​SUBJECTS: Changes to net overseas migration; housing supply, backpacker visas.

PATRICIA KARVELAS: Let's hear from the Minister himself and bring in the Minister for Home Affairs and Immigration, Tony Burke. Welcome to the program, Tony.

TONY BURKE: Hi Patricia, and thanks for playing those. I haven't had a chance to hear any of that, so that's helpful.

KARVELAS: Well, you've heard all of the political backlash. Now I want to ask you about your policy.

BURKE: Yeah, cool.

KARVELAS: Why are you certain that you can get down to 225,000 net migration based on these changes? Are you offering a guarantee here given there's no legislation?

BURKE: Look, we're confident that we'll be able to get there, in fact the projections we've got already are that we're tracking there. And if you look at the net overseas migration number that came out today, we're tracking there as well.

The basic changes that we're making is to try to make sure we get there in the best way for the Australian economy and in the most decent way.

So effectively, you know, legislation would give me more tools, it means in terms of the economy we'd be able to make everything even more effectively targeted, but the changes that we've announced today simply mean those numbers that are already in the budget, that Treasury had already projected we would be able to get to, we could have a much higher level of confidence that that will be able to happen, and also means that I've got some of the tools that I need to be able to have the minimal sort of impact on the Australian economy in terms of any negative.

The reality is, and the Matt Canavan quote was a classic about this, you get lots of people saying, "Oh, we need fewer migrants, but I need all the ones who work in my area".

The reality is we're a nation built on migration, and immigration is a phenomenal strength to Australia. What we need at the moment is to be able to temper the numbers for a period of time to be able to allow housing to catch up, and housing supply. While the housing shortage isn't actually caused by migration, it's caused by the fact that Australians are living fewer people per household than they used to, which is a right that Australians have, but that's how we've got here.

But given that we're here, the only path forward is to be able to temper the total immigration numbers to give housing supply a chance to get in front.

KARVELAS: Okay. What specifically do you want to legislate for that you can't do with these changes?

BURKE: Yeah, look, the two areas that I flagged in the speech, and you know, there are different ways of landing either of these, but the first principle is to have an expressions of interest framework where, effectively, some of the visas that are demand‑driven, you would have the capacity to be able to put some government controls on them.

People often sort of think that if you've got "immigration job" in your title, you are holding every lever on every visa, and the reality is ever since the Howard Government Australia took a decision that for work visas it would be, if employers need the visa, they get it, no matter how many numbers that involves, and similarly for student visas, the principle was, if our education institutions can sell the place and they want to, then the visas get issued, and effectively that's how the Migration Act is largely structured.

So an expression of interest framework allows us just to be able to take some control of those numbers rather than it being completely demand‑driven.

KARVELAS: Okay.

BURKE: The other part of it that would require legislation is I believe, and anyone who's known me for a long time would know, I believe very passionately in us having a serious refugee program and asylum system where somebody who finds themselves in Australia, where it is in fact completely unsafe for them to return, where we have a process for them to be able to explain that for Australia to have an international commitment that we've taken, to be able to put it to those individuals.

Similar, even though we did it in a different process, but similar to the concept of what happened to the Iranian football players where, while they were here, suddenly there were threats being made personally against them from overseas, and Australian is a good country, and we want a system that allows people to hold out their hope at that moment.

What I don't think that should involve is, for example, people from countries ‑ and we get these applications ‑ be they Five Eyes countries, be they Western Europe, be they Scandinavia, where there's almost zero chance of the application getting over the line, but someone applies anyway to get themselves a longer period in Australia while they go through a series of failed appeal processes, and the actual impact that they're having is slowing down the genuine cases.

KARVELAS: So you're saying that's with legislation that you'd want to do that?

BURKE: Yeah.

KARVELAS: Are you saying you can't get the Coalition's support to do that?

BURKE: That's right.

KARVELAS: Why can't you get their support to do that?

BURKE: Look ‑‑

KARVELAS: They say they haven't seen a specific piece of legislation. Has there been a lack of effort?

BURKE: I think that would depend on who you interviewed in terms of what you were told there. But the conversations, you know, they've kept the conversations in confidence, and they've been respectful with that. So, I didn't use today's speech to, you know, to have some sort of political ‑ bash them around the head or anything like that.

I simply think these two reforms are reforms that any party of Government would want. I think these reforms, to be able to find that pathway, are decent approaches for Australia. No one from the Opposition has actually, in any of the conversations, said they actually disagree with what we're trying to do.

KARVELAS: Okay.

BURKE: And so I hope that there's a point when they come back to the table, and certainly, if I had the additional powers, there would be more I'd be able to do in terms of making sure we maximise the best landing for the Australian economy.

KARVELAS: So let's talk about this magic number of 225,000. You talked down today, going further with cuts, having a lower number, arguing it would essentially tank the economy ‑ my language. What's the evidence that you base that on? What is the magic number? How do you arrive at that being the number that somehow keeps the economy not going negative?

BURKE: Well, effectively anything that you do, anything that you do will have an impact economically somewhere, but effectively you can't go much lower than where we have without either having a significant number of educational institutions face the likelihood of will they have to close down, and it would be the regional ones that would first; secondly, you end up in a situation where you lose critical skills.

So if I can refer in answer, because we don't have the Coalition policy out there yet, but we do have the One Nation policy, they claim that we get the same number of skilled migrants, I think the figure in their papers is 70,000, even if we didn't allow any of the skilled migrants to bring their families.

Now if you have a think of four key occupations that everyone knows we need these workers; doctors, construction workers, nurses and aged care workers. For doctors and construction workers, half of them at the moment come with their family, principally their partner.

Now, anyone who thinks those doctors and construction workers would still come if it meant not having their partner for four years, I think they're making it up.

KARVELAS: Okay.

BURKE: Similarly for nurses and aged care workers, it's two‑thirds of them come with family members. So there's ‑‑

KARVELAS: But you did consider, didn't you, blocking workers from being able to bring their partners in the deliberations?

BURKE: No, we've made the decision with respect to students. Students tend to be younger, and the other thing that happens when students bring families is even if a university or educational institution is doing all the right things in student accommodation, the moment you bring your family with you, you don't tend to stay in student accommodation and you're back out in competition in the general housing market.

So for students, this is something where we believe the universities and educational institutions will be able to work with it, but it's also a very different cohort.

Now, when I say they can't bring families, there are some areas of regional significance and strategic significance for Australia where we will still allow it, so we'll still allow it for the Pacific, we'll still allow it for ASEAN, and similarly for some courses where someone is logically going to be older, like PhD courses, and things like that, we don't want to miss out on them.

KARVELAS: Okay.

BURKE: So they'd be able to bring their families.

KARVELAS: The National Farmers Federation says the price of food will increase because of your changes to the backpacker visas. That's what they're predicting. You'd think they'd know, we're in the middle of a cost‑of‑living crisis, there's a war in the Middle East that won't end. That's pretty risky, isn't it?

BURKE: Look, for farmers, I'd say two things: first of all, the announcement we made today is about getting the processing moving again for those backpacker visas that have an obligation if you want the extra years to work in the regions. So that's a significant advantage that, you know, wasn't there before my speech, is now on the table in the Department getting moving on the processing of those again at a faster pace.

The second thing I'd say though, is we have the PALM Scheme, we have the Pacific Workers Scheme, which is there and waiting, and back when I was Employment Minister we did a lot to improve the situation and improve the rights against exploitation of those workers.

When we did that, some of the worst employers in the horticulture sector, not all, not the main horticulture employers, I won't pretend that, but we had some of them say, "Well, if you improve the working standards of Pacific workers, we'll just go to backpackers".

Now that's not a reason to say that you need backpackers. The Pacific workers, we have Pacific workers ‑‑

KARVELAS: But can you be certain, Minister, that it won't have an impact on food prices?

BURKE: Well, if they're willing to use the Pacific workers, if they're willing to use the Pacific workers, then everything that they want picked, every job they want done, is completely there and able to be done. And if their reason and their claim for keeping prices low is jeopardised by having to pay Pacific workers properly, then I think that would show a very poor reflection on those individual businesses.

KARVELAS: It might, but it gets passed on to consumers, doesn't it, and that becomes a political headache for the Government if they can say consumers are now going to pay more because of migration changes that you're making.

BURKE: Well, no, no, but if we're in that argument, we're in the argument that consumers ‑ the way ‑ I don't think consumers believe their pathway to paying less should rely on worker exploitation.

KARVELAS: You spoke about how we have a shortage of homes and people want to make sure that, you know, we guide the immigration system so that we soften our numbers to be able to allow housing to catch up. That's the basis of the Opposition's plan to migration and housing too. So why do you oppose that? They want to make a direct link. Isn't that what you're talking about here?

BURKE: Well, the direct link that they want to make presumes that everybody lives in a house on their own. They've got a one‑to‑one link, which is an odd way. Like effectively what we have now is Australians now live the average 2.5 people to a household.

If you look at the number of people that we've been bringing in to the number of houses that have been built, so far we've been on exactly a match matrix, and the numbers in the budget mean that we stage down to 245 and then down to 225, which provides the breathing space.

So there's no doubt that while the housing shortage is not caused by immigration, it's caused by a changed number of people per household. In the Hawke years it was 2.9, now it's 2.5. Every time it moves one decimal point we need to find 450,000 extra homes. That's what's caused the shortage that we have relative to population.

But if you go too hard, you lose your Government services, you lose your health services, you lose ‑ when I say Government services, I'm referring to health services there, and also you start to lose the people you need to build the homes.

Now once you're in that sort of circumstance you'd have to ask, what are you achieving?

KARVELAS: Is the fact that you have actually even referenced the shortage of housing a sign that One Nation has framed this debate?

BURKE: No, this is what I was referencing when I started the work on this a year ago, and so, you know, I started work on this policy and these measures straight after the election with my department, and the challenge that we were wrestling with and working closely with Clare O'Neil as Housing Minister was to say we need to make sure, if we're going to deal with housing shortage, that we have a period where housing supply gets moving, and at the same time that it gets moving, immigration is tempered, but it needs to be tempered to an extent that works for the Australian economy.

And if you look at those comments from the farmers, and people have been making comments over the last couple of weeks in particular, saying things that we were already doing were causing challenges for their businesses.

Now I've been able to release some of that pressure today with the changes that we've made, but if getting to 245 was carrying the pressure on business and farmers, then you can only imagine, instead of getting to 245, which is the number for this financial year, what would happen to the economy if you were aiming for 180, or aiming for 130, or aiming for zero.

KARVELAS: Just finally, Minister, you say you began this work, but it's taken a whole lot of time to land. In that long process, have you, or your Government more broadly, I'm not going to put it all on you, but you as Minister and the Government, allowed a vacuum where others, who are quite noisy about these issues, have been able to fill it, and you haven't been able to answer these questions in relation to immigration numbers?

BURKE: The nature of every policy reform is once you land on what needs to be done, and once you've worked it through, you'd always wish that you'd been at that exact point a year earlier; naturally everyone would wish that.

But what really matters is to make sure that you land correctly. You know, you had the Shadow Housing Minister deliver a Press Club speech not that long ago, which hadn't worked through any of his internal processes, and it was dead within a couple of hours. You had the One Nation policy be released without the never stopping to think, you know, for the doctors who we need, or the construction workers, how many of them at the moment bring over their family.

And so if you rush it, yeah, you get to fill a vacuum, but if you rush it, you also get it wrong. And if you rush it, you end up causing real challenges ‑‑

KARVELAS: But do you accept ‑‑

BURKE: ‑‑ for the Australian economy, for jobs, for people's chance to rely on health services.

KARVELAS: I understand the economic argument there, but do you accept that in that process support around the Government and these issues has eroded?

BURKE: Well, I'd say two things: I'd say, first of all, the concept of a vacuum presumes that people only get their information from mainstream media, and the reality at the moment is there are different algorithms that people are in, particularly on issues like this, where it would not matter what I say or what I have said now, they will be being fed false information. That's part of the environment at the moment, unfortunately.

Secondly, you always need to deal with the counter‑narrative, and to be rushing out before you are ready actually would have landed a situation ultimately where people had even less confidence.

So, yes, I would have preferred that we'd been able to land everything right from the moment I said we need to think about this, but we are in a better landing place with more consultation across all the different portfolios affected, and everyone is affected by what happens with immigration, that what matters ultimately, the question you must not fail, is have you acted in the national interest, and we absolutely have.

KARVELAS: Minister, one last area. You are the Arts Minister. Artists are worried about a leaked proposal on copyright to allow AI models and basically you'd have to opt out if you're an artist. Are you going to do that?

BURKE: I think the papers that have been seen in the media don't actually put it as simply as you've just described. The challenge that we need to work through is this: first of all, yes, in terms of national security and the economy are there big benefits for data centres here? Absolutely there are. Should the price of getting there be theft of people's work? Absolutely it shouldn't be. And that's why the consultation's happening.

I think people would have reason to be alarmed if there wasn't consultation happening.

KARVELAS: So what's your message ‑‑

BURKE: But the Prime Minister's ‑‑

KARVELAS: ‑‑ to Paul Dempsey who I had on yesterday who said he felt like there was a guarantee around this, and what he's now read is at odds with that?

BURKE: Yeah. I think some of the interpretation of it is at odds with that, but I don't think the concepts that the Government's working through change our first principle, which is we accept that artists own their own material, and we are trying to work through a situation where we can land the benefits to the economy that otherwise, you know, we might lose, but make a huge difference if we can get them, and to try to navigate a way of doing that that still works for our creators.

KARVELAS: Thank you so much for joining us, Minister.