For an immigration program to work in the national interest, it must discriminate based on values.
It's a controversial proposal, immigration based on deliberate discrimination.
Those who migrate from liberal democracies have a greater likelihood of subscribing to Australian values.
Compared to Opposition leader Angus Taylor has outlined the Liberal Party's hardline migration policy in a provocative speech in camera.
Not everyone wanting to migrate to Australia will be a net benefit to Australia. Indeed, some will be a net train.
Parts of the plan had echoes of Donald Trump, others of John Howard, as Taylor made a play for one nation's growing pool of lapsed Liberal voters. So what's in the plan and will the libs risky move on migration pay off in the polls. I'm Nicole Johnston and you're listening to seven AM Today Press Gallery journalist Karen Middleton on the Liberal Party's hardline new migration policy. It's Wednesday, April fifteenth. Karen, We've been waiting for the Opposition's immigration
plan to come out for a while now. It's been delayed a couple of times. We finally have it. What changes is Angus Taylor proposing, well, we've got.
A bit of it, Nicole. We haven't really got the whole lot, as the numbers are actually missing. But what we have got is a framework that's true. And for example, we have the proposal that that would be the introduction of a safe country list, so a list of countries whereby if people who've claimed asylum are rejected, there'll be a list of countries that are deemed safe to return them to, and that's supposed to fast track the refusal and return process for us IS claims.
Countries on this list would be those deemed generally free from persecution. If a citizen of Australia safe country applies for a refugee and humanitarian visa from outside Australia, it will be assumed to be inadmissible.
There's a proposal to reassess more than two thousand visas issued to Palestinians since the October seven, twenty twenty three Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and the war that followed that.
The Garzan cohort of seventeen hundred people here on visas presents a high risk to our nation. That cohort must be reassisted entirely with far greater scrutiny.
Then anyone applying for visa, including tourists, would have to submit their social media details to be vetted at the Australian end before they get visas. So that sounds an awful lot like what Donald Trump is introduced in the United States proposal for new funding for law enforcement agencies so they can track down and arrest and deport people who are deemed to not fit into the Australian community or who've broken the law.
If you do the wrong thing, we'll keep you out or will kick you out, you will be deported.
And then there are three key pillars that Angus Taylor outlined. The first, he says, is values, Australian values. The second is shutting the door to people who abuse the immigration system here, and the third is showing the red light to radicals. He said, so getting rid of people who have come from somewhere else and are deemed to be causing social unrest.
So, Karen, if we could just go through a few of them, pick them apart. What did you think of the part of Taylor's announcement when he talked about this screening of social media for all these or applicants, even tourists.
The Coalition will establish an enhanced Security Screening Center using the full suite of intelligence, screening and enforcement capabilities. The center will stop radicals, extremists and terrorists from entering our country.
Doesn't it start to cross over into the government invading people's privacy and how would something like that even work?
Well, it is certainly an invasion of privacy. Having said that, social media is public, so there's an implication with the way that the Trump system works that they're digging deeper than that. The problem here is what are they looking for? What are the things in your social media that might deem you not eligible to come to Australia, either as a tourist or as a migrant. Any kind of prejudice could be allowed to run, which is exactly what this policy purports to be trying to stop. I guess, so
it's very unclear how it would actually work. It would also cost a huge amount of money. I expect to have people going through every applicants social media accounts in detail and then writing reports about them, and then someone making a decision about them, and then the process that is involved in all of that. And I think if
we look at the United States. This certainly from the outside looking in, there's a general impression that if you're someone who's been outspoken about Donald Trump and his government, and especially if you're someone with any kind of profile, then you'd have to think you are a good candidate
to be screened out based on your social media. So if that's what's going to be introduced here, then it would be entirely up to the government of the day what it decided the rules were and what was an acceptable level of criticism and of whom and what wasn't.
If we could move on to the part of the speech that talked about enforcement, now that was going after visa overstayers and people who've exhausted their appeals by having this task force to target around sixty five thousand unresolved cases, and it does start to sound like Angus Taylor is not ruling out a us I style crackdown on immigration.
Well, I think he was asked about that on radio and he didn't comprehensively rule it out. But again, it isn't clear how that would work.
We will deport people who no longer have a visa and shouldn't be in this country. We should we should do.
That with you know, like a team with vans and armed police and all that.
Sort of thing. We're talking a very different thing here. They're talking well over ten million people. We're talking about sixty five thousands. So I don't know.
Under the existing system, if people either break Australian law and their foreign citizens or they've applied for asylum or refugee status and are rejected, then the system works to ultimately send those people back to the country that their country of origin or to a third country. But of
course practically that doesn't always happen. We know, and there is a backlog of cases that have been a frustration to successive governments, including the current one, and that goes to this sort of safe list idea that the coalition is talking about trying to make it easier to deport people, but there are practical obstacles to that, not all of which are in the control of an Australian government.
Karen, one of the main messages or themes that we had was this issue of Australian values.
Australia has a non discriminatory immigration program. We don't discriminate based on nationality, race, gender or faith.
But he said that we should discriminate based on values. Now what's he talking about.
Well, that's an excellent question because again it's open to interpretation. Now there is a statement of Australian values that people who are coming here on a shorter term basis, temporary visa applicants for example, have to say that they understand a set of values that include or read from some of them, for unicol respect for the freedom and dignity of the individual, freedom of religion and freedom to not
have a religion. Commitment to the rule of law, so everyone's subject to the law and has to obey it. Parliamentary democracy, so that the law is determined by parliament. Equality of opportunity for all people, and that's about gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, race or national ethnic origin. And then there's this idea of a fair go and they've defined that as mutual respect, tolerance, compassion for those in need,
equality of opportunity for all. And then it also talks about the English language meaning the national language, and it's an important unifying element of Australian society. But what Angus Taylor seems to be talking about is effectively legislating these values. Now that's going to get into pretty tough territory because if what you're making people do is sign up to
what it then becomes a legal document. And on that basis, if they are later found to not have upheld those values and they're going to be deported, there has to be a legal framework for that. There has to be specific legislation that tells us what constitutes a breach of those values, a breach of the fair go or the freedom and dignity of the individual. And I don't know, it's sort of got the feel of a lawyer's picnic about it to me.
Coming up, could Taylor's hard right pivot backfire.
What we've seen in recent years, the Bondi Beach terrorist attack, radical Islamic preachers espousing hate with.
Impunity, Karen. In the second half of Taylor's address, he talked about immigrants with quote subversive intent. So what was he talking about there and how did he go about linking migration to the Bondai Beach terrorist attack last year?
Well, this is interesting because we've got to remember that the man who's been charged and who's still living, of the two, there was a father and son accused of these crimes. The father migrated to Australia from India twenty seven years ago and has lived here ever since. The son was born in Australia, so he's not a migrant, he's an Australian. So it seems to be an attempt to suggest that people of Arab background, of Muslim face
maybe are people that we should be worrying about. And I think you're getting into dangerous territory when you're starting to blur the lines around all of that. So people with subversive intent. Our security agencies are already looking for those people. They work extremely hard to try and make sure that those people don't get into the country, and
by and large it seems they're pretty successful at it. So, you know, there are just a few kind of logic questions around what they're actually talking about.
Genocidal marches in major cities, anti Semitism across Australian communities. These are the ramifications of an immigration system where standards have erated.
What's been the reaction to all of this so far, Well, I.
Guess the earlier reaction is probably what you would expect. So the Greens are saying, you know, this is potentially a revival of the wide Australia policy.
The Coalition think that reintroducing elements of the Wide Australia policy is the way forward for Australia in twenty twenty six. That is not the way forward for Australia. Australia gains so much immigration.
They're concerned, particularly about the emphasis on English language and whether that's supposed to be now enforced. The Labor Government has said it's a race to the bottom and this is all about trying to stem the flow of voter support from the Coalition to one nation.
The Coalition have got zero credibility and immigration. They let net migration explode after COVID and now we're just seeing desperate dog whistling from Angus Taylor who's desperately trying to compete with one nation at a race to the bottom.
I think you would expect that some of the communities that are particularly being singled out in his speech and identified as places of concern alike could also raise concerns about it. But it will appeal to a lot of people who feeling secure, who are under financial pressure, and for whom migrants are the most obvious target. So there
is an undercurrent or not so undercurrent. Now it's out in the open of politics around this issue, which goes beyond just the raw economics that we usually talk about in relation to migration numbers.
And so, Karen, when you take a step back from this, does it seem that Taylor is trying to move the migration debate away from how many people come here and towards what type of people the coalition thinks should be allowed into Australia.
I think he wants to do both, but I think he's doing the latter first, and that is quite deliberate. If you look back just prior to when the Liberal Party changed leaders and elected Angus Taylor's to replaced Susan Lee, there was a big push from the Conservative side to do more to try and win back those one nation voters.
And James Patterson, who's a significant member of the coalition and a key Conservative, had given a speech so late last year I think where he talked about the pathway for the Coalition to getting back into government had to be winning those people back and they needed to prioritize that, and they needed to emphasize things like Australian values and patriotism to ignite passion for the flag and to use those kinds of issues, sort of populist nationalist issues to
attract those people's attention, come up with policy ideas that might bring them back, and then after that worry about things like economic policies and maybe the numbers of migrants. So I think what we're seeing looks like the beginning of that kind of strategy rolling out.
And so when you put it all together, the values test, the social media checks, Gaza refugee reassessment, what does this all say about where Taylor wants to take the Liberal Party.
Well, it's a very conservative approach to this issue, and I think he's also wanting to hark back a bit to that John Howard days, where John Howard managed to wield this issue about levels of migration very very successfully as a political where he even quoted John Howard's old saying back from the two thousand and one election, which was we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come. Now, that's the statement
of the obvious. Every country should do that, but it's used in a way to, as you said earlier, bring up ideas of the right kinds of migrants, who's the right kind and who's not.
Will decide who deserves protection and the circumstances in which that protection is.
And so this debate is just it's just got a different tone about it, and I think it's drawing heavily and what was happening in the United States. It is a risk for the coalition because it will attract a number of those people who are just talking about who are feeling frustrated and disillusioned and are looking at parties like one Nation, but it will probably scare a whole lot of other people. And the question is where do
they live and where do they vote? And will it be a net gain and a net positive for the opposition in the long run. And I think it's interesting to note that the new leader of the Nationals, Matt Canavan, and while he's endorsing a lot of populist ideas, he's been very strongly against the kind of xenophobic stuff that
Pauline Hanson has been known about. You know, it's going to be interesting to see how this all plays out within the coalition because there are elements of this that might be seen as giving sort of tacit approval to that kind of language and that those kinds of ideas. So I think there could be some robust debate inside the Coalition about all of this and where it's headed. And there's a big question about whether it makes us
more unified as a community or less. So we'll watch that with interest.
Karen, thank you so much for explaining it all to us today.
Thanks Nicole.
Also in the news, Quantus says it's cutting flights as a result of the war in the Middle East, which has led to soaring price of jet fuel. The airline has announced it will reduce domestic capacity by five percent between May and June, with most cuts affecting routes between major capital cities. Quantus estimates its fuel bill could reach up to three point three billion dollars, more than eight
hundred million above its previous estimate. The airline says impacted customers who have booked with Quantus or Jetstar will be offered alternative flights or a refund. And the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Harry and Meghan, have started an official tour of Australia after arriving in Melbourne yesterday. The couple will also visit Cameron Sydney, addressing causes that focus on
mental health, community resilience and support for veterans. Some questions have been raised on how much the four day visit will cost taxpayers, with concerns that police have been enlisted to provide protection for the pair. Harry and Meghan's team has maintained the trip is being privately funded. I'm Nicole Johnston and this is seven am. Thanks for listening.