Peter Dutton and the Murdoch press are celebrating Trump’s anti-immigration fuelled victory. While he may not use Trump’s extreme language such as ‘migrants are poisoning the blood’, or that they are ‘eating the dogs’, his anti-immigration rhetorical skills are his best pathway to the Lodge.
So what aspects of immigration will Dutton focus on now that the armada of boats he has repeatedly warned of has not arrived?
Criminal deportees
Last year’s High Court decision on release from detention of character cancellations who cannot readily be removed is an ongoing opportunity. Dutton will ramp up his argument Labor isn’t doing enough to protect Australians from dangerous migrant criminals even though his own offerings on this have been either to show the middle finger to the High Court or to propose totally unworkable legislation.
Not surprisingly, last week the High Court overturned the monitoring legislation for released detainees (ankle bracelets, curfews, etc) which the Coalition insisted on making virtually mandatory. Labor acquiescing to Coalition pressure to do so was a mistake. Labor’s preventative detention legislation, which Dutton continues to demand Labor use, is just as unworkable.
New Immigration Minister Tony Burke’s proposed regulations to use monitoring on a case-by-case basis has a greater chance of surviving legal challenge if used only in very clear-cut cases. Dutton will insist that is insufficient. He will goad Labor to use monitoring more extensively and criticise every instance where a released detainee steps out of line.
Burke’s proposed legislation to enable released detainees to be re-settled in a third country appears similar to offshore detention and processing of boat arrivals but actually marks a significant departure from past practice. This legislation will apply mostly to people who had been living in Australia on permanent visas, often for many years, before they committed crimes for which they have now completed their sentences.
It has been common practice for such people to be deported to their home countries where that is possible. It has also been common practice for Australia to re-settle boat arrivals who are found to be refugees in a third country (eg NZ). But paying a third (likely a very poor) country to accept people who have no connection to that third country because Australia considers them too dangerous to live in Australia, is unprecedented. That will inevitably be subject to legal challenge.
We are essentially saying to these third countries, that their communities are already so poor and dangerous that accepting another cohort of dangerous people should not be a problem.
Even Dutton may find that distasteful. But he will support the legislation.
Asylum seekers and mass deportation
The number of asylum seekers currently living in the Australian community is at a record 118,000. It was over 94,000 at the change of government, largely driven by a massive labour trafficking scam that started when Dutton was Home Affairs Minister. Few Australians will know just how poor Dutton’s record on immigration integrity is given his anti-immigration rhetoric.
That will not stop him criticising Labor for not fixing his mess. Labor’s $160 million strategy appears to have stabilised the primary and Administrative Review Tribunal (ART) level asylum backlogs. But the number of asylum seekers who have been refused at the primary stage (87,000 at end September 2024) and ART stage (over 45,000) and not departed will continue to rise.
While Labor has restored some of the Coalition’s cuts to immigration compliance funding, that is not nearly enough to stop the number of refused asylum seekers in the country continuing to rise.
For these people Dutton will not promise a mass deportation program such as Trump’s. Given the Coalition’s abysmal record in removing immigration detainees, Dutton will know how difficult and costly mass deportations are. He will still have bruises from his failed attempts to remove just the Biloela family.
Dutton will be happy to leave this issue to the Murdoch press and radio shock jocks who can carry on about mass deportations with the same level of ignorance as Trump.
Blow out in net migration and students
On this issue, Dutton will hide the fact the student contribution to net migration was rising strongly when he was Minister as was the recruitment of too many students with poor English and poor academic skills who struggle to get skilled jobs after graduation. He will also want to hide the fact that, under pressure from various business lobby groups, the Coalition stomped on the student (and other) visa accelerator towards the end of covid that gave us record levels of net migration.
The Coalition will prefer to focus on Labor’s slow and haphazard response to the blowout in net migration and link that to the housing crisis and cost of living – even if the links are tenuous. The housing crisis has been coming at us for years before covid.
Dutton has already likened the boom in onshore student refusals appealing to the ART and the steadily rising number of students seeking asylum to boat arrivals – a nonsense comparison.
He will contrast his announcement to bring net migration down to 160,000 per annum with Labor’s struggles to get net migration down to its much higher forecasts for 2023-24 and 2024-25. Canada’s projections to get net migration into negative territory in 2025 and 2026 may be an attractive rhetorical benchmark for Dutton. But Canada’s situation is quite different to Australia’s.
While he will promote his net migration target of 160,000 per annum, Dutton will avoid like the plague any pressure to explain how he would get net migration down to that level. It would be close to impossible without a very weak labour market. Would he try to engineer a weak labour market just to deliver his net migration promise?
Surely not!
Abul Rizvi PhD was a senior official in the Department of Immigration from the early 1990s to 2007 when he left as Deputy Secretary. He was awarded the Public Service Medal and the Centenary Medal for services to development and implementation of immigration policy, including the reshaping of Australia's intake to focus on skilled migration, slow Australia's rate of population ageing and boost Australia's international education and tourism industries.
Contributions to Pearls and Irritations
Your contribution will fund quality independent comment and analysis in Pearls and Irritations
Contribute
