Earth to Burke: People Want You to Control Immigration

In his Citizenship Day address to the National Press Club, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke offered aspiring immigrants what he called “a relatively simple proposition”:

“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.”

He said that “everything I’ve announced means this.” That’s odd, because earlier in the same speech, he described “the system working as we would want it to” in the following terms:

“Someone comes here on a student visa, they study an area of skill shortage, they get their qualification. They then go onto 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 work visa in an area of skill shortage. They then apply to the permanent program. Once they’ve been a permanent resident for more than twelve months, given their years that they’ve already been here, they become an Australian citizen. That is not visa hopping. That is the system working at its absolute best.”

So … if you want to come to Australia permanently, apply for a temporary student visa (3 years), transition to a temporary graduate visa (3 years), transition to a temporary skills visa (4 years), and only then—after you’ve been in the country for a decade—apply for your permanent residence visa.

There are times in political life when the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, but people don’t usually speak out of both sides of their mouths in the same speech.

In the most-scrutinised speech of his political career, the Member for Southwestern Sydney said nothing that would upset the Big Australia lobby or recent immigrant voters.

He did imply that his government would have a quiet word with Andy Burnham about the number of British backpackers, but does anyone really care about British backpackers? They contribute to NOM (that all-magical number), but they don’t commit much crime, they don’t put much pressure on housing, and they don’t visa-surf for a decade.

In more evidence that Burke didn’t read his own speech before delivering it, he emphasised that housing shortages are due to the reduction in the number of people per household. He repeatedly put this down to the choices made by Australians to live in smaller groups.

He doesn’t seem to have noticed that 2 million temporary immigrants are likely to live in singleton households—or that stopping students from bringing their spouses would further reduce the average household size.

The ABC trumpeted the speech as laying out a “sweeping overhaul of the migration system.” And there were some tweaks. International students will still be allowed to trade up from a Bachelor’s degree to a Master’s degree, but no longer be allowed to trade down from a Bachelor’s degree to a Certificate IV in Asian Cookery. Thank God for small blessings.

And the 100,000 or so visa overstayers will be put in immigration detention—but they will not be arrested? At least, that’s what he implied. He was at pains to stress that “this is not the sort of operation that some people have seen on TV happening in other countries.”

How would he convince 100,000 people to go into immigration detention preparatory to being deported without resorting to methods used “in other countries”? None of the “journalists” in the audience saw fit to ask him that question.

Tony Burke was absolutely right when he concluded his speech by saying that “what people want is to know that we’re taking control.”

After his Press Club speech, that’s still what people want. But he hasn’t shown any signs of taking control.