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Former prime minister John Howard says immigration has been one of Australia’s great success stories and that the best way for politicians to deal with the rise of One Nation leader Pauline Hanson is to not pay her too much attention.
In a call for calm after months of increasing hostility over Australia’s immigration intake, driven by One Nation’s surge to a historic high, Howard said everybody, irrespective of their ethnic background, should feel they are a part of Australia.
“We wanted migrants who would embrace this country. We didn’t require of them that they forget the country of their birth. Nobody wants you to do that,” he said.
“If your parents were born in Italy, or if they were born in Lebanon, if they were born in China, why should you ask of them that they give up affection for the country of their ancestry? We did require of them that they become fully part of the Australian community.”
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke on Thursday announced a series of measures aimed at curbing temporary migration, including limits on partner visas for students, and a backpacker ballot.
The measures have been broadly accepted by the university sector and they have drawn condemnation from farmers alarmed about workforce shortages to pick crops, highlighting the challenges of making even small changes to the immigration intake without a backlash from a range of lobby groups.
Burke said Australia was facing a much broader challenge over the structure of its immigration program, which has become reliant on temporary migration and is at risk of creating a guest worker economy.
“This is one of the things I’m very worried about,” Burke said in an interview. “I don’t have an immediate fix to it.”
The temporary migrant workforce now accounts for more than 16 per cent of the working-age population, filling offices, farms and restaurants across the country without the rights of permanent residents or citizens. The government does not have the legislative tools to address the demand-driven system without support from the Coalition.
Opposition Leader Angus Taylor has echoed Hanson’s claims that Australia has a problem with “mass migration” and he rejected Labor’s attempts to legislate new powers to tackle the demand-driven system without a “serious cut to the numbers and a serious improvement in the standards”.
Howard’s 2001 slogan, “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”, came to define decades of refugee politics.
But his government also turbocharged the demand-driven temporary migration system by handing control over temporary migration to business, allowing employers and universities to sponsor staff and students with minimal government oversight.
The policies under the old 457 visa were designed to fill labour shortages, reduce taxpayer funding for universities and drive economic growth. They also created the foundation for the current explosion in temporary migration. More than 1 million temporary migrant visas were issued last year, based on business and education demand, not government regulation.
“It’s important to have a migration program that caters for reasonable expectations of a number of things, including shortages of skilled migrants,” Howard said.
Australia’s second longest serving prime minister would not comment on the long-term implications of his government’s temporary migration policies.
“The Labor Party is obviously the government now, and there’s always more pressure for the government party, but it’s a community issue and I want Australia to be a happy family.”
One Nation is polling well above the Coalition and just one percentage point lower than Labor on first preference votes, according to the latest Resolve Political Monitor.
Howard was the Liberal leader when Hanson was first pre-selected as a Liberal candidate in 1996, before she was disendorsed after offensive comments against Indigenous Australians.
Hanson, at age 41, entered parliament as an independent, beginning an almost three-decade career in politics based largely on anti-immigration policies that have now resulted in her party eclipsing the Coalition as the dominant challenger to the Labor government.
“What I said was that we shouldn’t pay too much attention to her and I think that was a sensible approach then,” Howard said.
Howard said Australia had become more divided. “It only, in my view, started to go off the rails when we started talking in tribes,” he said.
“What I know is that the policy we followed for decades worked. It’s been one of the great Australian achievements that we’ve taken people from all around the world.”
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Eryk Bagshaw is an investigative reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.He was previously North Asia correspondent. Reach him securely on Signal @bagshawe.01Connect via X or email.
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