In a speech to the National Press Club, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has attempted to redefine the immigration debate. But what lies beneath?
Over the last fifty years, the subject of immigration policy has floated uneasily on top of the politics of the day in this country. For the Liberals, it’s mostly been about stoking fears of unauthorised arrivals in small boats, who have always loomed large in the Australian consciousness, probably because that’s how many of our ancestors arrived here.
There was a glimpse of another approach under Malcolm Fraser, and his welcoming of Vietnamese refugees, which infuriated John Howard, who later used another variation of the same issue to get re-elected, using the Tampa affair to set up the so-called Pacific Solution and stop desperate asylum seekers seeking protection under international law, while simultaneously enormously expanding skilled and student migration.
Labor has often been happy to go along with this double standard on the issue, to avoid being wedged or for darker reasons.
Now, after sustained attacks from Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, who have been using the same immigrant-bashing line which has worked so well for their fellow travellers in MAGA-land and Farage-world, the Albanese government is going along with the idea that the housing shortage is caused in part by immigrants (actually supply is keeping up with migration and population growth, just not greedy investors).
The latest twist, via Tony Burke, is to blunt One Nation’s attack by switching the focus to international students, backpackers and overstayers who arrived in planes, while insisting that immigration is fundamentally one of Australia’s strengths.
NOM NOM NOM
Net overseas migration (NOM) collapsed during COVID, then surged temporarily afterwards, providing lots of ammunition for the creation of carefully curated graphs showing Australia being swamped by foreigners.
While there’s been some confusion about the details, One Nation and the Coalition have recently announced plans to drastically reduce NOM numbers, PHON to almost nothing and then perhaps 130,000 per year, and the LNP to maybe 160,000. Labor are aiming to get the number down to around 225,000.
For a reality check, ABS data released last week shows that net overseas migration was 292,100 for the year ending March 2026, down from 309,500 the previous year, with Australia’s population now at 27.9 million.
While One Nation has embraced Gina Rinehart’s fantasy of unattached workers coming here to make her rich and then going home, Tony Burke pointed out that about half of all doctors and construction workers (and two thirds of nurses) arrive in this country with family, with the prospect of industries like aged care collapsing if this was disallowed, along with major skills shortages and disruption to the economy.
He said it was ‘absurd’ to call Australia a country of mass migration, and framed Labor’s changes as a ‘relatively simple proposition’, encouraging visitors to get appropriate visas, which would be better policed to prevent overstayers and international students from visa hopping.
Aussie ICE?
This part of Burke’s speech was immediately jumped on by the Greens, led by Senator David Shoebridge, who said the talk of 100 extra compliance officers and 250 additional detention beds was reminiscent of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and its raids in the USA.
Responding to attacks from both sides, Tony Burke said that if the coming political contest was going to be about migration, then he was ‘all in’.
In practice it actually looks like a case of the more things change, the more they stay the same. Every government for decades has run tough on the visible form of immigration that was politically salient at that time; boats, temporary workers, and now student and backpacker numbers, while the overall system kept expanding underneath.
Whether Labor likes it or not, the visible thing is now the NOM, which may not actually be the most meaningful thing to be focusing on. Underneath that simple string of numbers is the complex, lived reality of multicultural Australia, and underneath that is the fear and racism driving voters back to a fantasy past.
Originally from Canberra, David Lowe is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and photographer with particular interests in the environment and politics. He’s known for his campaigning work with Cloudcatcher Media.
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