How the nature of Australia's migration will change over the next decade | 7.30

Clare O'Neal a lot of the discussion today in response to this policy has been about the overall migration numbers but could we start by talking about how the nature of migration will change over the next decade as a result of the changes you've announced today thanks Laura just as a starting point migration is absolutely Central to who we are as a country and we've arrived in arrived in office to find a system that's absolutely in tatters so today our government has released a a blueprint for a complete overhaul of our migration system our goals are to create a smaller better planned migration program that is actually serving the national interest now as you point out off the top there one of the goals of our agenda here is to bring migration numbers back to normal but that's not all this is this is about redesigning this incredibly important system that has been such a driver of our safety and prosperity as a country and making sure that it continues to play that role for future Australians well many viewers would be surprised to know that about 2.3 million people sort of 10% of the population are on temporary visas how will the relative size of that group and the nature of who is in it change as a result of this you're right Laura I don't think many Australians would understand that if you went back 20 years we had about 7,000 temporary residents in our country and as you say that number today is 2.3 million uh what's the amazing not just the size but the fact that that happened without any policy debate without any government decision but basically just through a natural kind of um neglect and not sufficient attention being paid to this system our uh goal as a government is to bring permanency and citizenship back to the heart of our migration system well you actually started this review at a time of intense labor market shortages and a lot of those people are filling jobs that we just haven't been able to fill in Australia uh you know low skill ones as well as high skill ones or particularly low skill ones what sort of change will this have on the labor market and who are the migrants we can afford to lose really important point if I can point first to the one of the key problems that we're trying to solve here is that our migration system is really constructed back the front at the moment and what I mean by that is it is very hard today to come to Australia as a really highly skilled permanent migrant and these are just the migrants we need but we place endless bureaucracy and wait times and cost in their path what we have also done at that at that same time what really is you know happened under the previous government is these side doors and back doors have been left open so very large numbers of people are coming into our country they are settling into low skill jobs in the labor market and they are highly vulnerable to exploitation now what we are trying to do is flip that we are trying to make sure that we create easier Pathways for those um migrants who are going to come come here build the productivity of our country grow jobs um build businesses and lift the productivity of those around them while at the same time we address what are really problematic Integrity issues at the moment in the system and the biggest pathway that that's occurring um at the moment in is through our international student system and those International students uh the the problem if you like aren't really people who are going into universities um and doing higher degrees it's people who are coming in and doing slightly dodgy uh sort of technical courses at private colleges and things like that um how much harder will it be for them to come into Australia and for them to stay because it's not just that they come for a while they're coming along and of course um according to this review Visa hopping and they end up staying for quite a long time so important a few important things to say firstly International Education is a very important sector for our country it's our fourth largest export our biggest export of things that we don't pull out of the ground and grow and we want to nurture and protect it the issue at the moment is that we have real Integrity concerns about this sector there are clearly um a number of people who are profiting from this sector who are creating ghost colleges who are creating Visa factories and using this to bring people to Australia actually to work and not to study and when those young people arrive in our country instead of getting a great experience of a good quality education and a you know a good experience in the Australian Workforce they are highly vulnerable to exploitation so studies show that about 40% of international students are paid below minimum wage that is an outrageous statistic and we have international students in our country at the moment 650,000 of them so we do need to address those Integrity concerns and our strategy announced today uh will do a lot about that um we your point about staying a long time is very important so if I can just briefly address that one of the issu issues we have is not just the way the student um visas are being used but the former government left open these incredibly long graduate Visas so that a student could stay and do perhaps a four-year course at University and then they might have nine years in Australia where they could continuously extend their graduate Visa now that's not fair on them when there's not a pathway to permanency at the end of it and it's certainly not fair on us because it builds that population of people in our country who are permanently temporary so we are going to scale that right back and bring graduate visas back to a two-year period after which it's time for people to either transition onto a skilled Visa or return to their home country so let's talk about those overall numbers uh there's been a lot of discussion about how uh migration has basically kept the economy afloat this year but obviously there also a lot of pressures on housing and infrastructure or you keep identifying housing uh will this change ease the housing crisis it's certainly going to make a difference Laura because the kind of reduction in migration numbers that the government is driving for here are very very substantial um we're talking about you know going off a peak of what the numbers were last year and the budget projections will suggest that that number will Harve over a 2-year period very significant difference and that's really important Laura because we've got um a generation of Australians my age and younger who are living in our Capital Cities and feel that home ownership is a pipe dream for them who can't even get into a rental uh we've got serious issues in our housing market now those issues are not caused by migrants they're caused by 10 years of woeful neglect of housing policy in this country but there's no doubt that they're adding to those pressures at the moment and it is not the time to be running very large migration programs I just also add that one of the incredible things about our beautiful Multicultural country is is the level of community support for our migration program that is only sustained if people see and understand that the migration program is running its sustainable levels and I think today that's not the case that's why part of the government's approach is to bring those migration levels back to normal as quickly as possible just on another matter minister with the benefit of hindsight was there anything more the government could have done before it released the group of people affected by the high court detention system decision to reduce the chance of them reoffending well absolutely not Laura and I think what you've seen over the past five weeks is the Australian government move at record speed to manage a very significant High Court decision that was made just over a month ago and I've said repeatedly if I had any choice in the matter all of these people would never have left attention I don't the high court made a decision the government must follow the law and that's where we find ourselves clar O'Neal thanks so much for your time tonight thanks Laura

Channel: ABC News In-depth

Views: 37,830

Keywords: abc news, australian news, abc news indepth, documentaries, long-form journalism, abc 730, 730, migration, politics, immigration

Id: MlUwUfLTZ5Q

Length: 8min 21sec (501 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 11 2023