SUBJECTS: Immigration reform, Temporary visas, Student visas

TONY BURKE: Thanks for the introduction, Tom. You didn't mention I'm also Arts Minister. There's a line at the start of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead that there's an art to the building of suspense.

So here we are, it's good to be here with each and every one of you. Acknowledge country and wonderful to be able to meet with you; acknowledge Elders past and present.

Can I also acknowledge the heads of agencies who I have here, Secretary to the Department of Home Affairs Stephanie Foster, the Head of Immigration Clare Sharp, the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police Krissy Barrett, the Director‑General of the Criminal Intelligence Commission Heather Cook, the Director‑General of AUSTRAC Brendan Thomas, Gavin Reynolds, the Commissioner for the Australian Border Force, and Brett Sonter, the Commander of Operation Sovereign Borders.

Today, and no one will let me get away with claiming there was a big strategy in making sure that we could deliver this speech on Citizenship Day, but today is Citizenship Day. And effectively, anything about our migration story has to start with the concept that immigration is fundamentally a strength to this country, is fundamentally a strength to Australia, and the ultimate expression of an immigration journey is in a citizenship ceremony. They are the most joyful and most patriotic events that we have, where someone stands up at the end of their immigration journey and makes a life‑long pledge to our country, and our country responds to them with the words "welcome home". It's real nation building, and we need to always remember that while there are issues in the immigration program that we are always wrestling with, that job is never complete. We can never lose sight of the extraordinary strength to the fabric of our nation in what is modern multicultural Australia.

It is possible, and sorry, and in that the great Australian project has always been different to what some of the debate would imply. Some countries describe themselves as a melting pot. It's not a term I ever use of Australia. In a melting pot anything you throw into it loses its shape and dissolves. I view our nation very much through the shape of an orchestra. It's a pretty bad orchestra when everything's the same instrument. What you need to make sure of is that all the different instruments of the orchestra can work together in building harmony, and that has been the Australian project and that has been so much of the success of our nation.

In dealing with the immigration debate, I first of all want to discharge some of the pretty absurd claims, because we are capable of having a mature debate about this. There are some pretty absurd claims out there that I want to be able to deal with. Then I want to talk quickly about what some of the actual problems are that we do need to wrestle with. And then I'll deal with the reforms that we're announcing today.

The first of the absurd claims is that Australia is a nation of mass migration. We need to remember just this one simple fact: Before the pandemic, the Intergenerational Report had the projections for where Australia's population would be by 2030, 2031. When we get to that point, we'll be 700,000 people smaller than what had been projected before the pandemic. There are parts of the world where mass migration is something that they are dealing with. It is not something we're dealing with in Australia.

There was a peak post‑pandemic which was too high. There were reasons why it was too high, and reasons why logically there was always going to be a peak. But with the net overseas migration numbers that have just come out about an hour ago, we're now 47 per cent below what that peak was, and now in a situation we are tracking in accordance with the numbers that were last delivered in the budget, in fact a little bit below them.

The second concept that's come out recently in the debate is there are some visa classes that are irrelevant to net overseas migration. This is an argument that I've heard about the PALM, the Pacific Labour Mobility program. It's also used with respect to working holiday makers or backpackers. No area of the immigration program is irrelevant to net overseas migration.

Simple, you know, if we want to say that backpackers are irrelevant, just let me give you this figure. Last year the contribution of backpackers to net overseas migration was 48,000… 48,000. So, every part of the program is relevant. There's almost an approach, sort of the NOM version of NIMBYism. I won't try to invent the NIMBYism word, but it's a concept where people will say that they want immigration numbers to go down but they don't want to mention which visa class, and they immediately want to rule out all the ones that they would rely on.

Part of the challenge with this argument is that there has become a bit of a narrative that says, "Oh, maybe we need immigration in the regions but nowhere else". It is true that immigration is critical to the economy of our regions. It is also true that immigration is critical to the economy of our cities as well.

For all the talk about student visas, it is also the case that there are people who work and have jobs in Australia as a result of international education being an incredibly important export. It's not simply the people who are involved in teaching, it's also the people who work on the maintenance and facilities, it's the people who work as the cleaners, it's the people who run businesses that the students use. There is a whole section of the Australian economy in the cities that is only there because we have an important export industry in international students.

Drastic cuts, wherever you make them, hurt the economy in every part, in every area. And what we need to make sure of is anything that we do to temper migration needs to take account of the economic cost. And anyone who wants to pretend there's only an economic cost in the regions does not understand the Australian economy.

We talk about the need for extra housing. It's pretty hard to get a house built without having a plasterer involved. In both Sydney and Melbourne, close to two‑thirds of the plasterers we have were born overseas.

We need immigration. We just need to make sure that it is targeted for the needs of Australia in numbers and across the different categories that work for our economy.

The final argument, silliest of all, but it's been run so many times I just have to use this platform and this moment to discharge it, and hopefully when these people are next interviewed by any of those who are members of the National Press Club, they'll be pulled up on it. There is an endless refrain that the Government is bringing in yoga teachers and not construction workers, to the extent that the Shadow Minister for Housing, Senator Bragg, has even said we are bringing in more yoga teachers than construction workers.

It is absurd, but keeps getting made, so let me just provide this information. In terms of construction workers, we have tripled the number that we're bringing. We used to bring 4,500, last financial year the number of construction workers we brought in was just shy of 15,000. We've tripled the number of construction workers who are coming in.

Now you can do your own maths to compare that to the number of yoga teachers. In the light of this Government the number of yoga teachers we have brought in is zero. Zero. And yet this claim is constantly made about yoga teachers. Why are they on the list at all? Because there was an agreement made by the previous Government with India that yoga teachers would be added to the list. The person from the previous Government who announced that change was Dan Tehan as Assistant Trade. So, it's a tiny argument, but it is so constantly out there and so demonstrably wrong, it gives an indication as to how a debate like this can just run out of control.

But there are genuine problems that we have to wrestle with, that we have to deal with. The first is the challenge, which was an active decision, started in the Hawke Government, expanded in a very big way under the Howard Government, and not largely questioned until quite recently, and that was that most of our immigration program would be demand-driven.

Effectively, the decision that Australia took when we had a demand-driven program was to say that if employers can get the workers that they need, and our educational institutions can get the students who are willing to pay, and we get the business, then infrastructure and housing will take care of themselves. That is no longer the experience of Australians; that is no longer the view of Australia. But effectively there is now an expectation on us that the pure demand-driven approach to major parts of the immigration system is not what Australians want, and they do want to see government able to take a higher level of control on different parts of the immigration system, compared to what previously has been there.

The second issue that needs to be dealt with is visa hopping. Now, not all of the movement from one visa to another is what I would call visa hopping. A lot of it is actually the system working as we would want it to. So, if someone comes here on a student visa, they study an area of skill shortage, they get their qualification. They then go on to a graduate visa, look for work. Get work in an area that we had skill shortage. The employer decides to then sponsor them, and they get an employer-sponsored temporary visa in an area of skill shortage. They then apply to the permanent program. Once they've been a permanent resident for more than 12 months, given the years that they've already been here, they then become an Australian citizen. That is not visa hopping; that is the system working at its absolute best, and that is Australia having some of the highest levels of direct economic benefit from the migration system.

But there is a problem with visa hopping where there are individuals who would never, in fact, meet the qualifications to be able to become a permanent resident, and effectively jump from visa to visa, use the appeals process to be able to stay here as long as possible until it eventually becomes absurd to not just let them stay, because at that point they have Australian citizen children and at that point they are so integrated into a local community.

The different methods of visa hopping I will go through a bit later. We need to deal with it. It's a genuine problem.

The final issue that's a genuine problem is the concept of what we do with respect to housing. Now I start with this: Housing and the housing shortage we have is not caused by immigration. But immigration needs to be part of the solution for the housing crisis, and let me explain why.

If you go back to the Hawke Government, back to the Hawke years to today, and look at well, what's happened to housing? What's happened to the number of people? You'll find these two really simple facts. The number of people in Australia has increased by 75 per cent. The number of homes has increased by 100 per cent. How on earth did we end up with a housing problem if they're the stats? And the answer's really simple. Back then, and Australians have every right to decide how many people they want to live in per household, back then the number of people per household was 2.9. It's now 2.5. Every time we get a .1 change, a .1 change in the number of people per household, we have to find an additional 450,000 homes.

Now Australians have every right to be able to decide how many people they want to have living per household, but that also means anyone who looks at the migration program and wants to somehow say it was their fault - no, Australians have made a decision about how many people they want per household. Post‑COVID, after we'd all lived very closely to each other, a whole lot of people decided they wanted fewer people around than had previously been there, and that may continue as a trend. But immigration will need to be part of the solution to help provide some space for housing supply to catch up.

But if you were to simply look at where we're at the moment, because some people say, "Well what if it just kept pace, if you just kept it at even numbers?" The two 2.5 figure at the moment is basically exactly what we currently have. At the moment, immigration is not putting further pressure on housing, but what's happening at the moment is we need immigration to soften enough that housing has a chance to catch up.

So, dealing with those as the problems, I then come to the reforms. Now I respect that there will always want to be a political narrative that says, "Why is the Government announcing reforms to the migration program" and people will always look at current political context. So, for the sake of just saying something that is demonstrably true, all of these reforms were started, and the work started last year. Every measure I'm going to go through had been largely worked up and formalised by February of this year. This is not, this is not ‑ and then we go through all the process, as we should, of working through the refinements and making sure that what we've got is exactly fit for purpose. But no one, and it's simply demonstrably wrong to suspect that somehow this is a recent bit of work done to deal with a political climate; it's not. It's when we sat down and looked at the pace we could get for new housing, and we looked at where immigration was at, we knew we needed to have ways to bring those numbers down.

The second thing I'll say about the reforms that I'll announce is they are not as comprehensive as I would like them to be. Effectively, to be able to add all the levers that I talked about, particularly with respect to the problem of the demand-driven system that we have, you can't do that without legislation.

Now I'm not going to use this platform to launch some sort of attack on the Opposition, because I hope they will come back to the table. And I can assure everyone here they've kept confidence with the negotiations and the discussions that had happened and I'm not going to breach any of the confidence there either.

But let me make this clear: We had put nothing forward to them that is any way a wedge for them. Nothing. Every measure that we're putting forward is something that they would support. Their only difference might be that there are other things they would want us to do as well. But I would also say when they come to bring forward their policy, without the sort of legislation that we would like to get through the Parliament, and that is clearly in the national interest, I don't see how they would ever be able to implement the full powers that they would propose either.

So, the changes that we're making, as Tom said in the introduction, are summarised under the three headings: Who arrives; who stays; and who leaves?

The first part of dealing with who arrives is something that was referred to in the productivity roundtable straight after the election, which was the reform of the points test. The points test is a major economic driver. Now, with that, we have redone the points test in consultation with Treasury to make sure that we are for our skilled program, particularly the permanent part of the skilled program, getting the best possible economic benefit for Australia out of the people who come to move here on skilled visas.

We are also adding an unusual capacity there which hasn't been there previously, which is within the points test to be able to choose particular skills which will have an uplift so that they will be viewed as though they were a higher level of qualification.

So with that, whereas you normally get more points for a university course than you get for a TAFE or trade, it will be the case under the new points test that we will, on implementation, be making sure that anyone who is skilled in the housing trades will get the same number of points as though it were a university qualification, to make sure that we are getting the construction trades that we desperately need.

The next thing, with respect to who arrives, are two things that we're doing that will help speed up some of the processing that I'm able to do as a result of the other things that I'll announce.

The first is Ministerial Direction 119. This is a ministerial direction which determines the priorities under which we process visas. At the moment we've got a single one where we have almost identical rules for both the permanent program and the temporary program, which has meant sometimes when we can't get someone through on the temporary ‑ on the permanent, we also can't get through them on the temporary in the processing order.

What we'll be doing is updating that and adding to the priority list in full construction, agriculture, fisheries, resources and teaching.

Next, in terms of working holiday maker processing, there are some things that I announce further down with respect to working holiday makers that curtail some of those numbers. The fact that we are doing that allows us to restore the normal processing speed that we were previously at for primary applications for working holiday makers.

When I say that, we're not restoring that pace across the whole of the working holiday maker system; we're doing it for those ones that have the regional requirement to be able to get years two and three. There's not a regional requirement with respect to the United Kingdom, and we have a challenge with the rapid growth of that, but obviously it's part of a free trade agreement and something that we continue to talk to the United Kingdom about. So, at the moment we are still in the case where we will be processing at the speed we've been processing the last few years for the UK working holiday maker applications.

But just to give you a sense of the pace of the growth, at the time that the free trade agreement was signed, the number of UK backpackers we had here in Australia was in the order of 17,000. Now that's a little bit on the low side because that was the end of the pandemic, but the previous peak had been around 35,000. It's now just shy of 80,000 in terms of number of people here in Australia, and it's a level of growth that means we are just at the moment, going to continue to be processing that one slowly, and will continue, both myself and other ministerial colleagues who are particularly Penny Wong and Don Farrell and Julie Collins, working with our counterparts to make sure that we can have those conversations with the UK in a constructive way.

The next change on who arrives is the change with respect to student visas and graduate visas. If you're an Australian citizen and your partner is not an Australian citizen, and they live overseas, and you put in an application for them to come here, you have to wait quite some years. At the moment, if you're an international student and you want to come here with your partner, you get them right from the start.

What we will be doing for international students, and I'll go through the exceptions to this because the exceptions are also important: for international students, we will no longer be allowing the attaching of family members for international students or for graduate visas. Anyone who already has their family attached to a visa and is already here, we're not going to be breaking up families onshore. The ones who are already here, that'll stay as is for the, you know, until at whatever point they leave Australia, unless they end up being entitled to a permanent visa. But we will no longer be adding to the stock of students automatically being able to bring family members over.

We have special visa conditions which will still allow it for the Pacific and for the ASEAN nations, and for certain courses, for example, PhD courses, they'll be able to bring family. You're offered in a very different circumstance of life for those sorts of students than people are for undergraduate.

But one of the most effective things to do with who arrives would also be to have an expression of interest system. That would have us dealing very directly with the demand-driven challenges. I can only do that part of it if we have legislation, and at this point we don't. That said, what I've gone through will still have a substantive impact on us being able to control the numbers of who arrives in Australia.

The next issue is who stays here. Now, while we will be going back to the pace of processing for working holiday makers that I described earlier, we will be going to a ballot system for years two and three. To qualify for the ballot, you will still have to meet the criteria that you currently have to meet in terms of the regional work. So, to qualify for your second year you have to do 88 days in the regions. To qualify for your third year, you have to do six months. That won't change. But what you will be qualifying for is a ballot. Not everybody will get through because we need to have some control and certainty of what those numbers are.

The ballot for year two will be limited to 45,000. For reference, last year there were 57,000 people who qualified. So that will be 45,000 will be the limit there, but needing to do regional work will be unchanged.

To qualify for year three, and remember, year three, with the exception of the UK, is something that is not part of any free trade agreement; that third year, it was something that was introduced not that long ago. We'll be seriously limiting year three down to a ballot system of 5,000. Now, last year there were 31,000 in this group. That will only become 5,000 places. To qualify, you will still have to have completed the regional work to be able to be part of those ballots.

The next issue on who stays is visitor visas. Now I referred before to somebody whose partner is overseas, putting in a partner application and having to wait years before the person is able to come here. There's been a double standard on that. If someone doesn't tell us that their partner's from overseas and the partner just applies for a visitor visa, once they get here and if they apply onshore, the process has been that they stay and they're on a bridging visa. It's a double standard that really has no logic attached to it. But the consequence of that sort of double standard has been deeply problematic. It's meant, and you ask any Member of Parliament, no matter which side of the aisle they're on, they'll have examples of people trying to get visas for someone to come to a wedding, to come to a family event, and my Department is not able to issue the visa. And they're not able to issue the visa for a really simple reason. They have to, under migration law, do the test as to whether or not the visit is for a genuine temporary purpose. And the practice that we've had of people being able to from visitor visas automatically transfer on to bridging visas has meant a whole lot of these visas don't get issued at all, even though the odds may have been reasonably high that it was going to be for a genuine purpose; they just couldn't satisfy it.

We'll be attaching to visitor visas a no further stay provision to visitor visas. Now obviously you can't do a no further stay with respect to a protection application, but we will have a no further stay with respect to other applications for people coming on visitor visas. That will give some consistency as to what happens with family migration. It will have no impact on anybody who is already here because this is about the issuing of future visas and the rules for future visas. So, families that are already here, that won't change anything for them. But it does mean that the days of people having every bit of evidence and being so confident that they just wanted their family to be able to visit from overseas for an important milestone, or to see an aged relative before they passed away, is something that we'll be able to issue those visas as a result of this change. And it also means while someone is waiting for a spouse visa to come through, their partner will be able to visit Australia on a regular basis.

The next part of who stays are our changes to student visas themselves. For student visas, there are three times that a student once they're here seeks to vary in some way, either an extension, which is, you know, you've got critically ill, you're not going to finish your course in time and you need an extra year or, you know, your institution that you came to study at actually fell over and you need to apply to a new one. You do a 12-month extension. That's unchanged.

The second thing that happens with student visas is people often seek to do a transfer. You come, you start your course, and after 12 months the course you're doing is not the right fit and you want to use your credits to do something slightly different. That will require the application for a new visa, so we'll be able to test that it's legitimate, but it's effectively where, at the same institution or at the same level someone transfers from one course to another. It works. It makes sure that we've got people actually studying things that they're good at, and in terms of international education, that's not the visa-hopping problem.

The visa hopping problem for students comes at the third area, which is not the extension or transfer, but what we call progression. Someone finishes their course and where do they go to next? And one of the classic areas of visa hopping is people finish a course, hop to the next course, hop to the next, and one of the worst examples is they transfer down to a not-so-legitimate educational provider who is able to say to them, "Study with me, it'll cost you less. We're not very demanding on whether you attend anything, and you'll be able to go for your life and get out there and work", and where this is being used effectively to drive a migration outcome, not an educational outcome.

What we'll be doing is setting a very simple rule: You can go up the qualification scale, but only up the qualification scale. So, at the end of a bachelor’s degree if you want to then do a masters, that's up the scale; that's okay. But to hop around up and down to different institutions and claim that what is actually just seeking a migration outcome as part of Australia's export of international education will come to an end as a model.

The final part of who stays is the issue of disingenuous protection claims. I start with this principle: Having a protection system for asylum in Australia is critically important. There have probably been few issues that I've been involved with where I've had more support and thanks from people on the street than the decision that was taken earlier this year with respect to two elite Iranian soccer players. Sorry, I better say footballers, or I'll get in trouble.

And so, Australia does support a legitimate asylum seeker system. What there is no community support for, and I certainly have no time for, is when someone gets to the end of visa hopping, and they can be from a Five Eyes country, they can be from Western Europe, they can be from Scandinavia, they know they don't have a legitimate protection claim, and they get advised to put one in anyway, and you'll be able to wait out the appeal system, wait out the court system, you might get up to nine years working in Australia. That's not a legitimate reason for the protection system and actually holds up the processing of the legitimate claims.

So give a sense of the gravity of this: if we took the people who apply from countries where more than 85 per cent of the applications fail, that constitutes 80 per cent of our caseload. This is an issue I'd like to be able to deal with. I want to deal with it sensibly; I want to deal with it in a way that does not in any way create problems for the genuine asylum seekers who are there, who a decent nation needs to have a decent system for.

Once again, this is one that I can only deal with legislation, and therefore that part of the story I'm not able to complete today.

The next area though is who leaves. First of all, we'll be changing the code for migration agents. So, migration agents who encourage the exact sort of behaviour of non‑meritorious claims that I just described will be able to be sanctioned and will be able to be deregistered. It's something that should have happened some time ago, and we cannot have people with some sort of official formal status using that official formal status to encourage people to make something which by any definition is an unacceptable abuse of the system.

The other area with who leaves though is best explained by what happened in 2015. This is the area where I am most likely to be misinterpreted and where political opponents, or even dare I say some sections of the media, may misrepresent the most, so I want to give absolute clarity.

Before 2015, we had a routine process in Australia for overstayers where, when people had overstayed a visa, we would bring people in to detention centres; if they ‑ you would give them a bridging visa, you'd tell them leave, if they hadn't left you'd bring them in to the detention centre, and within a few weeks they'd organise their own flight and leave. And effectively that didn't just affect them; it had a behavioural impact where a whole lot of other people who were overstaying thought, "Yeah, yeah, it's better that I just get on a plane and leave".

In 2015 there was a change in Australia. In 2015 we moved to mandatory visa cancellation. So if I go back to 2006, when I was Kim Beazley's Shadow Minister for immigration visiting detention centres. The detention centres back there, the people there were overstayers. They didn't stay long. Any time you went back, it was largely a different group of people in those detention centres.

But since 2015 the detention centre population has largely changed from students who might have overstayed to people who have come from prison to the detention centre. And there are many compounds there where there is no way I would share an overstayer with that particular caseload, and it's meant that the resources of the Department have had to be used in a very different way.

What we will do is simply go back to what Australia always did before 2015. This is not the sort of operation that some people have seen on TV happening in other countries. This is making sure that we would have an additional 100 compliance officers and we would have had an additional 250 beds. We are working through, we already have different alternative places in detention near airports that are available, but we're also having a look at the former quarantine facility in Melbourne to see how that might be able to be repurposed as part of this as well.

Effectively, what we are going back to doing is simply being able to make sure that if you overstay, you will not be able to say, "Well there's no consequences, as if they're ever going to make sure that I leave". We need - with the integrity of the program - to make sure that we can go back simply to what we did before 2015. No more and no less.

All of this comes back to, in fact, a relatively simple proposition. For all the heat and drama of migration policy debate, it simply means everything I've announced means this: If you want to come on a temporary basis to Australia, apply for a temporary visa. If you want to come to Australia permanently, apply for a permanent visa. And if you no longer have a valid visa, you should leave Australia. That's all it is.

But to have that working, to have that working and to have that system with as much integrity as possible gives meaning to the citizenship ceremonies that are happening all around Australia today. And the reason that I want to make sure that we have this system working as best as possible for the Australian economy and for the confidence of the Australian people in making sure that it works, is so that we give meaning and allow the celebration of those patriotic citizenship ceremonies that are happening.

And just think, because some of you won't have ever been to one, the beauty of the fact of people who have looked around the world, chosen us, and we've decided, yeah, we want them to stay, they stand up, and they say, "From this time forward" ‑ some of them ‑ I say "under God" and half of them repeat it, half of them don't, it's up to them, "I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people". "I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey".

That is the commitment that meets every test of what Australians hope the immigration journey will be, and almost everybody who comes to Australia is a good guest in our country, and the people who make those pledges are good citizens and fellow citizens of this country. And I want to have the confidence that what people hear at those ceremonies is something that we move to every Australian feeling, which is that our response to people in that moment is to simply say, "Welcome home".