Bidding Wars and Nonsense Targets: Cutting Migration Down Under

It’s become the disease of affluence: How do wealthy countries limit, restrict or totally bar migrants (whether they arrive through regular channels or otherwise) who are seen as ills to be shunned rather than solutions to be treasured? A country like Australia would be a shadow of itself without its migrants, either of the long stay variety or those of shorter duration who come in and do the indispensable, from offering medical services to fruit picking and filling the “hospo” (hospitality) sector. But the malady of affluence has afflicted the Canberra establishment, much of it due to the jittery demagoguery of One Nation, a party with ideas so few you could place them on the back of a napkin.  

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, much like its British facsimile Reform UK, is particularly obsessed by the alleged failings of immigration. It promises to cut it to “net negative” levels over the course of three years and throttle existing visa rules. (The numbers promise to be a staggering 750,000 or thereabouts.) Migrants will be restricted in bringing family members to Australia, and international education (those on visa subclass 500) is in for a hammering. Some 75,000 “illegal migrants,” according to the party’s website, will be deported and numbers of overall immigration cut by over 570,000 “from current Labor levels by capping visas at 130,000 per year to ease pressure on housing, wages, and infrastructure.” Skilled visas are suspect, legal avenues for review condemned, and “migrants from nations known to foster extremist ideologies” excoriated. Australia’s commitment to the UN Refugee Convention, a fidelity so often unreliable and hypocritical, is also to be terminated.

The large question here is how seriously the proposals by One Nation should be taken. Reducing international student numbers, for instance, is an interesting idea, but not for the reasons Hanson and her advisors assume. The university sector in Australia has treated the international student body as a never-ending milch cow without necessarily concerning itself with their welfare. The focus away from domestic student numbers has also meant a lazy reliance on higher paying foreign students that has made education suffer. The assembly line of consumers rather than learners comes before the groves of knowledge. To take the blow torch to such numbers as the temporary graduate visa population, however – a reduction from 270,000 to 40,000 – would be economically imperilling.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation decided to needlessly fan the babble with a National Forum replete with commentary that did little to clear the air. But it got 535,000 viewers, so that must have meant something. And the economic spokesperson for One Nation, former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, could tell everybody that, “The will of the Australian people is so pronounced, this has to be dealt with, we will deal with it.”

Joyce reflects that broader mood of playing the opportunistic hangman to the eggheads, the experts, and those sneeringly called the intelligentsia. He is particularly keen to rage against economists, an admittedly charmless cadre at the best of times. “The issue of what it is going to cost I think is contentious, but I have no concern about following the will of the Australian people.” One’s country, right or wrong.

This shows a degree of abdication from leadership that is impressively stunning. It also suggests that One Nation has a direct, plagiarist’s line to the White House and the more mind-rotting aspects of Trumpland. “I think the Australian people are sort of tired of the fact that you have to go to an economist to come up with public policy, to go to the Parliamentary Budget Office, and, to be frank, I have been around this game for a while and I have never seen a forward estimates in any budgetary paper be even close to the mark.” With confidence, he could dismiss their expertise: the Parliamentary Budget Office, let alone any arm of the public service, could hardly be trusted to assess the merits of One Nation’s migration policy “because they’re not elected, I am.”

Political commentator George Megalogenis tried to be sensible at the Forum, yearning for days of yore when governments did steer debates instead of being led by panicked social media warriors, attention seekers and mob elements motivated by the will. “If you’re going to take … 766,000 people out of the Australian economy and society for three years, you have tanked the economy in a way that is on the scale of the depression of the 1890s and 1930s,” he reasoned.

Instead of seizing the sensible high ground, the Albanese government is fumbling on some middle terrain in the hope of nullifying the influence of One Nation. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke opted for some mild demagogy in his National Press Club address during which he blew from the Hanson blowhorn, if only tentatively. Australians, he thought, were no longer believers in the “pure demand-driven approach to major parts of the immigration system”; the government needed to “take a higher level of control.” The focus here would be haughty and disciplinary: “Who arrives; who stays; and who leaves?” 

Blows against various groups were promised. International students and graduate visa holders will not, for instance, be able to bring family members with them to Australia, with some exemptions applying to doctoral dissertation students and Pacific and ASEAN students. These changes are not retrospective. “We’re not going to be breaking up families on shore.”

In a tribute to One Nation’s eagerness to target those naughty illegal non-citizens, Burke announced a greater regime of invigilation, with the hiring of 100 additional compliance officers to smell out those visa overstayers and an additional 250 beds for detainees in immigration holding centres. “What we will do is simply go back to what Australia always did before 2015.” Cheerful times, they were.

A ballot system will be introduced for working holiday makers (subclasses 417 and 462) wishing to stay for more than a year, with the second and third year being particularly challenging. In the second year, a cap of 45,000 places will be introduced through a randomised ballot. By the third year, the number will fall to a trickling 5,000. Stints of regional work will have to be done to be eligible for those ballots.  The Australian Restaurant and Café Association chief, Wes Lambert, anticipates staff shortages in hospitality. Mike Guerin, chief executive of the National Farmers’ Federation predicts a rise in food prices and “emptier supermarkets.” Burke simply suggests that those in agriculture make better use of the Pacific Australia labour mobility scheme. From the perspective of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, the measures of greater enforcement would make Australia “smaller, meaner and more divided.” (Is that possible?) The Greens deputy leader, Mahreen Faruqi, abhorred the increased focus on immigration detention and bar on foreign students bringing family members into the country. “Labor’s move to force people to choose between their family and a chance to study in Australia is a soulless mimicry of One Nation tactics.”

Former Labor advisor, Lidija Ivanovski, further notes that Indians stand to suffer most in this “bidding war” of incessant targets. “It seems to be about what One Nation might perceive as the browning of Australia, and will arrest that.” Indians comprise 13.6% of temporary visas holders: the modelled reductions would result in a fall of 23.3%. “South Asians comprise 25.4 per cent of temporary visa holders but would represent almost 46 per cent of the cuts.”

The clear point is that the government is running scared, despite claiming the summit of sensibility on immigration. Polls have turned them into lemmings on the hop, despite the fact that net overseas migration has fallen to 292,000 in the year to March, a fall of 47% from its post-Covid peak. The opposition Coalition have not done much better to enlighten the electorate, horrified that they will be reduced to an even smaller rump than they already are in parliament. Hard feelings are in, resentment is in vogue, and this threatens to remain voguish for some time. The hope for rational policy on this subject seems too much to expect.