Politics with Michelle Grattan: Abul Rizvi on how silence and stalling stoke anti-migrant fears

Immigration has once again become a hot button issue, from weekend protests featuring neo-Nazis to a new A$408 million deal with Nauru to accept former immigration detainees Australia cannot legally deport back to their own countries.

The federal government has also just belatedly announced the permanent migration figure for this financial year. At 185,000, it’s unchanged from the previous year.

On this podcast we’re joined by Abul Rizvi, a former deputy secretary of the Department of Immigration under the Howard government turned media commentator. He says it was “very, very unusual” that it took the Albanese government so long to announce the latest migration figures.

The delay was unprecedented. I cannot remember a year in which the government did not announce the programme for the relevant year before that year started.

But Rizvi says both major political parties should take responsibility for fuelling public concerns about immigration, after two decades of stalling on hard decisions and avoiding difficult conversations.

At least since Kevin Rudd unleashed on us the big Australia debate […] both major parties have been reluctant to talk about immigration policy […] They have lacked a will to explain our long-term directions in terms of population and net overseas migration. And as a result, I think they have left a vacuum.

And that vacuum is now being filled […] by extremists such as neo-Nazis and others. But I think they are a small portion of the people that the government needs to be talking to. They need to be talking to middle Australia, who just wants to know that immigration is being managed in the national interest.

Rizvi says successive federal governments have failed to properly manage or explain how they’re dealing with migrant numbers. That’s having unintended consequences, both for families and businesses trying to bring workers or loved ones to Australia.

The big pressure is under employer-sponsored migration, where I suspect what [the government will] do is simply slow processing. And that will just make employers angry. It will make the applicants angry. It’s just really poor practice.

But more importantly, they’re confronted with a massive backlog of partner visa applications, which on my estimates […] the backlog is around 100,000 […] They come under the Permanent Migration Programme, so they’ve got to be fit within that programme. We’re getting about 60,000 to 65,000 applications per annum, and the government has allocated 40,000 places for partner visas.

In other words, it’s saying, yet again for another year, they’re just going to let the backlog grow. The law, the Migration Act, says the government must manage these visas on a demand-driven basis. And the government proudly puts that on the website, that it does that. But when you’re constantly letting the backlog grow and grow and grow, you’re not really managing it on a demand-driven basis.