
Thank you. We've had some fun, haven't we, Pikachu?

We've even had some fun. It's been great.
We have. And don't forget, we have an explainer on the housing situation, the policy, and the politics.
You can find that in the Politics Now feed.

And if you have a question, you can send it to the party room at abc.net.au and the excellent friend Kelly will answer it for you. I might help.
See ya.