New plan must stop ‘Big Australia’ boom, ease strains on cities and rebuild the nation
Migrant numbers are front of mind within the upper reaches of the Albanese government and the soft underbelly for change agents operating in this policy danger-zone.
Clare O’Neil vows to staunch the unprecedented inflow of foreign students, backpackers and temporary workers into Australia since the international border was reopened two years ago. Migrant numbers are front of mind within the upper reaches of the Albanese government and the soft underbelly for change agents operating in this policy danger-zone.
Since December 2021, the number of foreigners on student, graduate, working holiday and temporary work visas has jumped by 803,000. Amid a cost-of-living crisis in Middle Australia, the politics of population have been up-ended in a little over a year.
Migration is being weaponised and the business lobby fears the worst. A little over a year ago there weren’t enough workers and employers were on the warpath; now that they’re here, there aren’t enough homes.
The vibe is metastasising before our eyes: Stop the planes!
The Home Affairs Minister revealed her long-awaited game plan this week as official figures showed our population increased by a record 624,100 in the year to June. The milestones kept tumbling on Thursday, as annual net overseas migration hit 518,100 in the last financial year.
Keeping a lid on population was a baby bust. The total fertility rate (children born per woman) plunged to an all-time low of 1.58. Where’s Peter “baby bonus” Costello when you need him?
At 2.4 per cent, annual population growth is higher than Kevin Rudd’s “Big Australia” era of 2008-09 and is equal to the rates recorded in the wild 1950s due to migration and a baby boom. It’s an easy scare campaign for Labor’s opponents, now safely retreating from the blame blast area.
Treasury, especially, but also the Reserve Bank and immigration officials were caught napping by the boom. By contrast, eminent historian Geoffrey Blainey says post-war migration was built on Arthur Calwell’s national security imperative and welcomed by the community; permanent settlers streaming into unskilled jobs in manufacturing and construction, which delivered new housing “with gusto”.
“In essence,” Blainey says, “the present out-of-the-blue upsurge in immigrants is not likely to be anywhere near as successful as the carefully planned boom in the 1950s. Already high rents in the cities are one of the unwanted effects of the present inflow.”
The bedrock of Labor’s new strategy is the review by a three-person expert panel led by Martin Parkinson, Canberra’s former top public servant. O’Neil’s riding instructions to the panel came before the migration rebound but Parkinson’s crew delivered a road map for all seasons.
In short, the strategy squeezes temporary students and unskilled workers; cracks down on dodgy education providers and their non-genuine clients; raises English language requirements for students; improves mobility for workers on short-term visas; and puts Jobs and Skills Australia at the centre of a tripartite process to determine workforce needs.
A headline-grabbing new four-year skills in demand visa will replace the troublesome single-employer-sponsored Temporary Skill Shortage visa that business and unions agree is failing.
Officials will screen applicants depending on which of three tiers they’re judged to be in: specialists earning at least $135,000, “core skill” workers (paid no less than $70,000) and a yet to be determined “essential” class of low-paid migrants. Top talent will get a seven-day turnaround (on average) in processing. Wage thresholds will be indexed.
At the very least, O’Neil is taking out the policy junk and jerry-built structures bequeathed by the Coalition and trying to refresh immigration systems and data collection. She intends to send people home at the end of their work or study tour, rather than see them drift in the limbo of “permanently temporary” that many end up as they pinball from visa to visa. All the while, O’Neil is hellbent on restoring high-skilled migration as the nation-building enterprise that transformed Australia over successive decades.
O’Neil is confident net overseas migration has peaked. Falling numbers in the next few years will change the temperature of the debate and that’s by design, she says.
“The policy changes we’ve made are neutralising the politics and they’re also fixing the problems of a broken migration system,” O’Neil tells Inquirer.
But there is an immense amount of work ahead, given Parkinson reckons fixing a system debauched by deliberate neglect will be a “10-year rebuild”. Shifting to a long-term planning horizon with the states and territories at its heart, achieving better outcomes for regional migrant settlement and working out how to fill workforce needs in the care sector are priorities. In the new year, the minister is planning a regional road show for consultations.
O’Neil’s abiding goal is to put permanent migration at the centre of policy, with a revamped points test to decide who gets to stay. “No one understands the points test,” she declares of a tool that has been abused. “We’ll fix it next year.”
Review panel member Joanna Howe says a better points system would reduce the possibility for it to be gamed and would prioritise high-calibre migrants. They would receive a permanent or provisional (government and industry) endorsed skilled/talent visa, regardless of age, qualification, points or other eligibility criteria. The University of Adelaide law professor cites the example of an international student who completes a bachelor degree in IT and completes a professional year program with the Australian Computer Society in Queensland to get a positive skills assessment.
The person could move to Adelaide as the holder of a subclass 485 graduate visa, move to Whyalla in outer regional South Australia, live and work (in any occupation, such as a pizza delivery driver) for six months, before meeting the SA government eligibility criteria and being nominated by it for a subclass 491 visa.
Once nominated for a 491 visa, the applicant could return to Queensland and move to another regionally defined area. “This example exposes how it’s possible to manipulate the points system through gaining points quickly and easily but ultimately resulting in a permanent migrant with less benefit to Australia and unlikely to boost productivity,” Howe says.
As well, she says the agricultural sector, particularly horticulture, faces two critical problems: labour shortages and a norm of noncompliance with labour standards. “Both need to be addressed to provide sustainable labour solutions for the sector,” she says.
Howe identifies three structural issues that produce “endemic exploitation and insecure labour supply to farmers”. First, visa segmentation means there are many sources of temporary migrant labour “which results in a race to the bottom”. There’s competition between better-regulated Pacific Australia Labour Mobility stream workers and working holiday makers who are not regulated by any additional measures to address their vulnerability. It’s easier for farmers to access the latter cohort and with far less accountability and transparency.
Howe argues the government should remove the 88 days and third-year extension from the Working Holiday Maker program and create one central agriculture visa through PALM.
Second, most farm workers who are exploited are so by virtue of unscrupulous contractors. There needs to be federal labour hire licensing with penalties enforced against farmers who use unlicensed contractors. Third, the sector’s reliance on undocumented migrants needs to be urgently addressed or “there will continue to be an underclass of invisible, easily exploited workers in the sector”, Howe says.
Committee for Economic Development of Australia chief executive Melinda Cilento argues the government should work towards creating an essential skills visa focused on workers in the care sector. Feedback from aged-care providers is current labour agreements aren’t working.
“The sector is really struggling financially and has acute workforce needs,” says Cilento. “But the agreements are time-consuming, cumbersome and difficult to implement. They need something workable, practical and timely. It’s critical to get this right.” Cilento says the tripartite model the Albanese government used to develop the new strategy is the way to fix the workforce issues and get more aged-care homes in the pipeline.
Howe says developing an essential skills stream will take longer and adds complexity, “but is necessary to safeguard the greater risks for exploitation for this cohort and the possibility that Australian jobs will be replaced”.
“The aged-care labour agreement which provides union oversight, greater training and investment in local workers and a pathway to permanent residency suggests a useful way forward,” she says. Howe says the essential stream should not embed low wages and conditions in a sector “which experience internationally tells us is a real risk when countries introduce a low-wage, low-skill temporary migration pathway”.
In a broader sense, Howe believes “we need to remove migration policy from being the political football it has become, ever since Julia Gillard told foreign workers to get to the back of the queue in her infamous Rooty Hill speech in 2012”. She wants to see a return to the bipartisan approach in 1995-96 “which saw the birth of our contemporary labour migration program with broad support from both sides of politics and the social partners”.
Lasting migration reform will require vigilance and energy, as well as the vision and quick reflexes that was missing from Labor over the High Court’s ruling last month on indefinite detention in the NZYQ case.
Is the government up for the migration makeover? Is it up to it? O’Neil is emphatic; the answer is yes on both counts.
“This is a massive change to the migration system,” she says. “We are talking about rethinking migration as a visionary nation-building exercise and that’s a big shift in thinking for the Australian government as well.”
CEDA’s Cilento says the road ahead won’t be perfect, so “there will be regular tweaks” in policy. But the role of Jobs and Skills Australia is crucial, while data on visas, systems and performance must be transparent and published regularly. “The pandemic made us realise how much we took migration for granted,” she says.
“We now have all these structural challenges in the economy, like getting the skills we need in AI, the energy transition, human services and digital. That’s why it’s very dangerous to weaponise immigration. It’s been the cornerstone of our past prosperity and will be in the future – and you don’t want to destroy that.”
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