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Waking up to just how cheesed-off the Australian population has grown with massive immigration levels, the Albanese government has announced it will ‘fix’ the ‘broken migration system’ and reduce it to ‘sustainable’ levels. Selling the new plan as one of the “biggest reforms in a generation”, the government has laboured mightily and delivered a hundred-page door-stopper of reforms. If reform is measured solely by the tonnage of words on paper, this immigration reform is the real deal. If not, it’s a bill of goods.
Plough through the plan’s wordy minutiae, the sort only Canberra bureaucrats can produce (I should know, I once was one of them), and what emerges is a shallow document designed to disguise the reality that, under these purported reforms, the immigration floodgates will remain stuck in the open position.
These reforms are a textbook example of ‘never mind the quality, feel the width’, the practice of deceiving the consumer by emphasising quantity over quality. The package does nothing substantial to actually reduce Australia’s high immigration levels and is primarily aimed at placating an electorate profoundly disillusioned by the pressure that an immigration-driven Big Australia is putting on wages, housing, urban amenity, access to services and the quality of life for average Australians.
The main sleight of hand centres on highlighting proposed cuts to the current and absurdly high post-pandemic intake which will merely return immigration to ‘normal’ pre-Covid levels, already way too high. The Big Australia boosters will continue to get their immigration fix after these ‘reforms’.
The Numbers
In the year to September 2022, net overseas migration (NOM) topped out at 518,000, an all-time record (and double the usual annual NOM) which was largely driven by the catch-up of returning foreign students following two years of pandemic-closed borders. Relief from this surge is at hand, however, according to the government. The NOM target for the 2023-24 financial year is 375,000, with ‘just’ 250,000 to follow in 2024-25, then 255,000 in 2025-26 and 235,000 in 2026-27. This still represents more than a million new immigrants every four years — this in a nation of just 26 million — and merely returns us to the ongoing high levels of the last decade which (excluding the years of the ‘Zero Covid’ delirium) had been bouncing around 230,000-240,000 a year and even getting as low as 180,000. The new NOM numbers are actually higher than all of these old numbers. Some reform!
All these human imports are just what Australia doesn’t need to address our acute housing shortage, pressure on rental affordability, the squeeze placed on access to schools, surgeries, hospitals, public transport and other services. Nor should we forget the problems of a certain migrant element which contributes disproportionately to gang violence and other criminal behaviours and, just recently, has been making an oversize contribution to that vibrant diversity and cultural enrichment by taking appalling incidents of anti-Semitism to our streets. Even Albanese admitted to the ABC that “some of Australia’s new arrivals aren’t adding substantially to the national interest”, yet we can expect a lot more of the same.
‘Temporary’ Migrant Workers
There are some two million temporary migrant workers already in Australia (including backpackers, other working holiday-makers and international students, who also work) but Albanese’s plan to address this issue is to make these temps permanent by offering the migrant workers “achievable pathways to permanent residency”. How this enticement is going to help Australians wanting to work is anything but clear, no doubt because immigration, to the incurably woke, must always be about the immigrants’ employment welfare and not that of local Australian workers. Permanent residency has always been the goal of many ‘temporary’ migrant workers and the new reforms will simply make it easier for their wish to be realised.
The ‘reforms’ include a decoupling of a migrants’ temporary working visas from their sponsoring employer, allowing the migrant a bonus 180 days (up from 60 days) to find a new employer sponsor. This ‘reform’ has been presented as allowing migrant workers to escape the clutches of evil bosses but will mainly serve to extend working time in Australia.
The Great Overseas Student Con Game
There are already 860,000 current international students and graduates living and studying in Australia on student visas, over twice what it was (340,000) just a decade ago in 2012. Many of these students (more than 150,000) cycle through new courses, not because they are polymaths conquering new disciplines, but because this allows them to prolong their (working) stay on renewed student visas. They are a major part of the ‘permanent temporary’ class of working migrants.
This backdoor access to a job in Australia is a renowned scam which the so-called reforms promise to remedy, if you can believe that. This includes a 48 hour-per-fortnight cap on allowable student work, rather than the unlimited hours now the case. They are here to study, allegedly, and not to work, but 24 hours a week is still pretty generous.
The reforms also promise that the number of foreign students entering low-quality courses, mostly a ruse to allow immediate entry into the workforce without ever going near a lecture room, will be cut. But winning the arms race between government immigration policy and overseas students’ gaming of the system (aided by the rubbish courses of their dodgy providers) would require competence, resolve and real intent by the government. So don’t count on any improvement.
The other major overseas student reform is that of the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) which will see the bar for English language proficiency lifted from 5.5 to 6.0. The top score under IELTS is 9.0 (for an ‘expert user’ with full operational command of English) and the middling score is 6.0 (for a ‘competent user’ with ‘generally effective’ command of the language despite ‘some inaccuracies and misunderstandings’). This new score requirement for a student visa is, however, a bare pass mark, not far above a score of 5.0 for the ‘modest user’ with only partial command of the language.
Last time I looked, higher education courses were delivered in English, meaning understanding and expression would seem rather crucial. The big reveal, the tacit admission of the proposed IELTS reform, is that overseas students have so far been ushered in with a barely competent command of English. I suppose course money speaks louder and is more persuasive to university administrators than barely intelligible English.
The biggest problem, however, with all these overseas student reforms, even if some of them actually come to fruition, is that there is to be no overall hard cap on the number of foreign students, which makes any target for their intake essentially meaningless.
Exemptions to ‘reform’
Some immigration streams are exempt from even the pretence of reform. Permanent, high-skilled migrant workers are to remain in favour, as if there are no high-skilled Australians, or those capable of becoming so, able to do the high-skilled work (and receive a fair price for their labour).
‘Family reunification’ will also continue under existing policy settings which means that elderly dependent family members (and any ‘extended family’ grifters) will get free lifestyle upgrades courtesy of Australia’s taxpayers.Refugees (including all the fake ones bluffing their way into Australia) will still have a pretty easy time, with an annual target of 20,000 up by around 2,000 on the current level. This ‘reform’ should keep the Left/Green/Teal ‘refugee’ vote in the bag for Labour thanks to our compulsory preferential voting system.
Get Real With Real Reform
The basic flaw at the heart of this latest iteration of immigration reform is the pretence that immigration is, like a force of nature, something beyond government control and is only amenable to minor policy tinkering by technocrats in Canberra’s bubble. This assumption is a cop-out because the federal government, should it so desire, has full control over immigration.
Compared to the ‘open borders’ policy that effectively operates now, the government, should it choose, could set hard caps, rather than fluffy ‘targets’, on the numbers of immigrants, including a total immigration moratorium or a steady-state Net Zero immigration (One Nation’s policy).
They could even base immigration policy criteria on the cultural compatibility of the intending immigrants. This would drive Australia’s progressives absolutely nuts (‘White Australia Policy’ revisited, do I hear?) but that would be a bonus. It would be a brave government to go down this latter path but, as the convincing No vote in the Voice referendum showed, the threat of being smeared as a ‘racist’ by the woke has lost a lot of its clout.
Conclusion
This latest suite of immigration reforms will do nothing other than, at best, take us back to ‘normal’ immigration levels which were already, to borrow a progressive buzzword, ‘problematic’. Instead, the real aim of the reform package is to mollify the immigration-weary public with cheap talk of reform whilst keeping the immigration gravy train on track for the property developers, the tertiary sector, the employers of cheap labour and their tame politicians.
Post these reforms, young Australians will still be stretched to rent or buy their own homes and will have go back to living with mum and dad, all the seats on the bus will be occupied by foreign students, the GP surgeries will take a week before they can see you, A&E waiting times will still try one’s soul, and Australia’s road traffic arteries will still be clogged with those immigrants on their way to Australians’ jobs at cut-rate remuneration and conditions.
Instead of just tidying the edges of immigration with a whipper-snipper, a chainsaw is needed.
The ‘family reunification’ policy has always been utterly baffling to me. How could it possibly be in the national interest to take on board the elderly parents of a newly-minted citizen? Its not like the sponsor is paying a million dollar bond for each of them in anticipation of the imminent healthcare costs. It makes me feel like a total mug, to have been diligently paying tax all my life, only for the benefit of that diligence to go to someone who has just arrived and has never paid a cent into the tax base.
Agree tom. Group of 10, 15 senior men sitting on the grass in a playground middle of the day. Family reunification allows them and their wives to effectively be free in-home child care. Once saw a man pushing a screaming hat-less child in a pram on 40deg day. I should have asked him what the bloody hell he was doing outside in this heat with his grandchild? Often these grandparents are bow-legged and limping, from malnourishment and disease in their home country.
Several occasions my father’s workmates left machines mid-job to bring a child to hospital – ‘child cough I bring hospital, wife no English, no drive’. Simply can’t/don’t want to pay for GP or medication. I don’t decry their circumstance, but it cannot be denied that migration from overpopulated and unsanitary countries simply shifts their illness requirements here. Don’t know how else to put it. Will be interesting to see how the recently signed migration agreement will further pressurise Australia’s hospitals.
Dunno about family reunification tom for when we tried to bring my MIL here for a visit and negotiated our way through the process, Immigration wanted a bond of 100K “in case she gets ill and has to use the public health system.” We didn’t have that much loot so MIL never did get to visit. The irony of it was that MIL was a just retired medical specialist. I have had battles on and off with immigration for almost twenty five years for they initially refused my wife even a tourist visa for her qualifications were all wrong in that she was white, Christian, spoke excellent English, had several Uni degrees and a job to start immediately as a geophysical engineer in the oil and gas exploration industry. Immigration translated her Cyrillic documentation wrongly (maiden name) and ignored the translation made by an approved government translator and as recently as six months ago CentreLink used that same mistranslation to deny me, an eighty two year old, a commonwealth seniors health care card for the mistranslation is still on the government books despite the fact that our marriage certificate has her maiden name spelled correctly, ditto her Australian passport, drivers licence, tax documentation and other paperwork. Another legal battle saw me get the health care card but the bottom line is one of an excellent immigrant being treated so badly and that same immigrant paid a million dollars in income tax during her working life here. From discussions with other people treated somewhat similarly, some of the even from the UK, the system is wrong, horribly wrong, and it needs a Royal Commission and not the usual whitewash.
I’m less concerned about temporary visitors (though I’m glad the state called for a bond in your MIL’s case) and more concerned about permanent arrivals. My (very basic) understanding of current policy is that there is a bond requirement when dependent elderly parents arrive but it is relatively modest and it is returned to the sponsor after something like 2 or 3 years. The arrival thereafter gets access to centerlink and medicare etc, and I just can’t see how that is a good deal for the country. I wouldn’t mind if this policy was securing us a majority of doctors and nurses and engineers but anecdotally at least that really doesn’t seem to be the case.
An “open borders” policy of Labor and Greeens seems to be normal policy for the Left confirmed by Democrats in the US. Labour in the UK, and bureaucrats in the EU.
Swamping the Tory voters with multi-ethnic immigrant voters was an expected outcome of British Labour under Tony Blair, and Joe Biden Democrats must have similar thoughts for Blue and Red in the US.
Poor struggling immigrants lacking competent language skills would be a gift to the Welfare party.
“Would it not be easier for the government to dissolve the people, and elect another?” – Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht after the 1953 East German uprising.
Labor seems to be acting on his advice.
An important and well-written piece. Thanks, Phil.
The Albanese Labor government made no mention at the last election of its plan to import nearly 900,000 migrants within two years.
Albo’s immigration tsunami is driving the worst housing crisis in living memory. It’s also wrecking economic productivity and making us poorer per capita. The IPA recently calculated that Australia’s increased reliance on immigration to generate economic growth meant that Australians in 2023 were approximately $7,848 poorer on a per capita basis. See:
https://ipa.org.au/research/addicted-to-migration-australias-falling-productivity-and-the-cost-of-relying-on-migration-for-economic-growth
And let’s not gloss over the fact that the current immigration wave – largely from the third world – is fuelling unprecedented cultural and ethnic divisions in Australian society and turning our country into a radically different place.
Mass immigration is a disaster for legacy Australians.
From the IPA link:
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Australia’s increased reliance on migration meant that Australians in 2023 were approximately $7,848 poorer on a per capita basis.
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Maybe I’m missing something, but…
Than they were when?
Not just monetarily, but physically as well. My father has been on a public hospital waiting since 2019 for an appointment (not surgery, appointment) with an orthopaedic surgeon to fix his broken toe. Tax and Medicare payer for 42 years. The governments and the inner-urban elite are in denial. I believe the Albanese government should curb the intake until the 3-8 years waiting lists for ENT, Ortho, etc appointments and surgery are cleared. Let’s say 2% of those half million immigrants break their foot/ankle next year, maybe fell off their scooter or moped while delivering fast food, that’s an extra 10,000 operations the Ortho’s across Australia need to complete. That’s 10,000 Australians who miss out on moving one spot up. Can’t keep pushing hundreds of thousands of ‘category three’ Australians back down the list, otherwise they have blood on their hands. My father was warned before he left Germany for Perth in 1980 – “Don’t get sick!”. He laughed it off as a 24 year-old, but at 64 it is all true.
I would suggest having a glance through the full IPA report. It estimates that GDP per capita would have been higher had the population (immigration) component of Australia’s economic growth remained at the rate it was in the 1990s – a rate significantly lower than today.
“In 2023, GDP per capita was $91,439, but would have been $99,287 had Australia’s population growth remained at the rate it was in the 1990s, and growth was achieved through other components, such as productivity gains. Since 2000, the cumulative loss has totalled $80,038 per person. This has meant that Australians have lost close to one entire year’s worth of income over the past 23 years due to the increased reliance on migration and population growth to achieve economic growth.”
As economist Gerard Minack and others have pointed out, high immigration leads to capital ‘widening’ at the expense of capital ‘deepening’, resulting in lower productivity and lower living standards.
Minack:
“Australia’s economic performance in the decade before the pandemic was, on many measures, the worst in 60 years. Per capita GDP growth was low, productivity growth tepid, real wages were stagnant, and housing increasingly unaffordable. There were many reasons for the mess, but the most important was a giant capital-to-labour switch: Australia relied on increasing labour supply, rather than increasing investment, to drive growth. Remarkably, the country now seems to be doubling down on the same strategy.”
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2023/11/gerard-minack-demolishes-aussie-population-economy/
Agree. My recently retired father, often came home from work with his head in his hands. Despairing at newest batch of 457-sponsored ‘tradesmen’ he had to work with. Almost entirely from the sub-continent, Often calling themselves ‘Systems Engineer’, ‘Mechanical Engineer’, ‘Machining Engineer’. Nothing of the sort, lies. Father asked his new workmate to pass him the micrometer, workmate came back with a… spanner. Often, they had never held a micrometer, vernier, or worked on a lathe or gear cutting machine. Often couldn’t string a sentence together, couldn’t verbally repeat or follow an instruction my father gave, left oil spills, and drums empty for the next person, put hydraulic oil in the gears! Machines left with metal swarf for the next person to clean up! I could go on! Dangerous, unsafe workers.
These new Australians also brought their caste culture to his workplace. Aforementioned problems never happened with the Italian, Yugoslav, Polish tradesmen who kept a great culture there. He resigned a year before retirement age. He realised his German 1st class machining tool-maker skills were being wasted on cleaning, and fixing his fellow ‘tradesmen’s’ stuff-up’s. He says it is a bitter pill to swallow, considering his migration into 1980’s Perth required perfect English, vaccinations, tens of thousands in savings, tradesmen certificates/conversion, family sponsor etc. One stuff up and you were out the door. How times change (deteriorate).
This is incredibly sad to read. Australia used to be selective when it came to prospective migrants. But standards have fallen dramatically. Canberra is presently running a low-skill, high-volume immigration program, with most new arrivals coming from countries with vastly lower standards and very different cultures to Australia. The growing problems associated with such immigration can be avoided by our political class for a while longer, but not forever.
Agree Phil. I no longer read any Government documents (paper and online) that intimidate me with the tribal territorial land threat (‘acknowledgement’), so I scroll slowly and as soon as I see that word I immediately x (close) out of it.
From reading the ABC and The Conversation online articles I can see that the government and ABC et al. newsmakers are kidding themselves if they think the decline in cohesion, suburban amenity and living standards is due to ‘temporary migrants denied the security to build a new life in Australia’ or ‘exploitative work conditions’ or ‘students being rorted by the international education system’. These opinions/statements are examples of government and media that have their heads in the sand. When will government and reporters stop lying to themselves?
None of these remedies will stop the aforementioned declines. The declines are caused by mass migration from 3rd-world or developing countries, refusal to practise English, suffocating religions and lack of assimilation. Bureaucrats are welcome to come to my street and see 5 of the last 5 house for sale go to the dogs, pardon me, absentee landlords. The new migrants moving in are not Hello Kitty toting students, but late 20’s, early 30’s single men from the sub-continent and adjacent countries and regions. Does the Albanese government think that these people are going to magically start throwing litter in their bins rather than the verge, mow the lawn, stop ogling me, and respect their neighbours after 10pm because they know they will be here for 40 years rather than 4? Many European politicians have rightly said that it isn’t until the first generation is born that Western living standards are adopted.
The ignorant Federal government can type all the obfuscating language it wants, but are they really scrutinising the authenticity of qualifications? Integrating and assimilating sufficiently to Western civility? One newspaper letter-to-the-editor here in WA put it succinctly, ‘… too many migrants are turning up to Australia ill-equipped to adapt to the Australian lifestyle …’
‘… too many migrants are turning up to Australia ill-equipped to adapt to the Australian lifestyle …’
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I suggest the main reason they are “ill-equipped” is they have no wish to and no intention of adapting.
Nor does Australia expect new arrivals to adapt to our ways and culture. Rather, Australia’s elites promote multiculturalism and send the message that Australia is a tainted, illegitimate country built on stolen land.
Sponsored skilled migration visas will continue to be poorly administered. A friend of mine’s dating a man who had been sponsored to Perth from Colombia as a Project Manager, but despite company-funded English lessons each week, his contract was not renewed after the 12 months. Simply could not communicate properly, particularly technical aspects. Surprise, surprise he is now delivering food via the apps – no communication required! Why not in a new job in his claimed profession? Wasn’t he brought here to solve a skills shortage? I refuse to use food/ride-share apps for I believe it is lowering living standards and amenity in our suburbs. It is not a legitimate career.
Old ladies falling off the perch –house & garden sold and turned into 6,7,8-men share-house car yard. Young Australians must return to purchasing & cooking their own food and coffee. They must also go back to life-long essential careers like nursing, medicine, engineering, farming and trades. Art, communications and anthropology will not grow their food, build their house or mend their broken hip.
Surely, one day, they will realise this?
Agreed!