Are There Too Many Migrants and What Is the Right Migration Policy? [S3-10]

Show Notes

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Music: “Insurrection”
Written by Pierre Chrétien
Performed by the Soul Jazz Orchestra
Courtesy of Do Right Music Inc.

Transcript

28 October 2026

link to podcast

Glenn
Welcome to another episode of Why Can’t They Just, a podcast about politics, policy and getting stuff done. I’m Glenn Davidson and I’m a member of the Labor Party.

Janaline
I’m Janaline Oh, I’m also a member of the Labor Party. I’m a former diplomat and a climate, environment and anti-racism activist.

Luke
I’m Luke Robertson, a member of the Labor Party, as well as a conservation biology and environmental policy student.

Janaline
Before we start, I‘d like to acknowledge that we are all recording this on the unceded lands of First Nations people in Australia. Recognising that sovereignty was never ceded, we pay our respects to their Elders, past and present, and we extend those respects to any First Nations listeners that we have today.

Glenn
Today we’re going to talk about migration. Now, Australia’s relationship with migration is as old as modern Australia itself. Since European settlement, waves of migrants have shaped the nation, from the first settlers, to the influx for the gold rushes, to the post World War 2 European arrivals, to today’s diverse intake from Asia, Africa and beyond.

And for the most part, it’s been a bipartisan issue.

Currently, Australia’s permanent migration intake stands at about 185,000 places each year, with over 70% of that set aside specifically for skilled streams. So that includes professionals, employer sponsored visas, healthcare workers for example. The balance goes towards family reunion and humanitarian streams.

But that’s only part of the story. Australia’s population dynamics are largely driven by temporary visa holders in the form of international students, temporary skilled workers and working holiday makers. After the post-pandemic surge, net overseas migration has reduced towards more of the long term baseline projections.

Meanwhile, Australians are grappling with the cost of living crisis, housing is under pressure, there is urban congestion which is increasing, wages aren’t keeping pace, amongst other things. And, for some at least, the level of migration is to blame.

So, Janaline, migration seems to be both the problem and the solution. How can it be both? What should the numbers be, and is there something else going on here?

Janaline
All very good questions, Glenn. I think the focus on the numbers is a little bit ridiculous, and particularly the focus on net overseas migration. Net overseas migration is just the number of people who leave Australia and indicate they’re planning to leave for more than one year, subtracted from the number of people who arrive in Australia who say they’re intending to stay for more than one year. That includes Australian citizens, it includes New Zealanders, and it’s not really meaningful in the sense of the impact on the economy and what these people are doing and who they are.

So net overseas migration, which is a figure that all the political parties have been focusing on, I think it’s just the wrong figure. It is misleading. The reason it attracted attention was because net overseas migration skyrocketed after COVID. So you’ll often hear people say, oh, half a million people came in.

The borders were closed for two years. So there was a very large number of Australian citizens who couldn’t come home. There was a very large number of permanent residents who couldn’t come in. There was a large number of visa holders who were not able to enter: because of the border closure, they could not enter. It should not have been a surprise to anybody that, when the borders reopened, all of those people wanted to come in.

It was not a colossal increase of migrants coming to Australia. It was a time delay of people, including Australian citizens, who came in when they were able to. There is no mass migration into Australia. There has never been mass migration into Australia. If you look at the proportion of the Australian population of migrants now, it is significantly lower than in the very early 20th century.

This is a whipped up concern for political reasons that has no actual basis in the economy.

Unfortunately, it has coincided with another impact of COVID, which was supply chain constraints which made it much harder and much more expensive to build houses and to deliver groceries. And the post COVID inflation which occurred all over the world was real and it was problematic and it hit people where it hurt, which is in their hip pocket.

Unfortunately, the conflation of these two things that were not causally related has led to a very toxic political debate. Because when people are seeing grocery prices rise, when people are feeling financial pressure because interest rates have been rising and they’re having trouble paying their mortgage, and somebody says ‘none of this is your fault, it’s those brown people over there who are coming in in massive numbers and sucking up all the housing and filling all the school places and eating all the groceries’, it becomes quite an attractive argument.

And I just think it’s deeply unfortunate that not only the fringe political party it has been talking about these for 30 years is saying this, but that the major parties, the Liberal and National Party, and the Labor Party, who have previously had a generally very bipartisan positive approach to migration as an economic benefit and a benefit to nation building, have got sucked into this idea that somehow we have to limit the numbers.

Glenn
Yes, OK, now that’s all well and good, Janaline, but if we just focus in on the housing crisis, surely if there are not enough houses for the number of people who are here, we shouldn’t be bringing in more people to compete for that limited number of houses? Surely that is just common sense and basic maths?

Janaline
Let’s say there are 10 houses in Australia and there are nine families and they’re occupying nine of those houses. And then you want to bring another three families in and suddenly you’ve got 12 families competing for the 10 houses. Then your maths makes sense.

But an economy is a lot more complex than that. So in the last census there were a million residential homes vacant. Now that number is also a little bit misleading because some of those homes were vacant because people were on holidays or they were between leases or they were having renovations.

But the point is that housing is complex, and people moving in and out of housing is complex. The international students, who’ve been blamed for a lot of the pressure on housing, mostly live in student accommodation. Most of that accommodation is not available to anybody else.

There is a housing supply problem. There has been one for 40 years. But it’s not about the migrants coming in and taking the houses. It’s about the housing supply not keeping up with demand. And some of those migrants are helping to build the houses and some of those migrants are also generating wealth that enables other people to afford to build houses.

So it is a complex system. It is not as simple as saying there’s a certain number of houses and there’s a certain number of people coming in and we should limit the people coming in until it matches the number of houses being built, which is the Coalition’s migration policy. It’s way too simplistic and it ignores the fact that a lot of the problem with housing is not an availability problem, it’s actually an affordability problem. A lot of the problem with housing is because taxation arrangements were such that it was more profitable for some landlords to leave their rental properties vacant and claim negative gearing tax benefits from it than to rent it out.

Limiting the number of migrants is going to damage the economy. It is going to make it harder to fill jobs; it is going to make it harder to attract investment; it is going to make us dumber because some of those visa holders are coming in to do PhDs, or they’re coming in to invest.

The rate of small business creation by migrants is significantly higher than people who were born locally in almost every country. Migrants also tend eventually to become employers. That apparently attractive ‘it’s just maths’ narrative just completely fails to acknowledge the complexity of the economy.

Glenn
So talking about that complexity then, if the argument was that there was too much demand for housing and prices were going up at an unsustainable rate, now we’ve got a situation where house prices are actually falling. So how can that be if we’ve got too many people coming in competing for too few houses and yet the prices are going down?

Janaline
This again exposes the fallacy of that narrative because logically, if prices are going down, it would suggest that supply is exceeding demand, so maybe there aren’t too many people coming in. Obviously that’s a very simplistic way of putting it, but it’s no more simplistic than arguing that you have a set stock of housing and you need to stop migration until you build more houses.

We are not building houses fast enough. We are not building them affordably enough. There are a myriad reasons for that: including global supply chain issues; including the cost of diesel for transport; including wars in Ukraine and Iran. And during COVID, when the borders were closed and net overseas migration was negative, there was a significant increase of house prices. The maths is not simple, it does not add up.

Glenn
Now, within that migration flow, one of those groups that attract the most opprobrium are the international students because of their large numbers. And one of the things that the Albanese government is looking at doing is preventing them from having accompanying family. Are international students really the problem that they’re being made out to be?

Janaline
I think international students are a bit of a scapegoat, but let’s get back to why we have so many international students. It’s because international students bring a lot of money to Australian universities, which have been underfunded by governments since the 1980s. This started under the Keating Labor government when they started moving towards this kind of corporatized model for universities, where universities had to go and fight for their own funding. And one of the consequences of that is that, surprise, surprise, they find that full fee paying international students are actually tremendously lucrative and the proportion of students who come from overseas in Australian universities has now risen commensurately.

Now, I was an international student. I did my undergraduate degree in the UK as a full fee paying international student. So I’m not here to say we should not have international students; but I think we need to look at the funding model of universities so that the reliance on international students is not so acute.

With respect to the government’s approach to limiting accompanying family members, I think it is not unreasonable. They have exempted PhD students who are more likely to have accompanying family members. It is good to exempt them because we want to attract the best people to come and do PhDs in Australia. At undergraduate level, the undergraduates who are likely to come with their families are actually much more likely to be going to those vocational and technical colleges who have been shown to be somewhat more vulnerable to being exploited as an excuse to come to Australia to work.

Glenn
All right. Well, I think we’ve shown that this whole migration debate is not a simple matter of maths or so called common sense, and it is quite a complex phenomenon and problem, and it sits within a very complicated and complex economic context.

Now if we move on, the government argues that the right level of migration is essential to filling labour gaps and supporting growth. The reality is that our demographic profile means that we need migrants to keep core sectors and industries running. We’ve spoken before in other episodes about aged care and health care, where thousands of personal care workers and nurses keep the care sector afloat amid a rapidly ageing population. In the case of housing, despite political promises to build 1.2 million homes, the construction industry faces acute shortages in trades, engineering and project management. And beyond those two sectors, international education, as we were just talking about, remains one of Australia’s largest export industries and it pumps billions of dollars into service economies and funding university research. Meanwhile, regional agriculture and hospitality rely heavily on seasonal and working holiday visas to meet peak demand.

Janaline, the Albanese government is seeking to reduce net overseas migration while claiming to prioritise specific sectors like construction, agriculture and healthcare. Is this a solution in search of an actual problem, or is it a case of nasty politics driving a suboptimal policy solution?

Janaline
I would say: definitely, it is nasty politics. I think it is worth having a logical, well thought out and properly considered migration policy. I’m not in favour of a blanket open the borders approach. I think Australians have the right to assume that the government has a logical approach to migration in terms of filling skill shortages, in terms of vetting the individuals who are coming in, and in terms of being cognizant of the needs of the economy.

The other thing that I find extraordinary is the way in which the Coalition is complaining that we have too much of a focus on temporary migration, because their policy since the Howard era has been to use temporary migration as a means to keep wages low. The former finance minister, Mathias Cormann, explicitly said in a radio interview that part of the government’s strategy was to use temporary migration to suppress wages.

Generally speaking, Australians are quite positive about permanent migration. There is a very good argument for focusing on paths to permanent migration because I think there is something to be said about permanent migrants having more of a stake in the economy and that we should be encouraging this and also we should not be using temporary migrants as a means to suppress Australian wages.

Luke
I just want to pick up on what you said. There is an incredible irony between positions of the Coalition and One Nation on skills in the Australian workforce and migration. Perhaps migration wouldn’t be such an issue if we had a stronger vocational education system like supporting fee-free TAFE.

It beggars belief to me that they identify a problem that we have a skill shortage and then when the solution is to upskill the population they’re like ‘nope, socialism’. I mean, it’s the same thing you’re describing right now, temporary migration as a means to suppress wages. That is analogous to what John Howard did with the TAFE system, where there was the HECS system to start paying for it and also introduced all those private colleges as well, that really ripped a lot of money out of public TAFE.

There’s a real contradiction in attacking migrants for coming here and doing jobs and then also not supporting Australians to upskill for those jobs. They don’t want either option. It’s just a culture war; there’s no substance in it.

Glenn
That’s true, Luke, and it is quite frustrating and it’s not the first time or the only time that the Coalition doesn’t agree with itself. But the point that they’re making is about not having an economy that’s based on a large underclass of guest workers, as happens in a number of other countries. But by the same token, they do vote against any measures that the current Albanese Labor government tries to implement to have things like fee-free TAFE and to upskill vocational education and give greater status to, you know, the lower paid parts of the economy that are very reliant on a lot of temporary visa holders, who hope hopefully do become permanent residents in time. It’s also difficult for people, if they have to leave the country to reapply to come back in to change their status.

And perhaps that’s something you might like to elaborate on, Janaline.

Janaline
The actual mechanics of how you implement your migration policy is both quite important and also slightly beside the point in terms of the general narrative about do we have too many migrants?

I reckon the migration policy measures that Tony Burke, the relevant Minister, introduced some time ago around identifying areas in the migration system that were being exploited, not just by migrants themselves but also by migration agents, and to stop essentially the phenomenon of coming in on one type of visa and then deciding you wanted to stay and so taking advantage of the opportunity for another type of visa.

And this gets to the requirement to leave the country to apply for a new visa. Now, I don’t think we should be doing that for family reunions. I don’t think we should be doing it for student pathways to residency. We certainly shouldn’t be doing it for asylum seekers.

I think measures to reduce the incentives for people who are not genuine refugees to take advantage of these processes are reasonable. That said, we also need to invest more in asylum processing and ensuring that people do get a fair hearing. And a lot of this comes, as I said, to the migration agents. So I think registration of migration agents is also quite a good idea.

Glenn
One of the things with complex systems: there’s plenty of loopholes and there’s plenty of people who make a very good living out of exploiting those loopholes and probably exploiting the people who they’re putting through those loopholes.

If we just go back to the whole issue of the labour market, and particularly in rural and regional areas, most farming communities are very reliant on temporary visa holders or backpackers or holiday makers or whatever to pick the fruit and work in remote road houses and a whole range of other things that people who live here permanently - citizens or permanent residents - don’t want to go and do because they’ve got their lives in the cities. It’s a fact that most people in Australia live in this southeast corner in a very narrow strip, whereas a lot of economic activity happens in areas that are not part of that strip.

Why do you think people in those areas are arguing for a reduction in people coming in to do that work?

Janaline
I think it comes back to Luke’s point about culture wars. I mean, the National Party used to be the party that was most in favour of migration for exactly that reason, because regional Australia at various points gets depopulated and migrants fill the void. And they fill the labour shortages; and they revitalise towns; and they bring their children to attend the local school that might otherwise close down; and their families shop in the local shops that might otherwise be going out of business; and their presence justifies having a medical clinic because then the population is big enough.

So I find it quite extraordinary that the National Party is buying into this mass migration narrative. And what I find absurd is that the Coalition and One Nation are talking about mass migration and ‘we need to get rid of these people. And we have too many people and we need to stop them from coming in. Oh, except for backpackers and except for people working in horticulture, and except for construction workers. Oh, and probably aged care is a skilled category’.

I think Luke’s point about the culture war completely hits the spot here. This is basically about a culture war.

Luke
One of my biggest gripes of our Australian political landscape is the way in which politicians take cues from America. I hate that it all gets imported here.

The response to Tony Burke’s speech, which was a bunch of really small changes, and all of a sudden it’s ‘he’s opening the floodgates, he’s doing nothing’. Or on the other side, you know, ‘ICE is coming to Australia’.

I hate how the continuous culture war in Australia on every single issue has meant that we can’t discuss things like this. This is a very clear example of a wicked problem. And there’s so many stakeholders, right? There’s the agriculture industry, regional communities, of course, people in aged care. And then there’s, you know, the other side of that, people who want to create more jobs here.

It’s really upsetting that we can’t be rational about these things anymore. And that’s emblematic in the fact that we’re even discussing this net migration target; this number that is largely devoid of meaning.

Glenn
That actually comes back to the central question that I posed earlier and whether it is a case of nasty politics driving a suboptimal policy solution.

We’ve had a bit of a go at the Coalition and One Nation, but it’s the Labor Party that’s got the levers. How are they going, Janaline?

Janaline
I think the policy levers that were announced recently are quite sensible. It’s about tightening up bits of the system. It’s about ensuring that various visa classes don’t get abused. I do think it is problematic that they’re going slow on family reunion visas. But on the whole, I think it was a pretty sensible, technocratic announcement.

The Labor Party was the champion of keeping people out of the country, but the Labor Party has moved on to a more rational view of this.

The other thing I would say is that this idea that we should only bring in the most skilled migrants completely ignores the actual labour force need for a lot of low skilled workers who cannot be found locally. I agree that we don’t want to have some sort of underclass of guest workers, but the way that you avoid having an underclass of guest workers is to pay everybody decent wages and give them decent conditions. It’s not by stopping migrants from coming in.

One of the biggest failings over the nine years of the Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison period was a complete lack of immigration enforcement.

Glenn
Now some are arguing that drastic cuts are the fastest way to ease pressure on housing markets, roads and public infrastructure. Reducing net overseas migration to 100,000 per annum or lower doesn’t just pause population growth, it actually drastically accelerates population ageing. With birth rates well below replacement level, a net intake of 100,000 a year would compress the working age tax base relative to retirees.

Pushing net migration into negative territory where more people leave Australia than arrive would induce an immediate demographic shock. Treasury modelling shows this scenario triggers structural recessions, severe budget deficits from lost tax receipts well into the future, widespread business closures in regional areas, and acute inflation driven by a wage spiral from shortages of labour and essential services.

Janaline, if a government were to enforce a hard cap of 100,000 net migrants or intentionally push net overseas migration into negative territory, how would that cause economic and social harm? Surely such self-inflicted harm is in no one’s interest. So what does this proposed strategy apparently have so much electoral appeal? And is Australia an outlier in this area or are other countries going down this path?

Janaline
I mean, look, a lot of European countries are dealing with a big backlash towards migration. I think a part of that is to do with the huge influx of asylum seekers from Syria in 2015, where something like a million people came to Europe in a very, very short period of time. And various studies have shown that it’s not so much the number of migrants that bothers people, it’s when they can see a big change quickly.

I think in Australia, because we are essentially a nation of migrants, that phenomenon is still there, but potentially not quite as acute as it is in parts of Europe, where people have had fairly stable populations for like 800 generations.

I don’t think I can add to the litany of economic self-harm that is implicit in reducing migration numbers to that kind of level that you just articulated, Glenn; I think you pretty much covered it, but I think again, we come back to Luke’s point that this is not actually about the numbers, this is actually about the culture war.

This is code and it has always been code, ever since Pauline Hanson made her maiden speech in the Australian Parliament in 1996 where she said we were being swamped by Asians and we should send them home. And just to be clear to our listeners, she was talking about me, and I absolutely took it personally.

It’s a culture war. The concern about numbers is code for ‘there are too many brown people and we’re uncomfortable’. I mean, she literally talks about monoculture and then she pretends that the incredibly multicultural Socceroos are somehow part of her monoculture.

I mean, none of it makes sense, but it’s not designed to make sense. It’s designed to push culture war buttons in people’s emotions, and exploit their economic concerns by blaming somebody convenient.

Glenn
It really does beggar belief because we’ve seen in the US where that whole MAGA movement continues to give virtually unqualified and unquestioning support to the current administration despite it being against their personal economic interests. They’re the ones that are paying the tariffs. They’re the ones that are losing health benefits. They’re the ones that are losing employment because the, you know, industry is not coming back to the US and so on.

It’s a complete mess and we can see it there, but it doesn’t seem to affect the level of support. And we’re seeing here that the support for One Nation at the moment, who is peddling these lines, is sort of sitting around 30% and rising, despite people, not the other political parties, but the likes of Treasury or whatever, saying what the impact of that would be on those economies, including in regional areas. But it doesn’t matter. People are still supporting that line of argument and arguing that the current system is not serving them well. And it may not be, but to think that the solution is to completely destroy that and put something else in place that would be worse, just doesn’t make any sense.

But you know, I come back to my point that surely such self-inflicted harm is in no one’s interest, but we seem to be charging headlong down that path.

Janaline
So a thing about debates about migration in Australia - and overseas, but let’s focus on Australia - have always had a tension between migration as a social and economic policy measure and migration as a kind of cultural and security issue.

When I was a child, migration was very much seen by governments as an economic measure. There were significant efforts to bring migrants to Australia at various points during the 20th century and there was significant government investment in settlement services, in English language support, in helping migrants integrate into the community. Because migration was seen as a nation building measure and that was a bipartisan view, once Labor got over the White Australia policy and once the Liberals also got over the White Australia policy.

Even during the White Australia years migration was seen as an economic and social policy tool. Once we got over the racism, we then started to adopt a non-discriminatory migration policy, and migrants were welcomed from across the world and this was a bipartisan view.

There have been waves of migrants and there have been waves of racism against whoever came in last. Southern Europeans, people from Greece and Italy, suffered incredible racism in the 1970s and the 1960s. Vietnamese migrants and other Chinese suffered a lot of racism in the 1980s when Malcolm Fraser, the Liberal Prime Minister, extended some very, very generous asylum opportunities to people fleeing the Vietnam War. Muslims had their turn in the 2000s, particularly after 9/11, and one of the most damaging aspects of the terrorist attack on 11 September 2001, that brought down the Twin Towers and killed 4000 people in the US, was that the debate on migration then really shifted from migration as an economic and social issue to migration as a security issue. And this the awful idea that somehow migrants are more of a security threat than the local population, even though the rate of crime from temporary visa holders and recent migrants is dramatically lower than the rates of crime amongst the broader population.

And part of that is just visibility. Part of it is baked in xenophobia, which is probably because if you’re in a tiny hunter gatherer society and you see a stranger, that stranger is probably either going to bring violence or disease. You know, you’d like to think that in the 21st century we have moved on, but maybe not so much.

Glenn
You mentioned 9/11 there, which just really underlines the point that you’re making, because you know, when the terrorist attacks happened on the 11th of September 2001 and three and a half thousand people were killed either in the Twin Towers or in the aircraft or whatever, which is certainly a tragedy. And the world changed after that. But that same year, many more times that number were killed in routine gun violence, if I can put it that way, in the US, about which governments in the US have repeatedly done absolutely nothing. And in fact, they’ve continued to defend quite vigorously their Second Amendment rights to carry weapons, including semi automatic weapons. So you looked at the number of people who were killed in school shootings or family-on-family violence or other things, it’s a much, much bigger number than the three and a half thousand who were killed in 9/11.

And yet, as you say, you know, because that was seen as being The Other, countries went to war on that. You know, we had 20 years in Afghanistan on the back of that, and it’s still going on.

So it does really come back to there being something else at play here rather than the pure economics of migration.

And our time today is fast approaching the end. So let’s have some final comments from you, Luke, first of all.

Luke
Yeah, I liked what you were saying then. We’re all just apes; it’s very much in group, out group. I would just reiterate what I said earlier. We really have a problem in Australia. Our brains have been collectively fried by perpetual culture wars that we are incapable of having any sort of substantive discussion. And that is very much emblematic in the way in which this net overseas migration figure is being used as a football. So yeah, frustration is what I’m feeling.

Glenn
And from you, Janaline.

Janaline
Yes, it is frustrating.

I’m just going to take a little segue down that culture war path and the impact that it has on people. So, as I said, Pauline Hanson told us 30 years ago that we were being swamped by Asians. She’s now turned her opprobrium to Muslims, of whom there are no good ones in her view.

I think it’s time for people actually to just say it’s racist and we should not be racist and look, OK, Pauline Hanson’s been doing this for 30 years. We know that she holds these views.

The thing that really concerns me is when I hear Angus Taylor, the leader of the Liberal Party, the Liberal Party - clue’s in the name, or maybe not so much now. The Liberal Party was actually one of the champions of a non-discriminatory, non-racist migration policy way back in the 1960s. You know, the lifting of White Australia was a bipartisan thing. So for the leader of the Liberal Party, the person who thinks he’s the alternative Prime Minister for Australia, saying we want to discriminate on the basis of values and pretend that that is not racist, particularly when he follows it up with: ‘oh, and I think people who come from other liberal democracies are more likely to share those values’. And then he namechecks Iran as a bad country that doesn’t have the right values, that has an absolutely devastating effect on people who come from countries where that statement casts a question over their values, over their right to be Australian.

And another thing I will say is that while everything that we’ve talked about today about the economic impact of migration are absolutely true, and everything that the government says about the economic contribution of migrants is absolutely true.

I also just want to make a pitch for the fact that when you’re Australian, you are Australian, and if you’re a brown person who is Australian, I don’t see why you should have to be better behaved than a white person who is Australian in order to justify being Australian.

If a brown person commits a horrible atrocity, as happened nearly a year ago at Bondi, that horrible atrocity should be acknowledged, and that person should be condemned and tried and put through the appropriate judicial processes. But that atrocity should not then bleed out into bad views of other brown people, of other people from that person’s religion or that person’s community.

And that is what happened. The first thing that the then Leader of the Opposition said after Bondi was a question about the visa status of the perpetrators of that atrocity. Nobody has ever questioned the nationality or the Australianness of a person who perpetrated the atrocity of murdering 51 people at prayer in Christchurch who was an Australian citizen and is still an Australian citizen. And nobody has ever questioned that white man’s citizenship or right to be Australian.

We are all Australian. Once you get your citizenship, you are Australian: it doesn’t matter where you come from; it doesn’t matter what the colour of your skin is; your religion or lack of religion. Once you have that citizenship, it doesn’t matter what your accent is. You are Australian and you have a right to be considered Australian.

I think it is useful to talk about the contribution of migrants, but I think it is also really important for people to acknowledge that Australianness is not a conditional status and it shouldn’t be. I guess in that context, I would say I totally - clearly - I totally share your frustration, Luke, at the culture war aspects of this debate.

And I think we need to accept that Australia is a nation of migrants. We have a long and enduring and ancient First Nations civilization in this country. But since European settlement, Australia has been a migrant country, starting with the First Fleet from the UK in 1788 and continuing to this day. And there is not a hierarchy of who gets to be Australian and we need to recognise that the waves of migration into this country have built this country.

And I utterly reject the characterization that some members of the Coalition put forward that we should celebrate our First Nations heritage, we should celebrate the British heritage of institutions through colonisation and we should celebrate the contribution of subsequent migrants. I think the last two categories are the same category and we should recognise that.

We should absolutely celebrate our First Nations heritage and we should value it and we should manifest that value in the context of proper treatment of First Nations people. Everybody else in this country is descended from migrants and there is not a hierarchy of some migrants and other migrants. The first Chinese migrant into Australia arrived in 1812.

So I think the key to migration policy is to remove it from the culture wars. If we are to have a rational migration policy, which I think is a completely legitimate thing to have and a thing that every country needs to have, it needs to be based on the rational economic and social needs of the country and not coloured by culture wars. And we need to acknowledge that we are a country that has been built by migrants and that will continue to be built by migrants into the future.

Glenn
That was another episode of Why Can’t They Just? The theme music that we use for this podcast is a piece called Insurrection by Pierre Chrétien, performed by the Soul Jazz Orchestra, courtesy of Do Right Music Inc.

Janaline
You can also hear us on Canberra community radio, 2XX FM 98.3, on Tuesdays between 6 and 7, or via 2XXfm.org.au. If you like our work, consider supporting us on Patreon, via our website whycanttheyjust.com.au.

Glenn
I’m Glenn Davidson.

Luke
I’m Luke Robertson.

Janaline
I’m Janaline Oh, and this is Why Can’t They Just?