The government needs a brawler mentality to go after One Nation’s threadbare plan to slash overseas arrivals.
After weeks of delay on his immigration announcement, Tony Burke appeared at the National Press Club with just a few pages of handwritten notes.
Burke’s speech on Thursday was short on rhetoric and stuck mostly to explaining the changes designed to bring down net overseas migration, without knee-capping the economy.
Carefully explaining the detail, the cerebral and thorough home affairs minister expressed confidence the government’s plan would get the number of arrivals down to the forecast rate for the first time in years.
Announced with only 24 hours notice, Burke’s speech reflected the tough politics.
Little more than an hour before he spoke, the latest data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics confirmed Nom was 292,000 in the 12 months to March, well ahead of forecasts in the May budget of 245,000 for 2026-27.
Determined to reach 225,000 over two years, Burke came with a suite of changes.
In broad terms, he wants to shift some parts of the migration program away from demand-driven settings developed under the Hawke and Howard governments, to boost enforcement and deportations of visa overstayers, and remove some of the pull factors that have pushed up Nom since Covid-era border closures.
An expert review led by bureaucrat Martin Parkinson, prepared in Labor’s first term and delivered in 2023, showed the scale of the challenge. Australia has always been a popular destination for visitors, but the number of temporary visa holders living in the country has surged by as much as 77% since 2011, reaching 2.9 million people.