Australian Policy Series: Inside Immigration Policy — Abul Rizvi

This episode is the first of my live policy salons. It was recorded in Melbourne on January 23, 2025.

In this salon, we go deep into Australia's immigration policy with Abul Rizvi, former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Immigration. Abul managed Australia’s migration program from 1995 to 2007 and played a crucial role in the 2001 policy changes that massively increased the intake of skilled migrants—most notably by expanding pathways for overseas students.

If you’d like to attend an upcoming salon, you can get tickets here.

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Transcript

[Please note this transcript may contain errors.]

JOSEPH WALKER: So, one of the most consequential policy decisions that Australia has taken in the 21st century went largely unnoticed at the time.

In 2001, the Howard government introduced a series of regulatory changes to immigration policy that increased our immigration intake to levels that we hadn’t seen since the ‘populate or perish’ days of the post war era.

Now, the Howard government didn’t want to compromise on the skill level of migrants, but there wasn’t a deep pool of applicants waiting to come here.

The innovative solution was to massively expand our intake of international students and working holiday makers. And the idea was that we would have these people come to Australia, upskill, and then they would be given the chance to apply for permanent residence.

The decision worked. In the two decades since then, more than 2 million international students and working holidaymakers have come to Australia, many of them settling permanently. In recent years, international students have made up more than 40% of annual net migration. And it’s probably not too much of an exaggeration to say that in Australia today, immigration policy boils down to decisions about international students.  

Modern Australia would be unrecognisable without immigration. About 30% of us were born overseas, which I think is the highest rate in the developed world. And we have one of the youngest and most multicultural populations in the developed world.  

But while the fruits of our immigration policy are all around us, I realised that I knew very little about how the system actually works. Last year I was doing some research into immigration policy in the context of some research I was doing on the housing crisis—because obviously immigration contributes to the demand side of the housing market. And that’s when I realised that I knew next to nothing about how immigration policy works in Australia.

Then someone recommended that I read a book, which I thoroughly enjoyed, called Population Shock, written by our guest this evening.  

Abul Rizvi holds a PhD in immigration and population policy from the University of Melbourne, but before that, he was Deputy Secretary of the Department of Immigration and managed Australia’s migration program from 1995 to 2007. And he was deeply involved in those transformative 2001 changes. In fact, probably one of the top two senior public servants involved in those changes.

So he is uniquely qualified to help us understand immigration policy.

Abul, welcome to the podcast.  

ABUL RIZVI: Thank you.  

WALKER: So the way this will work is we’re going to have a chat for the next 60 or so minutes. I’ll ask the questions that I want to ask, and then we’ll open to your questions as well.

In this conversation, I want to strike the balance between being too philosophical and too technocratic. And I think the risk is more that it becomes too technocratic, and that’s because there’s more or less bipartisan consensus around immigration policy. And also the system just fundamentally works. And that’s a testament to the efforts of public servants like Abul.

But if we just have a conversation that sort of tinkers at the margins of the system, that’s not going to make for a very interesting podcast episode. So I sort of challenged myself to think, well, what are some of the big philosophical, maybe even contrarian questions that I could ask Abul this evening?

And my first question is actually going to be more of a thought experiment. And that is, if we go back to the end of World War II and Australia hadn’t had the mass migration that it’s had since then, which country would we look most like today? 

RIZVI: We would be significantly smaller, of course, probably less than 10 million. We would be much older. Our median age at the Moment is about 37, 38. And if we hadn’t had that migration program, our median age would probably be about 47, 48. And you might think, oh, someone in their 40s, that’s okay. It’s not too old. Remember, that’s the median. So there’s a lot of people a lot older than 48, if that was what would happen. And the third thing that we would be experiencing is that the number of deaths every year would far outweigh the number of births. So we would be older, smaller, and shrinking, and we would look more or less like Japan.  

WALKER: Interesting. Okay, so like a smaller, whiter Japan.  

RIZVI: That’s right. And probably shrinking just as fast.  

WALKER: Yeah. Okay, well, I want to come back to that, but before we get there, what do you think is the biggest thing, the most important thing, that smart Australians, people like the members of this audience get wrong about immigration policy?  

RIZVI: I think there is a tendency to think that the government has a level of control over migration in a day to day sense that we just don’t. We make policy changes and the effects of those policy changes will usually take 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 years before you see what happened. And so there’s a tendency to think, oh, well, you know, Mr Albanese, let the immigration program blow out of control. Well, yes and no. Most of the policy decisions that led to the huge boom in net migration in the last two years were actually made during COVID and before this was coming at us anyway. Where perhaps the Albanese government fell down was that they didn’t really respond to what was happening quickly enough. And it reached a point where it was at levels that they were not comfortable with, that they did not plan for. And that has consequences. So in my view, what’s happened with immigration in the last, say three or four years in terms of the alleged loss of control is the fault of both parties. And we will soon go into an election where they’ll both stand up and point at each other and make the assumption the Australian public’s too stupid to work out what actually happened.  

WALKER: To help people understand what actually happened. Maybe there’s another piece of context we should add here because people might be wondering, how is it possible that government loses control? Isn’t it the government that sets the number of visas and issues those visas? But if we think about – I’ll give my understanding and then correct me if I’m wrong – The relevant metric here is net overseas migration, which I guess the technical definition is the number of people coming into the country for 12 out of 16 months minus the number of people leaving the country for 12 out of 16 months. And that includes both the permanent migration program and the temporary program. And it’s only the permanent program that the government caps. The temporary program is demand driven. So that’s the international students, the working holiday makers. And that program probably amounts to a larger portion of overall net migration. And so in the sense that we kind of lose control of the numbers, it’s because we have all of that demand driven temporary migration coming in, blowing out net migration. And that’s the sort of context there for people.

RIZVI: That’s absolutely right. I would just add two other little groups that affect net migration. Yeah, New Zealand citizens move in and out relatively freely. And in terms of the number of temporary migrants in Australia, they are the biggest group, about 700,000. The other group that people forget about that are included in net migration are Aussie citizens. So an Aussie citizen who leaves for 12 months or more is counted as a negative on net migration. An Aussie citizen who returns and stays for 12 months out of 16 is a positive for net migration. In most years, more Aussie citizens leave the country long term than return.

WALKER: So I want to pin you down like you Abul Rizvi on what your principles are for migration policy. And I want to start by asking what’s the unit of analysis here? So should the goal of immigration policy be purely focused on welfare for native Australians? And then to the extent that migrants benefit, we just treat that as a sort of happy by-product, but it’s not an end in itself or should we also think about migrant outcomes as ends in themselves for immigration policy?

RIZVI: The two actually go together. A successful migrant helps Australia prosper. So there’s nothing wrong with a successful migrant. That’s a great outcome. More often than not, a successful migrant will mean more Aussies get jobs because there are flow on consequences from the successful migrant. So I don’t see it as an “Australia first” or an “America first” type concept. We actually benefit in both ways. The migrant benefits, we benefit if the migrant is successful in Australia.

WALKER: Right. So we’re not really confronted by those trade-offs, practically speaking.

RIZVI: No, no. And I mean often politicians will present it that way, but they’re presenting it that way knowing they’re wrong. I think most of them know they’re wrong about that, but they’ll present it that way because of political advantage.

WALKER: So my next question is about the sort of objectives of immigration policy. So you have, you know, one objective or one rationale would be slowing the rate of population ageing. Another would be filling skill shortages. But then you have all these second order consequences as well, like the diversity of the Australian population, fiscal benefits of migrants. What do you think is the right set and balance of objectives for immigration policy? What are we actually trying to achieve with it?

RIZVI: Right, you’re absolutely right. In my thinking the initial objective of our immigration policy should be, over the next 50 to 100 years, to slow the rate at which we age. We will age, we will get older, we’ll get a lot older. But if we can slow the rate of ageing, our ability to adjust to that is much better than if the rate of aging was very fast. If we were aging at the rate of China or Japan or South Korea or much of Western Europe, the adjustment processes are much more difficult. Businesses would find it much more difficult to adjust. Government agencies would find it much more difficult to adjust. So I think a primary objective should be demography. And indeed it was demography when Arthur Caldwell started the postwar migration program, he was thinking, demography.

WALKER: And so back in the late 90s, early 2000s, when you were advising Ruddock and Costello and then persuading Howard to, you know, implement the changes that we did, how much of that decision was about slowing the rate of population aging? Was that the main motivation?

RIZVI: Probably 80% was demography. It would have been 80% demography and it would have probably been 10% pressure from universities – we need a way of making money and we can’t fund ourselves unless we can make money. And so we had to open up the international education program. It just happened to be the case, that was the best way to also increase the migration program in a manner that it contributed skills to Australia, it contributed export income to Australia, and it slowed the rate of ageing and it was a budget benefit. Put all that together and it was too attractive for any government to refuse.

WALKER: Yeah. I’ve kind of thought of this as like a real stroke of Australian policy genius, these changes, just in terms of the number of boxes that they ticked simultaneously with that change. So in your book you write that it took about 18 months to get the department ready for those changes, which were implemented on the 1st of July 2001. I’m just curious because I’m kind of interested in questions of state capacity and just why Australia’s government is so effective or relatively speaking. I’m curious what it was like inside the department at the time and whether you could kind of take me back to those days in the early 2000s as you’re trying to implement changes that are so significant. Can you tell me a little bit about what that was like? And maybe also what the biggest sort of unexpected challenge that you encountered was in terms of the implementation.

RIZVI: Initially, a number of ministers in the Howard Government were reluctant to go down this path. We had, over the previous four or five years, severely constrained the migration program. We had cut it very significantly and the government felt that was an achievement. And to then turn around and say, we want to now grow. The program was hard for many ministers, I might even say prime ministers,  it was difficult for them to swallow. And it took time to convince them of the merits of what we were proposing. There were in addition, many within government, within the public service, and indeed within my department who thought what we were proposing was an anathema because to them it felt like we were losing control. And immigration departments and immigration officials have one common feature around the world, control. They like control. Control is good. And losing control is a risk. And I to some degree agree with that. But sometimes you have to take some risks to get some rewards.

WALKER: But I’m interested in, sort of at the level of administration, what is it like trying to prepare a bureaucracy for those changes? So I guess to give an example of the kind of thing I’m contemplating, we are talking about how net migration is measured in terms of the number of people who’ve been here for 12 out of 16 months, minus the number of people who have left for 12 out of 16 months. And you might wonder, well, how do we actually track and measure that? And the Department of Home Affairs tracks passport movements. And so we have all of these really good, almost real-time data on the movements of people in and out of Australia that then can flow through to those net migration statistics. So things like that. I mean, I don’t know if that was something you specifically needed to prepare… But how did you get the administrative state ready for those changes?

RIZVI: Much of that rode on the backs of my predecessors of 20 and 30, 40 years prior to 2001. Two decisions were made that were absolutely crucial to being able to do that. One natural advantage is we’re an island and we’re a long way from anybody. That gives you a big advantage. 

We introduced what is called the “universal visa system”. The universal visa system to most people and to most other immigration agencies around the world was: You lot are crazy. Why would you do that? Because you don’t need to control low risk tourist movements. You don’t need to worry about that. And at the time, most countries had gone down the path of what is known as a “visa waiver program”, where they identified nationals of certain countries and said, you don’t need a visa, just turn up at the airport, we’ll give you a stamp on your passport and away you go. Indeed, a few times I’d been to Europe and I didn’t even get a stamp in the passport. There’s nobody here. You just wander in or you drive across the border. Now they’re changing. But at the time when we introduced the universal visa system and we introduced a thing called the “Electronic Travel Authority” (ETA) – just about everybody in the world now has an electronic travel authority. But when we introduced it, once again we were told: You’re mad. Why would you spend all the money introducing an electronic travel authority? The reason we did it was because we wanted to have control over who was coming in and out. We wanted to know who’s in the country and who’s left. We introduced that in the early 90s, and we had to negotiate with a lot of countries who said: well, if you introduce this ETA for our citizens, we will reciprocate and withdraw our visa waiver program from your citizens. And we had to convince them that the ETA was so seamless that no one would notice. And in fact it turned out that was how it was implemented. 

I remember an elderly lady in the UK was coming to Australia and knew that we had a visa system and you had to get a visa. She applied for the ETA without knowing she applied for the ETA because the way you applied for the ETA was by buying an airline ticket and the airline reservation system toggles across to our systems, checks the person off, checks that they are not on the movement alert list, you know, that they are not a baddy, and then automatically goes back and tick you’ve got an ETA. And the lady goes: But there is nothing in my passport. We said: Oh, it is invisible but it’s in there. And that made her happy.

WALKER: Wow. So the Department of Immigration, as it was then called, had integrated with the software systems of every airline in the world?

RIZVI: That's right.

WALKER: Jeez. Basically every airline in the world?

RIZVI: Well, the airlines all operate off a common system called SITA. And we had to integrate with SITA. We had to talk to all the airlines who flew to Australia to make sure they understood what was required and what was being changed. But, yes, essentially our movements database integrates with SITA to run the Electronic Travel Authority.

WALKER: Interesting. 

Okay. So you mentioned “control”. I want to take a quick digression and talk about a very specific policy issue, and then we'll come back to the main narrative about population aging. 

I had a phone call this morning with Peter McDonald, arguably Australia's greatest living demographer and one of Abul's PhD supervisors. And I was asking him what I should ask you tonight. And he said: Okay. There's one question you have to ask Abul, and it is...

There are about 100,000 people in Australia today who have exhausted their last resort of obtaining a visa. They have run out of options. Many of them have appealed to the relevant appeals tribunal, either sincerely or otherwise, and they're allowed to stay in the country while that process happens. We currently have about 100,000 people who now just shouldn't be in the country and we have no way of getting them out.

If you were back in charge of the department, what would you do? What would it take to remove those people from the country? 

I'm interested in how a former administrator thinks about this as a sort of logistical and bureaucratic challenge. But what would you do?

RIZVI: I'll just go back a couple of steps to explain how we got here. Because it was a mistake. We got it wrong. The ETA and all those things, we introduced all those controls [like] the universal visa system, was about not letting this happen. 

What happened was in about 2015/16, we had a trafficking scam emerge, a labour trafficking scam. We've had labour trafficking scams many times in our history. This labor trafficking scam was not new. And when it started, I thought, well, we'll do what we always do – We clamp down on it very quickly, we identify the organisers, we investigate, we prosecute and the scam stops. But for some reason in 2015/16, no one responded and I couldn't work out why. And it just kept on growing. So in 2017/18, we had just under 28,000 people apply for asylum in Australia. 67% of them were from just two nationalities, Malaysia and China, who usually generate very few successful asylum claims. And this scam just continued and it only slowed down when we had the international borders closed with COVID. When the international borders reopened, the scam had stopped. But by then, the backlog of applications was so big that we had emerge asylum applications, which were essentially opportunistic rather than organized. So we moved into a different phase. Now that phase is moving through people who have come to Australia under the PALM Scheme, the Pacific Labour Mobility Scheme, and it's also moving into much more overseas students. That's where we have it. 

What would you do? With such a scam, you've got to slow the application rate. If you don't slow the application rate, doing anything at the other end just doesn't matter because the number of people coming through is very large. So you fund the primary decision makers adequately to process the application so quickly that the organisers don't get the benefits of the work rights associated with the asylum application. I mean, there are still people being approved, which is fine because they meet the criteria, but the bulk of the people were not genuine. And so the Labor Government did invest more money into processing them faster. And that has stabilised the backlog at the primary level. It's in fact come down a bit. They funded the Administrative Review Tribunal to process more quickly and that has stabilised the growth in the backlog at that level. I am told they have put money into pursuing and investigating the organisers and to start prosecuting them, but I haven't seen many prosecutions yet, so let's wait and see. 

So they've done those three things which are sensible and they should have been done, but then you have the situation of, what do you do with the 40, 50, 60,000 and growing people who have been refused but are not going to be leaving now? Now, if Mr. Trump was ruling Australia, he would do what he's allegedly going to try to do in America. I have some doubts about how that will work, but that's what an authoritarian leader would probably try to do. If I had access to such an authoritarian leader and I had enough courage, I would say to the leader:  this is going to cost you a fortune, tens of thousands of mistakes will be made, you will disrupt the economy enormously and ultimately you will fail. Do you really want to do that? 

Mr. Trump at the moment is asking for $86 billion from Congress to do his mass deportation. And his border czar has said, that's a down payment - I'm coming back for more after my 86 billion. And he will be coming back for more. They will be paying and paying for a long time to try to do this, and they will fail. They will make any number of mistakes. They will set up detention camps of huge size, essentially barbed wire camps with tents, probably in the desert. But huge, huge size. You know, tens of thousands of people detained for months and months in tents surrounded by barbed wire. Doesn't sound like America. Sounds like another place in history. And ultimately this will fail. 

So I would be saying to any Australian leader who asked me, what are we going to do about the 60, 70, 80,000 we've got? I would say, don't copy Mr. Trump, because that will cost you a fortune and it won't work. I would gently and very carefully manoeuvre the advice to convince the Prime Minister that you have to stop the problem growing and once you've done that, you then have to deal with the people who are left over. And the bulk of those people are now working in Australia – they've been working in Australia for many years, they have developed relationships with people in their local communities – trying to get them out would be a nightmare. Find them a subtle way to give them a pathway to permanent residence.

Now, the immediate reaction to that, if that hit the public, would be: Oh, that's an amnesty. You're just rewarding bad behaviour. Well, yes, but one, most of these people were manipulated. They didn't know what they were being put into. It was the organisers who were doing the asylum applications. Secondly, the costs of us trying to resolve it by a mass deportation program would far outweigh any sort of political cost where you get criticised for pursuing an amnesty.

WALKER: What's the biggest component of the costs there?

RIZVI: Of the deportation?

WALKER: What's the hardest part of the problem?

RIZVI: The biggest cost is undoubtedly the detention capacity. And that's why the detention centres Mr. Trump will build will be barbed wire with fences, because if he built them with bricks, he would take years and years to build such huge facilities. We're talking about essentially cities. So he'll reduce the cost that way, but that will be the biggest cost.

WALKER: Right. So these people in Australia who are not meant to be here, who are mostly from China and Malaysia, what's the characteristic argument they make when seeking asylum? Is it a religious persecution argument?

RIZVI: It is usually just a cut and paste from previous applications.

WALKER: And so there are businesses in Australia who help them facilitate this?RIZVI: Oh, absolutely. Labour trafficking is the second biggest criminal enterprise on the planet behind drug trafficking. And the people who run these operations are rich and powerful.

WALKER: Hopefully, when we publish this podcast, there might be some policy makers who will be listening to your advice.

RIZVI: We did one of those amnesties once. We just didn't call it an amnesty.

WALKER: When was that?

RIZVI: In 1993, the 1st of November.

WALKER: Who was involved?

RIZVI: Paul Keating arranged it. And because we couldn't find a sensible name for the visa category, we called it the “One November” category. It was to deal with 40 to 50,000 Chinese students who were not going to go home. And we didn't want to process them for asylum because that would have cost a fortune. And we knew the outcome, so why put them through all of that? So we found them a neat little visa category where just about everybody would pass, and we called it the “One November” category, and we expanded the program and we fitted them in.

WALKER: Have we tracked their outcomes?

RIZVI: Not really. But their children are very successful. We know that.

WALKER: So there’s some research that shows that second generation migrants are massively successful. Especially Asian migrants. 

RIZVI: Yes.

WALKER: To come back to the main narrative. One of I guess what has turned out to be one of the big benefits of the 2001 changes is the huge expansion of the tertiary education sector. Education quickly grew to be our third largest export and that’s raised living standards for all Australians. Back at the time, did you foresee the full extent to which the education sector would grow as a result of these changes, or did it surprise you?

RIZVI: It did surprise me how far it grew and how fast it grew. We tried to put in as many safeguards into the system as we could. We didn’t put in enough. One of the safeguards I tried to introduce in 2005 was a standardised entrance exam for an overseas student. So if you apply to become an overseas student in Australia, sit the exam, if you pass, you’re just about guaranteed a visa. If you fail, you’re just about guaranteed a refusal. I think that is a very much more efficient, objective, certain and fair way of doing things than the current arrangement, where a visa decision maker has to decide whether you are a, quote, “genuine student”. And frankly, determining whether someone is a genuine student is hocus pocus. And as a result you get highly uncertain decision making. We’ve got to move away from that. But government for some reason doesn’t want to go down that path and the universities don’t want to either.

WALKER: So I feel like in the last year or two there’s been a negative mood develop around immigration in Australia. And my very simplistic model of that is that when things aren’t working in the economy, when housing costs are very high, people switch into a sort of zero-sum mindset and immigrants are the first sort of logical scapegoat. And this is happening at the moment with respect to international students. Could you help me understand, what’s the actual effect of international students on the housing market?

RIZVI: Undoubtedly they have an impact near universities. So in the CBD, so most of our major cities, which is where they live, it does certainly have an impact there. Working holiday makers have an impact on backpacker hostel accommodation, but they have very little impact in suburban Australia. Not many overseas students live out in Heidelberg or somewhere like that. Yet that’s where the big complaints are in terms of housing. Undoubtedly, they make a contribution to the demand side, but I think much of what is being talked about in the housing space at the moment is a function of many other factors. But it’s easy to blame immigrants. It’s been the go-to for people for a long time.

WALKER: Absolutely. I mean, they also typically live in student accommodation or they rent. I mean maybe some international students are pushing up home prices at the margin. Are they even allowed to buy homes?

RIZVI: Yes, they are allowed to buy a home but they have to go through the foreign investment review board process. But yes they are.

WALKER: So maybe a tiny sliver of international students would be doing that.

RIZVI: I mean most of them wouldn’t be able to afford to buy a house in Sydney or Melbourne. Costs a fortune.

WALKER: Yeah, I’ve noticed. 

So one more economic question and then I’ll talk about aging. So there’s a debate in labour economics around the impact of migrants on local wages. And in America you have people like David Card on one side who say that migrants don’t really do anything to push down wages. On the other side you have people like George Borjas who say that they do. In Australia, maybe the closest analogue to George Borjas might be like a Bob Birrell or someone like that. But where do you lean in this debate?

RIZVI: It depends on the circumstances I think. I don’t think there’s a simple answer. I always start with the immigrants’ impact on both demand and supply. So you’ve always got to start with that mindset. There will be circumstances where parts of the labour market may be oversupplied and the price of labour in those circumstances for some reason is being held down. And if you inject more migrants into that portion of the labour market, yes, you could conceive of a negative impact.

WALKER: So examples here might be things like healthcare or aged care.

RIZVI: Well potentially. Although aged care and healthcare are the two – leaving aside construction tradies for the time being – are the two areas where we most struggle to fill vacancies. So yes, they look like the type of area where you could have a negative impact if there was an oversupply. But there is no oversupply in terms of aged care workers. In fact most of our aged care providers are saying we can’t find enough people.

WALKER: Right. Is that just because the government can’t increase wages?

RIZVI: Well, the government has increased wages. Well it’s both increased quite a deal, Australia’s minimum wage and it’s increased the wages of aged care workers as well. But it’s still not enough. The work of an aged care nurse or an aged care worker usually involves shift work. It is difficult work. It is often back-breaking work. And it pays very little. Why would you work there if you had an option?

WALKER: Okay, let’s talk about aging. 

So Australia’s total fertility rate, which is the average number of births that each woman is expected to have over her lifetime, dropped below replacement level, which is a little bit above two children per woman in, I think, 1976. And the last measure put it at about 1.5. So it’s well below replacement. 

Now we’ve, as you touched on earlier, we’ve been, kind of, slowing the rate of population aging through net migration. And our migrant intake, they skew very young and migrants, they contribute to the number of births in Australia because they skew young. And that means that women migrants will tend to be in the kind of childbearing age range, and so they’ll contribute to the births. Imagine counterfactually, we cut net migration to zero, tomorrow. How soon would Australia cross the threshold to natural decrease? So the point beyond which deaths exceed births?

RIZVI: My PhD supervisor, Peter McDonald, did the calculations on that thing, and he came to about 15 years which isn’t bad for a developed nation to go to zero net migration and not have deaths exceed births for 15 years is pretty good. If Canada did the same thing, they would reach that point within a year or two. 

WALKER: And so because we’re cutting net migration to zero, in 15 years, when deaths start to exceed births, definitionally, the population starts shrinking because population growth is a combination of both net migration and natural increase or decrease. 

Okay. So next scenario. Assume we sort of continue our rate – our current reasonably high level of net migration of  say, 200,000 per year – project that into the future and imagine the total fertility rate remains kind of where it is at the moment. How many years until we cross that threshold into natural decrease?

RIZVI: If the fertility rate stabilises at 1.5 we probably can get to the end of the century before deaths start to exceed births. If that happened, and that’s what’s currently being projected, we would be the last developed nation on the planet to reach that point.

WALKER: That’s a big achievement..

RIZVI: We would be last. Most of our major trading partners will get to that point or have already got to that point. So China, most of Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, Canada – United States, a bit of an exception although Mr. Trump may not [let it] remain an exception – are well ahead of us down the ageing path and down the point to reaching the point where deaths exceed births.

WALKER: So if we continue these levels of migration, natural decrease doesn’t start until closer to the end of the century, how long after that until the population started shrinking?

RIZVI: If we can maintain net migration at 200,000 or 250,000 per annum, we can shrink slowly for quite some time. The problem is going to be by that point just about every country on the planet will have deaths exceeding births. The most anti-immigration leaders on the planet will be developing immigration policies and they will be competing for people – young people.

WALKER: One of the most important things I’ve learned from reading you and Peter McDonald is just how to think about net migration as a demographic tool and what its proper role is as a demographic tool. And what I’ve learned is that its proper role is not to try to reverse population aging, but to slow the rate of population aging. And the reason for that is that net migration has diminishing returns for slowing the rate of population aging. This is a somewhat technical point, but could you just help us build an intuition for that mechanism or the mathematics there?

RIZVI: Yeah. Immigrants themselves, once they’ve migrated, also age.

WALKER: You don’t say.

RIZVI: A very large portion of our aging population are in fact people who migrated in the 50s and 60s. So when our aged care homes are looking after older people, they will often be looking after the previous waves of migrants. Because migrants age, there is a point at which if you keep increasing net migration, the return in terms of slowing the rate of aging slows and all you get is population growth without much aging or reduction of aging benefit.

Peter McDonald did the calculations and he came to about 200,000 as the optimum level for net migration. That was at a time where our fertility rate was about 1.8. I suspect if he ran that model again, he’d probably come to a figure of around 225,000 or 250,000, something like that.

The other problem with pushing net migration too hard, you start to lose public confidence. And public confidence that you have control is important. You’ve got to be able to show the Australian public: we are doing this in the national interest, we have planned this properly and we are doing it in a controlled and managed way. When net migration tends to get out of control, like it did in the last couple of years, that’s when you get public attitudes against migration rising. You get concerns about the capacity of infrastructure to keep up. And you get concerns about the capacity of service delivery to keep up. And so I would be counselling any government to be restrained about net migration above 300,000 and try to get it in that range that gives us the optimum outcome in terms of the rate of ageing. That would also tend to give us the best outcome from an economic perspective, probably also a budget perspective.

WALKER: Right. So I’ll come back to ageing, but quick digression, because you’ve raised this question of control. 

My sense is that there’s this consensus among the political elite in Australia that there’s some sort of equilibrium between being very harsh on illegal immigration and then maintaining quite a laissez faire legal migration program. And I seem to understand from you that you think that this narrative is important as well that if there’s a perception that the government’s in control – and that seems not to apply only to illegal immigration, but also to legal migration – then the public will be generous and will be willing to accept relatively high numbers of net migration. 

To what extent is that narrative actually true? Or what are the limitations of that narrative? Because if I think about, say, the United Kingdom, for example, it seems like people are growing increasingly intolerant with immigration there, even when there’s a semblance of control because the levels are just so high or the cultural mix isn’t right. So to what extent is the control narrative actually true? And what are the limitations?

RIZVI: Political narratives always have elements of self interest. So in the United Kingdom, numerous politicians have talked about reducing net migration to its irreducible minimum. And that doesn’t tell you anything. You know, what’s the irreducible minimum then? And then when the net migration turned out to be much higher than treasury had forecast, they say, well, that can’t be the irreducible minimum, can it? You lost control. And that does create, I think, angst amongst people, admittedly fueled by politicians pursuing self interest. But there is an element of truth in the fact that if the Treasury forecasts net migration to be “whatever” and whatever they decided was the ideal target the government decided on, and they missed that target by a long way –which they have done in the last two to three years – that inevitably leads to the narrative that’s now being run not just by politicians but by many social commentators as well, that the government’s lost control. And I mean, to some degree it was true. If you forecast net migration at 200,000 and it turns out to be 500,000, you can’t say, oh, yeah, we got it right and it was all good.

WALKER: Yeah. That makes sense. 

Okay. Back to aging. So we’ve learned that if you care about population growth, ultimately, you have to address fertility, right? Net migration is not a substitute for natural increase. It just helps buys you time to deal with the problems of natural decrease. This is where I found your book very pessimistic. There’s a point where, almost in passing, you mentioned that as nations like Australia enter the fourth stage of the population shock, we might have to redefine what we mean by recession, because we’re just going to be in these everlasting technical recessions. I just thought, hold on a minute, Abul, you’re describing a dystopia here. Like, our society is sort of predicated on continuing economic growth and when the size of the overall pie stalls or starts shrinking, people start fighting over the size of their slice, and cooperation disintegrates. And so I was really curious to read how you thought about this problem of fertility declines, how you diagnose the problem, and whether you thought it was something we could even address or turn around. And my reading of you in the book was that you think it’s largely driven by two things: one is the introduction of contraceptive technologies, and the other is increasing education and workforce participation for women. I’m curious why you were so confident about the contraceptive technology story because if I look at history, the demographic transition predates the introduction of contraceptives. So it begins in France. They switch over to falling birth rates by about the 1830s, and then other parts of Europe, like England and Germany, start by about the 1880s. Tell me a little bit about how you think about fertility declines.

RIZVI: There have certainly been fertility declines in history and they’ve been driven by all sorts of different things. But since World War II, there’s almost universal consensus amongst demographers that fertility decline was a function of the accessibility and affordability of contraception and the education of girls, both of which took off in the 60s. And you can see the impact of that across many nations now. They’re not the only two drivers, but they are the two biggest drivers. The third obvious one is financial capacity. And in Australia, I think, leaving aside the housing issue, the next biggest challenge to keeping our fertility rate at 1.5, and that, in my view, should be an objective of government: don’t let it fall any further, is the issue of childcare. For a young couple, after housing, the next biggest cost is childcare because the bulk of couples work and have to work because that’s the financial circumstances they find themselves in.

WALKER: Right. Is more low skilled migration the solution to that?

RIZVI: I’m not sure. I mean, we certainly have to staff our childcare centres and we have to think about childcare, I believe, a lot differently to the way we do at the moment. Will that need a workforce to assist? Probably. But I wouldn’t regard childcare centres as places of low skill. I think what we teach a child at 2 and 3 and 4 and 5 is just as important as what we teach them in year 10, 11 and 12.

WALKER: So back to the demographic transition. It seems like, correct me if I’m wrong, but maybe a better way to think about fertility declines is in two distinct phases. There’s that first phase, the one that begins in France by the 1830s. Whatever’s driving that, we don’t know, maybe it’s something so cultural or it’s to do with the modernization process. And then there’s a second phase which drives fertility down further, beginning around the 1960s. And that’s the phase characterized by contraception and education. 

Right. Let’s talk about… I’ll call it acculturation. I don’t know what the politically correct buzzword is, but how we manage having different cultures in Australia. And one of the things that strikes me is we seem to be world class at this. So probably the most multicultural developed nation…?

RIZVI: In terms of spread of nationality – That’s right. We would be. We have a greater spread of nationalities than anybody else. And our percentage is much higher at 30%. It’s high.

WALKER: Yeah. Which to me, honestly, this just seems like a miracle that we have so many people born overseas. We maintain such high rates of social cohesion. If I look at the latest survey done by the Scanlon Institute, I think it has support for multiculturalism among the respondents at about 85%. If you had to boil it down to one factor, what is it about what we do or the migrants we take in or Australia that makes us so successful at acculturation?

RIZVI: I would start with the politics of immigration since 1945. 

Mr. Calwell and Mr. Menzies didn’t agree on many things, but one thing they agreed on was the importance of immigration. And they both agreed gradually to keep broadening the range of source countries that we were relying on. And they maintained that. 

The first prime minister to say immigration is too high and we need to cut it back was actually Gough Whitlam, who at the same time abolished formally the White Australia policy. 

We then had Mr. Fraser, who initiated a number of reviews, including by Frank Galbally, that led to the development of a range of settlement services and highlighted the merits of a multicultural society. It wasn’t just Al Grassby who pursued multiculturalism. Fraser did too. I mean, Fraser and Whitlam didn’t get on, but on the issue of multiculturalism, the two are actually quite on the same page. 

We then had Hawke, who was a champion of multiculturalism. And indeed, when Mr. Howard talked to John Lawes and said we need to slow the rate of Asian migration, Hawke went into overdrive and introduced into Parliament a motion proclaiming the importance of a non discriminatory migration program. Two, I think, or three of Howard’s ministers crossed the floor, including Philip Ruddock. That was important. 

When Howard became Prime Minister, he did cut the migration program. And whilst it took some time, he eventually accepted the word multiculturalism and used it in his own fashion. But he used it. We then had the labor government after that who were still supporters of multiculturalism. 

Through the period of the Liberal Coalition, Mr. Abbott may have been inclined to be negative about multiculturalism, but he didn’t do anything about it. He didn’t actively speak negatively about it. Turnbull was a supporter, as was Morrison. He was a supporter of multiculturalism. 

And the current government has continued down that path. I mean, you can talk about all sorts of settlement services and all sorts of things that we have done that have been positive in terms of maintaining multiculturalism. 

But the key has always been bipartisan support. 

Now, whether in the forthcoming election we abandon that bipartisan support, I don’t know, there’s a risk we could. 

But ever since ’45, we’ve had essentially bipartisan support for multiculturalism. And that has made all the difference.

WALKER: Yeah. It still feels like a mystery to me. I wonder whether that bipartisanship is more a consequence or a reflection of our success at multiculturalism, rather than a cause. I guess it can go both ways. 

RIZVI: That’s a good question. 

WALKER: I’ve been playing around with an explanation recently. I want to test it on you and get your reaction. 

So I have a friend who’s an academic at LSE. He’s an Aussie. His name is Mike Muthukrishna and he specializes in the field of cultural evolution. And his explanation for why Australia is so good at acculturation is that actually the immigrants who come here in some deeper sense already share the same culture. And what he means by that is they are WEIRD. In the Joe Henrick acronym, it’s a Western Educated Industrialised Rich and Democratic. It is more of a consciousness raising tool than analytical tool. But it describes the very peculiar Western mindset, a very individualistic sort of reductionist mindset. And the argument is that education, even high school education, primary school education, doesn’t have to be tertiary education, but it downloads a very specific set of cultural beliefs, ways of thinking and assumptions that are characteristically WEIRD in the sense of that acronym. And so the migrants who come here because they’re very high skilled, they share that kind of WEIRD way of thinking. And so that’s why we’re so good at acculturation.

That’s one story. 

RIZVI: Makes sense. It could well be right. I don’t know, I’m no expert in that space.

WALKER: I guess the problem with that story is that it doesn’t explain why we’ve been so good at acculturation all the way back to the end of the Second World War. Because the increase in the skilled migrants only comes more recently in our history.

RIZVI: Yes. That’s true. And the students. You know, educating our own skilled migrants does have an advantage.

WALKER: Yeah. Exactly. Because they’re coming here during their most formative years –

RIZVI: Going to an Aussie university. They learn Aussie things.

WALKER: Yeah. Interesting. Okay, so that definitely feels like it could be part of the story. 

So, looking forward for the permanent skilled program, do you think it’s enough just to be young, skilled and proficient in English or should we be adding in other criteria?

RIZVI: Our skill stream is essentially composed of about four different major groups. 

The most important major group in that is, the “employer sponsored” category. We always manage that on a demand driven basis. Essentially it’s an employer doing the selection. Yes, we have some minimum criteria, but the selection is done by the employer based on fit for their business. I think bureaucrats trying to fiddle with that would not be a good idea. I think have the minimum criteria, let the employer choose above the minimum criteria, the fit for their business. And we know from a budgetary and economic perspective that visa category easily outperforms all the others. 

We have another two. One is, well, they’re both state sponsored but one of them is “formally state sponsored” – it’s state sponsored inter-metro Australia – where the state does the selection above a minimum based on what the state needs. 

And we have another one which is a regional category where there are concessions against the standard criteria but people are being encouraged to settle in regional Australia for obvious reasons – that’s where our biggest demographic problems are. Once again, that’s the region selecting the migrant for the skills that they need. That’s quite granular and it eliminates the Commonwealth bureaucrat from being involved. 

We then have a fourth category where the Commonwealth bureaucrat is the dominant player. And that’s the points tested category that everyone raves about. Yes, you could fiddle around with the points tested category more and you could give this some weight and that sort of stuff. Ultimately it depends on the pass mark you use. The higher the pass mark, the more likely the migrant will succeed. The lower the pass mark, the less likely they’ll succeed. We know that from 30 years of research. Often politicians and academics will talk: Oh, we need to fiddle around with the points test again. I fiddled around the points test for years. I don’t think it made that much difference actually.

WALKER: Okay. So from a demographic perspective, Japan and Australia are like night and day. They’re the oldest population in the world. You mentioned earlier. I think their median age is over 47. Our median age is about 38. One of the youngest developed countries, if not the youngest. When you talk to Japanese policymakers, what kind of questions do they ask you about Australia and what could a country like Japan be possibly be hoping to learn?

RIZVI: I mean, their first problem is their politicians have talked about the importance of monoculturalism for so long that it’s very hard for those same politicians to now say: well you know, that was in the old days and we don’t believe that anymore. That’s hard. Making that transition is hard. We made that transition over a very long period of time. 

When Mr. Caldwell announced the postwar migration program, he assured us one out of 10 migrants would be Brits. He knew he was lying cause he knew there was no way he was gonna get the numbers he wanted from Britain. But he felt he had to say that. So the Japanese politicians have to find a way of changing the mindset within Japan. And the Japanese people know they’ve got a serious demographic problem. You don’t need to be a demographer to work that out. 

So over the last decade they have been changing their visa policies quite considerably. And they have a points tested category now and they have an employer sponsored category. They also have a number of low skill categories which I think are a bit worrying. But interestingly, I was talking to the Japanese Consul General on Wednesday night – he invited me over for dinner and we just yarned for a while – and the thing that he was most interested in was our settlement services

WALKER: Why?

RIZVI: He said: success in settlement is going to be the most difficult thing for the Japanese because the Japanese culture is so monocultural that adjusting to that is a challenge for many people coming from overseas. The Japanese language is hard. It’s a difficult language to learn. 

Whereas many of our migrants come already with English skills. It’s hard to find migrants with Japanese skills. So they are looking at things like our adult migrant English program and replicating things like that. They are looking at our settlement services programs, particularly our funding of settlement organisations at a local level. And we’ve had that since the Galbally [report], though since probably before the Galbally report, but strengthened particularly during the Galbally report of the late 70s. They’re starting from scratch. So they look at what we’re doing and Canada’s doing in particular.

WALKER: And do you predict that they will… [or] how far will they adopt our policies?

RIZVI: Oh, all the way. Absolutely. They have no choice. It’s just a function of arithmetic. You either become extinct or you do something about immigration. They’re not gonna get fertility up from… I think they’re about 1.1 or 1.2. And when your median age is 48, that is half the population is past child rearing age. The arithmetic looks very stark.

WALKER: So Japan is set to become much more multicultural.

RIZVI: Absolutely. As is China. They have no choice. They have the same problems. Indeed. China probably is worse off than Japan because of its one child policy. Too many blokes.

WALKER: Yeah, it’s a problem. 

I’ve got three final questions and then we’ll hear your [audience] questions as well. So I’m doing six of these over the next seven weeks – different salon on a different policy issue each week. And as I’ve been sort of reading about these different areas, one of the things that stuck out to me about immigration in particular is there seems to be a lack of really good research and writing on immigration policy in Australia. There are obviously a lot of notable exceptions. And your book is of course one of them. But if I compare immigration policy to say something like defence and foreign policy, it feels like every couple of years in Australia we produce and then debate a really good book in that area. Why is this?

RIZVI: That’s a very good question. We have gone through periods where we did invest heavily in immigration research. Recently, in Melbourne, we created the Bureau of Immigration Research, which was an outstanding organisation. It was sadly abolished by Mr. Howard. But most of the money that the Bureau of Immigration Research had was incorporated back into the department. And so we continued to have a very substantial research function. We funded people like Peter McDonald and others to produce extensive research for us which was as good as anything on the planet. But ever since we went to the Home Affairs model, the research funding in Home Affairs is now almost entirely focused on law enforcement. We don’t fund immigration research and we have very few immigration research oriented faculties in our universities. I find that very surprising. Our universities don’t want to fund them.

WALKER: Right. Is it partly a function of the sort of bipartisan support for immigration policy? It just doesn’t seem so contentious in Australia.

RIZVI: I’m not sure that’s it. I’m not sure it’s the contentious nature of it. Although, I mean, it’s becoming more so. You know, we may well have our first or perhaps our second immigration election after Tampa and we won’t be armed with a lot of research – not a lot of recent research in that space. I think in areas like defence, the funding that’s available from industry to fund defence projects and defence research is just, you know… they drown in money. But there’s little interest amongst business lobby groups to fund immigration research. Very little interest. Or amongst universities, surprisingly enough. Yet, they make so much of their money from overseas students.

WALKER: They don’t want to give back to the research.

RIZVI: Not to immigration research. They put it to other research.

WALKER: Right. International students are the number one funding source for university research, aren’t they?

So when Gough Whitlam became Prime Minister - Bob Hawke, who was then president of the ACTU, I think famously offered to tutor him in economics or to arrange some ANU professors to tutor Whitlam - I can’t remember which one. But I guess this would have been over the summer at the end of 1972. And Whitlam of course declined. And the rest is history. 

So imagine an equivalent situation for immigration policy, say, a new prime minister or a new minister for Home Affairs calls you up and they say: Abul, I’ve cleared my calendar. I have a couple of days over the summer holidays that I just want to dedicate to building up my intellectual capital around immigration policy. What books or papers or sources are you recommending? So what’s your syllabus for them? And you’re allowed to say Population Shock?

RIZVI: Well, let’s leave my thing to one side. There is excellent [inaudible] work that was done by Professor McDonald over the last 30 years that I think is still worth reading. It’s still of value.

WALKER: Not outdated?

RIZVI: Not outdated. Well, the statistics are outdated, but the concepts are not. And I would still recommend that. I would also recommend that the politician read the other side of the debate, and that’s probably Bob Birrell. You notice I’ve named two people who are well and truly into their 80s.

WALKER: Peter and Bob.

RIZVI: Peter and Bob. And I would encourage them to read both sides and come to their own conclusions from that, because you get two very different views from two very learned academics.

WALKER: What do you think’s the strongest argument that Bob makes? In his work, what’s the thing that you find most convincing?

RIZVI: Well, he comes from an environmental background and I find it hard to debate population and environment. I’m not an expert in that space. I don’t know how to look at issues like emissions and population. And I don’t know how you would debate that. So I would put that to one side. Bob worries about multiculturalism, whereas Peter does not. Bob worries about people rorting the system, whereas Peter does not worry about rorts as much. Well, [Peter] does worry about them, but not as much. Bob is fundamentally a small immigration person. He would like to reduce immigration to its irreducible minimum.

WALKER: All right, let’s do some audience questions. If you’d like to ask a question, just put up your hand and we’ll get a microphone to you. Just while we’re waiting, let me ask one final question. If you could change our current immigration system in one way, completely unconstrained by politics, what would it be?

RIZVI: I would encourage the Prime Minister to commit to the development and debate and adoption of an actual plan.

WALKER: A population plan.

RIZVI: Yes. Let’s have a plan. Now. You might think, well, that’s bloody obvious, isn’t it? What a stupid recommendation. Well, we’ve never had one of those by the way.

WALKER: Australia’s never had a population plan?

RIZVI: Well, we’ve had politicians call booklets “population plans”. Mr. Morrison produced a booklet and he called it a “population plan”. It didn’t have a single word in it about the future population. How’s that a plan?

WALKER: First question.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: So how do you think high immigration changes an economy? So if you have a lot of high immigration, how does it change the broader economy and affect low skilled workers in the context of what we’re seeing around the world, where people with manufacturing skills find themselves out of work, potentially have a bit of backlash against that either in our country and other countries. And I ask that because there’s been a bit of work that I’ve seen online recently about the fact that high immigration of high skilled workers then changes the nature of that receiving country’s economy. And just wondering what your thoughts are on the link between those potential effects and the wider things we’re seeing in countries like ours and the US and other similar economies.

RIZVI: If you have a look at our labour force and you look at the cohort of unemployed, the 4.0% unemployed, despite the fact that we say we have low skill shortages, 80% of the unemployed do not have a post secondary education. If the objective of policy is to help as many of those people into a job, high-skilled migration is often one of the best ways of doing that because a high-skilled migrant inevitably will mean they need a range of support staff doing “lesser-skilled” work. I won’t call it unskilled work, but “lesser-skilled” work. 

If you hire a doctor who runs a surgery, the doctor will inevitably have to hire 2, 3, 4 people to support that doctor in running that surgery. And that is the case in many respects now. 

Eventually, we’ll reach a point where it becomes just too difficult to survive without filling the unskilled jobs. And I thought we’d never reached that point, but about 10 years ago we decided we had reached that point. So we started some low skill - deliberately low skill - programs to fill low skill jobs. The danger of that is what’s happened all around the world in those sorts of visa programs, which is just extraordinary levels of exploitation and abuse. 

We thought we could run such a program successfully without such levels of exploitation and abuse. We thought we were cleverer than everybody else. Turns out we weren’t cleverer than everybody else. And those programs are now experiencing extraordinary levels of abuse. And I think we can’t abolish those programs now because too many industries have become reliant on them. But we have to fix them. We can’t just continue with that level of exploitation. That’s just unacceptable.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #2: Just moving back to the questions around acculturation and social cohesion, I’m curious if you think there’s merit to the idea that a country has cultural values or cultural ideals that need to be preserved or maybe cultivated, and if so, if an immigration policy should in some way reflect that or take that into account.

RIZVI: I’m reluctant to advocate for governments getting involved in the business of culture because that, more often than not, just becomes an ugly debate about what is the correct culture. Culture is something that evolves. It develops over time. And we in Australia, as a result of waves of migration, have adopted all sorts of little habits, cultures, call them what you will, drawing on what we think were things that were attractive for us. And we did it. You know, we go out and have lasagna and pizza. That was a function of the migration of Italians. You know, lots of foreign words keep coming into our language as a result of the waves of migration. I have no problem with that. I like the idea that that sort of thing evolves naturally and is not something that is determined by politicians. They are the worst people to tell you about culture.

WALKER: Can I ask a follow up question there? So, hypothetically, say you did want to start selecting people on some kind of cultural values criteria. How would you actually implement that? Would you put in like five points in the points test for –

RIZVI: the right culture? 

WALKER: – for coming from a country?

RIZVI: So, if you could play a good-on-drive as good as Greg Chappell, you’re in? I have no idea. I wouldn’t go there. I would be desperately trying to advise the minister, don’t go there. Let the sensible Australian population work it out. Because they will.

WALKER: It’s a good question, though… I guess I was driving at this earlier with the question around: Is it going to be enough for skilled migrants just to be young, skilled and proficient in English going forward?

RIZVI: As long as our politicians behave? Yes.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #3: You were talking earlier: the story about integrating with CETA was really impressive – getting coordination with the international logistics. Australia does seem to be pretty good at delivering, especially compared to sort of what we hear out of the [US], out of the UK to some degree. What especially I guess within immigration and in the public sector, what do you see as, kind of, the secret sauce to our state capacity? Is it downstream of the heavy levels of bipartisanship or is it something else? And did you see that change at all over the course of your career?

RIZVI: We established an immigration department in 1945. I’m not aware of any other country that established a standalone immigration department like we did. And that immigration department lasted until 2015/16. It’s a long time for a department of immigration to survive in the way it did. Much of that immigration department was staffed by people who began their careers in immigration and stayed there their whole lives. That is both good and bad. It’s good because it means people get inculcated in the culture of the organisation. They have great corporate memory. On the other hand, you might say those people get set in their ways and can’t change. There’s always a balance in that. But until 2015/16, no Secretary of the Department of Immigration had ever said, our job is not any longer nation building. In 2015/16, we had our first Secretary of the Department that said: “the era of nation building is over. We have stopped it now. We will have temporary migrants who will come here, do whatever needs to be done and then we’ll, you know, toodle off.” That same secretary said: “the primary objective of immigration policy is national security.” That changed everything.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #3: Is that still the case? Are we seeing a rebound?

RIZVI: He’s moved on for various reasons, some of his own making. And the new person in charge is a very capable public servant, a lovely lady, very intelligent, but her background is almost entirely in defence policy. The Immigration Department is now staffed by a large number of people with a background in either defence or law enforcement. That’s not how we traditionally recruited to the Immigration Department.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #3: Sorry, I’ve taken over the podcast. You said earlier, as you said just before that, we had an immigration department with a large history and people had stuck around for a long time. Who would you recruit into the Immigration Department or Home Affairs now?

RIZVI: I think I would recruit people who actually want to work in immigration for the purposes of nation building, of helping develop our future. They were the people I’d look for. I wouldn’t look for any particular qualification. I wouldn’t say, you know, you’ve got to be economists or sociologists or whatever. I think I’d draw from a wide cross section of qualifications, but I wouldn’t focus on defence and law enforcement. Some is good, but not to be dominated by that is no good.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #3: I yield the microphone.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #4: Thank you so much for such an informative discussion. You mentioned briefly exploitation of migrants who come to Australia. I’m a journalist who sometimes covers migrant worker rights and I’ve spoken to people who come here on the student visas. They cycle through on student visas in the hope to stay here. They experience wage theft, wage reimbursement. They might get a visa that you’ve just mentioned there and then they still experience these things. Some people would say that they’re rorting the system, others would say that the system bakes in exploitation. I would like to know which one you think it is.

RIZVI: Yeah, the exploitation problem is more often than not the hardest part of immigration policy and how to prevent the exploitation. The best way to minimise exploitation is to give a greater level of agency and power to the individual migrant. The government has made some changes that enable certain migrants in certain categories, such as the employer sponsored categories, to be able to move employer much more easily than in the past. And I think that empowers the migrant a little bit more and reduces the capacity of the employer to exploit a little bit. Penalties for exploitation have been introduced, including criminal penalties. But in my view, the criteria for a person, an employer, to be found guilty of exploitation is still so opaque that I doubt many employers will actually be penalised. And that, I suspect is a function of compromise between the unions who are probably asking for stronger powers, and the business lobby groups who are asking for weaker powers. I think we’ll have to revisit that issue. I think it is important that if an employer has exploited someone, there is a genuine fear that they will be penalised beyond, you know, $5,000 fine or something. That’s not enough. A slap on the wrist doesn’t work. 

AUDIENCE MEMBER #4: But do you think that the system bakes this in? Because I have heard that argument from some politicians in fact.

RIZVI: It’s an ongoing risk. Absolutely. One of the things that was introduced in the employer sponsored visa was a minimum wage. That is you could not pay an employee below a minimum wage and that wage had to be cash in hand. It couldn’t be, oh, here’s the minimum wage. And by the way, I’ve now deducted this and this and you’ve got nothing left. There was a lot of that happening. Between 2013 and 2022/2023, we froze that minimum wage for absolutely no good reason and as a result the risk of exploitation just went up. Increasing that minimum wage has helped. There isn’t a single solution here. It’s a whole host of things that you have to do. One of them is we probably need to, in my view, empower unions and I know people will, you know, reel back in horror. Empower unions to be able to assist temporary migrants, students and others and enable them, indeed encourage them to join a union and get that sort of protection. Because the exploitation of workers - we know in the last 300 years that the biggest change has been the empowerment of unions [which] has enabled the reduction in the exploitation of all workers, not just migrants. Very few temporary entrants to Australia ever join a union.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #5: So immigration provides one of the very few ways that politicians can directly influence the electorate, as in which people get to vote and who don’t via path to citizenship. We also find that sentiments towards immigration skew with age. So people who are older tend to be more anti-immigration and people who are younger, more pro-immigration. Do you think that if you put to a vote the immigration policy that you implemented in 2001 to the same voters from 2001 today, that they’d vote for it?

RIZVI: No. 

AUDIENCE MEMBER #5: Okay, thanks. 

RIZVI: Because luckily no one noticed. We did make that change.

WALKER: It was regulatory, right?

RIZVI: It was a regulatory change. Yeah, no one noticed. And everyone was talking about Tampa at the time anyway.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #6: Thank you for addressing my follow up question which was “as they didn’t notice”. 

We’ve spoken today about the importance of governments having control. And in your writings one of the things that commends the points system is that the right people get in. There are those who write the opposite. For example, US economist Bryan Caplan in his book Open Borders advocates open borders. What do you think the consequences of an open border would be if we did just take away all controls?

RIZVI: By open borders, do we mean anyone who arrives becomes a citizen or do we mean anyone who arrives has work rights or anyone who arrives has any sort of protections or has access to Medicare or Social Security. The open borders question is complicated. You have to answer all of those questions to define what it is you mean by an open border. If you just mean let people come in and live in sort of the shadows of society, constantly exploited for the rest of their lives. I’m not sure anyone advocates that, do they?

WALKER: Some U.S. economists do. I guess the argument would be if it raises the welfare of the immigrants and it raises the welfare of the locals, why not make it possible?

RIZVI: Because countries are more than economies, they are societies. And any society does not want to have, I think, a permanent underclass of exploited people. That’s not Australia. It might be America. It’s not Australia. 

WALKER: Did you have a follow up?

AUDIENCE MEMBER #6: Very quickly. Are those people not already living in the shadows, in poverty?

RIZVI: In another country? 

AUDIENCE MEMBER #6: Yep. 

RIZVI: Yeah. They certainly are. But as a public servant, my responsibility is to the Australian national interest, not to other countries’ national interest.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #7: What other countries do you think are dealing with migration successfully? And are any countries dealing with migration successfully in a way which is sort of fundamentally different to Australia?

RIZVI: We’ve gone through a very difficult period in the last decade where I think governments have managed the issue poorly. Usually if anyone asked me that question, I’d always point to Canada. But what Canada’s done over the last five or six years has led to the situation where Justin Trudeau was accused of having lost control. He’s now lost his position. The Canadian Government is now projecting or forecasting negative population growth for the next two years as a result of deliberate policy. I have never heard of a government ever pursuing negative population growth as a deliberate policy before in my life. I never thought Canada would, but that’s where they’ve got to now. And that suggests to me poor policy management. They let things get out of control and then the backlash came. And now they’re saying we’re going to drive a million temporary entrants and students out of the country. Well, luckily they’ve got very high unemployment, so they might succeed.

WALKER: How much of it was things getting out of control and how much of it was perceptions of things getting out of control?

RIZVI: No, it was out of control. They went to a size of a migration program and a student program and a temporary entry program, a low skilled temporary entry program that was just excessive and did not have the right protections. 

AUDIENCE MEMBER #8: I was interested that you mentioned as a policy recommendation, adding an exam as part of getting a student visa. I was wondering what problem that would solve and what kind of criteria are policymakers looking for in granting student visas?

RIZVI: Right. At the moment to get a student visa, you apply and are processed against what is known as the genuine student criterion, which is a highly, highly subjective criteria. It varies according to the risk level of the individual education provider that you’re going to. So if you’re going to Sydney Uni, you get a very light touch and through you go. If you’re going to a lesser university, you go through a much more difficult process where the chances of getting a visa or not are much more fraught. And I believe that approach has three flaws. It leaves the question of whether someone is a genuine student or not up to the subjective judgment of a visa decision maker. And inevitably different visa decision makers make different subjective decisions and as a result, you create an enormous amount of uncertainty. Secondly, the government tried to introduce caps for individual providers. I thought that was really poor policy, but that was the best thing they could think of to manage numbers. In my view, having a bureaucrat determine, you know, Sydney Uni, you get 14 and Melbourne Uni you get... And every year we go through that process again and we decide how many everyone’s going to get. That’s just fraught because you’ll just have a massive bun fight with 1,400 providers every year with a bunch of bureaucrats who probably don’t know beyond Sydney Uni and Melbourne Uni. And probably don’t know a great deal about the providers. It’s an awful way of doing it. Whereas if you had someone sit an exam, you either pass or fail. Yes, you can have flaws in the exam and that sort of stuff, but at least it’s a standardised test. It’s what we do with domestic students, so can’t be entirely bad. So it gives you a standardised test, it gives the student certainty, it makes for better visa decision making and it enables the government to control numbers in a much more sensible and logical way than just deciding every year: oh, here’s the magic number. And last year they came up with the magic number which was 270,000. Never explained how this magic number was arrived at. And then they decided how much of the 270,000 would be divided to individual providers. That’s no way to run an industry. 

AUDIENCE MEMBER #9: I have two questions, but if we can’t get through them, that’s fine. First of all, thank you so much to both of you. It was really wonderful conversation, especially as a non economist. I have a question about The Global Fertility Crisis. You mentioned that the dominant belief among demographers since the 1960s has been that the crisis has been driven largely by female participation in the workforce and the rise of contraceptive technologies. And I’m wondering, if you put on a bit of a contrarian hat, what do you think is maybe the most compelling alternate hypothesis for it? Are there any that are particularly compelling? And what would it take for demographers to change their mind about that?

RIZVI: It’s a good question. Firstly, I should say I’m not a demographer. So I just read them and, you know, I know no more than what I’ve read of their work. The third thesis, or the third and fourth theses that come out are cultural. There have been cultural changes, and I don’t know the truth of this or otherwise in Japan and in South Korea that have contributed to this. I don’t know what those cultural changes are, but allegedly there are cultural factors that have led to women deciding not only that they will not have a baby, but they’ll remain single. Another factor is women putting off the age of the first child, often for career, education reasons or financial reasons. They’re waiting till they have a house in which they can bring up the child. That’s often a factor. And certainly in Australia, and I don’t know about elsewhere, childcare comes up often as a factor.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #9: Okay, thank you. A slightly stranger question. You decided to take up a PhD in 2017. What drove you to take up a PhD at that point in your career?

RIZVI: Well, I’d retired from the public service and, you know, I thought two to three days a week of golf was probably enough, and I had to find something else to do. 

AUDIENCE MEMBER #9: Fair enough. Some people take up hobbies, but… 

RIZVI: Well, it was a kind of hobby, I guess.

WALKER: Okay. So raise your hand highest if you think you have an unusually good question.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #10: Thank you, gentlemen. This was absolutely wonderful. Well, some of us, me in particular, knew very little about immigration, and you’ve helped a great deal. However, it felt a bit like an episode of “We’ll all be rooned, said Hanrahan”, as in it’s bleak and you want us all to go home and weep. So I was going to ask if you’d heard of a carnival at Boncuklu Tala 13,000 years ago. Have you heard of that? The first known piss up was at Boncuklu Tala in eastern Turkey 13,000 years ago with lots of drinking, dancing, and we think maybe some romance as well. So my question to the pair of you is could you please organise a few more festivals and not so much depressing immigration stuff.

WALKER: I can take that one. Thank you for that, Geoff. I’ll take that more as a comment, but on the topic of more salons. So we’re back in Melbourne on the 6th of March. We’ll be here with Judy Brett talking about Australia’s political culture and compulsory voting. I can’t promise it’ll be a piss up of the level of the one 13,000 years ago, but should be an interesting discussion. Many of you may need to head home now, but if you can stick around and join us, we’re going to debrief and mingle back in the Burke and Wills room downstairs. We have some more food coming out.

And last but not least, please join me in thanking our guest, Abul Rizvi. 

Thanks, Abul.

RIZVI: Thanks, mate. That was very enjoyable.