Pearls and Irritations

The media and politicians are inevitably arguing Albanese’s decision to move Clare O’Neil and Andrew Giles and replace them with Tony Burke at Home Affairs reflects their failure to fix our immigration system. The reality is much more complex as few Australians would be aware of the mess they inherited, particularly following the mis-management of the Dutton/Pezzullo administration.

O’Neil and Giles improved numerous parts of the visa system, particularly employer sponsored migration and migrant worker exploitation, but few will give them credit for those. The focus will be on three main areas of immigration policy in which O’Neil and Giles are alleged to have failed.

First, they released a large number of criminal non-citizens following last year’s High Court decision on indefinite detention and are alleged to have failed to find an acceptable solution.

That situation arose after Peter Dutton significantly increased using the Character provisions of the Migration Act to cancel visas of long-standing residents upon completion of their prison sentence but without putting in place adequate arrangements for their deportation. As a result, the number of Character detainees increased significantly and the average time in detention blew out.

That made it inevitable there would be a successful challenge to the detention of people the Government had little prospect of removing. Dutton’s suggestion that he would have only released the specific person who was the subject of the High Court decision is nonsense. He knows that is not how the legal system works but is happy to pretend otherwise.

The two legislative ‘solutions’ to the High Court decision that Parliament has passed – intense monitoring and preventative detention – were never going to work. Character cancellations who cannot be deported due to a lack of cooperation from receiving countries will have to be released into the community no matter who is in Government. Attempted deportation of long-standing residents will be met by retaliation by receiving nations, thus further delaying deportations.

Tony Burke’s job will be to try and help Australians understand that in the face of massive scaremongering.

Second, the Albanese Government inherited a backlog of over 90,000 asylum seekers that was largely the result of a massive labour trafficking scam that Dutton/Pezzullo largely ignored. Labor eventually introduced a $160 million package to start the process of addressing that. At best, that may slow the rate of new asylum applications exceeding processing capacity.

The backlog is now over 114,000. Burke’s job will be to start development of a long-term approach to resolving that situation. The political and budget cost of that will be eye-watering as it has been worldwide. It will take all of Burke’s political skills as no politician anywhere in the world has found an acceptable way to resolve such asylum seeker backlogs in the 21st century.

If Trump is elected President, Burke may be trying to find a solution to that situation at the same time as Trump tries (and fails) to implement a mass deportation program in the USA. Trump may possibly withdraw the USA from the 1957 Refugee Convention. That would put Burke under pressure to also withdraw Australia.

Third, primarily due to policies put in place by the previous Coalition Government for overseas students, there was a massive blow out in net migration from 2022-23. O’Neil and Giles initially refused to acknowledge a responsibility to manage net migration and then moved too slowly to address that.

While many sensible changes were made to student policy, the enormous hike in student visa fees, extensive use of subjective criteria to ramp up refusal rates and the proposed intention to use caps to limit the number of students each provider can have are simply unsustainable.

While there is little Burke can now do about the visa fee hike, he can fix the other two problems.

In my view he should do three things.

First, he should introduce use of overseas university entrance exam scores as the key basis for grant of a student visa and/or develop a dedicated university entrance exam for that purpose. That is how top universities in the USA select overseas students.

Second, he should replace the existing provider-based risk ratings with ones based only on sectors and source nations. In other words, all providers within a sector would compete on a level playing field subject to appropriate limits on the portion of overseas students in each class or course.

Third, post-study work visas should only be available to students who complete qualifications in areas of long-term skill shortage or have completed post-graduate research in Australia. All other students would be required to depart once they complete their studies.

Many providers would object to these changes but I suspect those objections would be based on self-interest rather than national interest.

Burke has the free air and the political skills to carry out these changes as he does not own the problems that were created under O’Neil and Giles.

Finally, Burke has the opportunity to define a long-term vision for our migration system that contrasts with the largely negative one being put forward by Dutton and Shadow Home Affairs Minister James Paterson.

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