ABC National Forum — migration and the kind of country Australia wants to be

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Australia is a proud multicultural nation. Immigration is central to our story and our identity. But right now, the future of migration is very much up for debate. It's an issue that affects everyone from inner city renters to rural farmers. Everyone has an opinion, but does anyone have the answers?

Welcome to Big Ideas. I'm Clare Nicholls, and if there ever was a political Gordian knot, it is how to reform our current migration system. There seems to be agreement across the political spectrum that something needs to change, but exactly what and how remains to be seen. Earlier this week, the ABC held its second national forum, bringing together Australians from all walks of life to discuss some possible ways forward. It was held on the same day that One Nation released its plans to cut migration by 766,000 in three years. This laid the groundwork for a pretty hot political debate, but the discussion started with a panel of experts. Abul Rizvi, former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Immigration, John Anderson, former Deputy Prime Minister, author and journalist George Megalogenis, and lawyer and human rights activist Nyadol Nyuon. And it was moderated by the ABC's own David Speers. Here he is now.

David Speers (2:10)

Abul, let me start with you with a basic but important question. What should be the purpose of our migration system?

Abdul Rizvi (2:18)

Immigration affects every aspect of society. It affects every aspect of the economy. It can be well managed and if it's well managed, it delivers very substantial economic and social benefits. Badly managed, it creates problems. And to be frank with you, from about 2015 onwards, and I monitor this data pretty closely, from about 2015 onwards, the red flags about the immigration system started to go up.

Immediately after COVID, the coalition government stopped on the immigration accelerator and the Labor Party was far too slow to bring it back under control. That has given us the mess that we are in now.

David Speers (3:01)

All right, we're going to get to how to fix that. John Anderson, Post Politics, you've taken a pretty active interest in this issue. What concerns you about the migration system right now?

John Anderson (3:11)

It's part of the story of a country that is increasingly fractured, that is losing confidence in its leadership, that feels the social compact has been broken. What's the social compact? Our forebears gave us a wonderful society, freedom, prosperity, opportunity, chance to have a say, based around the idea that its first responsibility was to keep us safe. The two essential keys then to being safe are to ensure that you have a cohesive society.

And that's what really worries me now. We're not cohesive anymore. And a society which is well enough managed to be able to ensure there's opportunity for everyone. And one of the great problems we have now is that poor economic management means that the only reason our GDP looks like is growing is, in fact, high levels. People think, believe too high. In reality, per capita, our living standards are slipping. And they are slipping considerably faster than the OECD average.

David Speers (4:24)

And I want to come back to that point you raise around cohesion during the program as well. George, you've written more than most about the story of migration in Australia over many years.

Just give us some context here. How has migration shaped our country?

George Megalogenis (4:40)

Australia is an immigrant nation. And in fact, the quote that I often refer to is one from Robert Menzies. 98 per cent, when he first made this statement in the 1950s, 98 per cent of Australians have come originally from somewhere else. Now that figure is now 96 per cent because the first Australian population is around 4 per cent, about a million people, identify as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander. So we are fundamentally a migrant nation. And the long sweep of our history, there's basically three cycles.

And this is the way that you would frame our story. There's sort of that convict bit that doesn't really matter, in a sense, because it was a very, very tiny open air prison. But from the 1830s through to the 1880s, we ran quite an interesting experiment with open doors. There certainly wasn't any plan in and around the migration, but a lot of people were paid to come here. And Australia's per capita income through the pastoral boom, the gold rush and then the marvelous Melbourne 1880s, through that period, Australia is, on most measures, the richest nation on earth in terms of per capita income. Then what do we do? We get a bit antsy in and around the depression of the 1890s, we're about to federate, and we decide to switch to this thing called White Australia. And the White Australia policy, which is the Immigration Restriction Act, which has a number of things attached to it, coincides with and then becomes a factor in a much slower, a much more fractured.