BURKE:
Today, Tony Abbott has made statements claiming the Government has a target of 36 million for Australia's population. Let me be absolutely clear: there is one member of Parliament who has directly said he supports the 36 million figure – and that was Tony Abbott on 3AW in January this year, being interviewed by Derryn Hinch. The Government has been clear, the 36 million figure is a Treasury projection based on what would happen if nothing changed in our population policies.
Thirty six million is not a Government target, it is not a Government ambition, it is not a Government policy. Compare the Government adopting in a careful way a strategy to develop over the next 12 months, with the chaos we have seen from the Opposition. In the last three days, there have been four policy flip flops on population policy from the Opposition. They have flipped and flopped over whether they even have a policy. They have flipped and flopped over whether or not they want to cut immigration numbers. They have flipped and flopped over whether or not they want to cut family reunion. They have flipped and flopped over whether or not they want to cut skilled migration.
How can you have a population policy when you can't even govern a population of 20 in your own Shadow Cabinet? That's what the Opposition is presenting us with at the moment. Tony Abbott claims he wants to be a man of action. It's time now for him to take some action and clean up the chaos into which the Opposition has descended when it comes to population policy.
JOURNALIST:
What is your policy? You say 36 million is a Treasury forecast, you are here demanding what he stands for, what do you stand for?
BURKE:
We made it clear when my portfolio was established on Saturday that we would develop a strategy over the next 12 months to take into account regional differences. At the time the Opposition said why can't you do it more quickly? Why does it take a year to develop a strategy in an area where Australia has previously never had one? I think the chaos we have seen in the last few days shows where you would land with policy on the run. In terms of immigration numbers, we continue to take into account the employment needs of the nation and tailor those figures in a considered way to the needs of the nation.
JOURNALIST:
At the end of that process, will you develop a target?
BURKE:
We will have a strategy which takes into account the different needs of the nation. One of the reasons that we have a process in the Budget is because the economic conditions change year in, year out. Five years ago if you were to have developed firm targets where you wanted population to be for the years hence, you would have created a problem during the period of the global recession. When tough times hit – as they did during the global recession – you need your immigration numbers to retreat, which is exactly what the Government did in that period.
But to think that you can have a cap on population ignores the fact that, as I have been briefed by Treasury this week, 40 per cent of our population growth comes from natural increases, from people living longer and the birth rate.
JOURNALIST:
Can you explain the net overseas migration number that Scott Morrison keeps talking about, has blown out to 300,000, what is the breakdown?
BURKE:
There are three things that cause that net figure to be higher than it had been usually, all of which were demand-driven. The first was an increase in skilled migration under temporary visas. The reason for the increase in temporary visas was a combination of the mining boom and also we have become heavily reliant, in health in particular, on a lot of nurses coming in on those temporary visas. Added to that, there was a significant expansion in overseas students – an industry worth $17 billion to the Australian economy. And finally, you also had the impact during the global recession of fewer Australians choosing to work overseas and an increased number of Australians, who were working overseas, returning home.
JOURNALIST:
You say 36 million is not your target, the Prime Minister however on the 7:30 report a couple of weeks ago, seemed to embrace it completely.
BURKE:
There is not a Government target for 2050 of where population should be. Our belief is that those policies and strategies will need to be based on the needs of the nation. They will change from one part of the nation to another and in the economic cycle, you will still need to review those numbers year-to-year.
JOURNALIST:
Do you fear that this whole debate is becoming confused? The immigration policy, the population policy, and the asylum seeker policy. Do you think that they are becoming confused and do you think that there is a racial element to it?
BURKE:
I'm actually confident that almost every Australian is capable of being part of a rational and sober debate on this issue. I'm not sure whether Scott Morrison is among those capable of doing that.
JOURNALIST:
Is he a dog whistler?
BURKE:
I'm not going to comment on their strategy - that would presume that they have one.
JOURNALIST:
If the projection for 2050 is so variable, in the Intergenerational Report why doesn't the Treasury model different levels of immigration to give us an idea of what it could be depending on where immigration was?
BURKE:
The modelling has to work on where you would be if the current policy settings were unchanged. Let's not forget those settings were based on an average over the last 40 years, projected forward for the next 40 years. Under the previous Government - the Howard Government was a big migration government - immigration levels increased substantially in the final years of their government and continued into the first years of this Government. Treasury modelling dealt with the evidence of the past that they had and projected it forward.
JOURNALIST:
In the 12 months to September, how many were people who returned to Australia. Those million Australians overseas, how many were those people? Secondly, what sort of policies could you develop to encourage people to go and live in regional areas?
BURKE:
Of the 300,000 figure that you refer to, I referred to the three different areas in descending order of size. Of those three different issues, the number of Australians returning versus going overseas was the smaller influence of those three factors but I don't carry the exact quantum of that. There was a second part to the question?
JOURNALIST:
How would you encourage people to live in regional areas?
BURKE:
It's not my intention to develop the strategy by concluding it in the first week. There is no doubt that we need to do more than we've done previously in coordinating and creating incentives to make sure that the workforce in Australia is where we most need it to be. Most of these policies, and the way they've been dealt with in years past, have presumed that once people are in Australia they'll automatically gravitate to where the nation needs them to be, whether they've grown up here or they've come through immigration. Experience has shown that hasn't worked as well as it might have.
JOURNALIST:
When you eventually get a population policy will it be all about immigration, mostly about immigration, or just a little about immigration?
BURKE:
It will be about the needs of the nation. Immigration is part of it , no doubt about it, but it isn't the only element. Infrastructure, urban planning, water infrastructure and availability – the issues that go to how well you can sustain both the employment benefits of immigration and some of the natural limits on the carrying capacity of Australia – these are all issues the Australian public has been talking about for a very long time. Governments of both sides have probably taken a long time to catch up and over the next 12 months and the reason my portfolio has been based in Treasury is to bring all those elements together.
JOURNALIST:
Are you comfortable with a large immigration intake when the economy is running very strongly and when skills are needed?
BURKE:
I think you refer to an example of how policies work when they are tailored to the needs of the nation. I have great sympathy for the employer in Western Australia who is saying they used to be able to find a workforce and now they can't. There are a number of policy levers to deal with that. Immigration may well be one of them, but what I want to do is find a way of reconciling the challenge of the person stuck in traffic on one of our main roads, who understandably says please don't add any more cars to the existing infrastructure, with the employer who has a genuine need for more people.
JOURNALIST:
What about getting better roads?
BURKE:
Well the current Government has already doubled the amount of money spent on road infrastructure; we've increased the amount of money spent on rail infrastructure by a factor of four. The infrastructure agenda from this Government has a very good story to tell. I would like to integrate that further so there's a relationship between where the demand for infrastructure is and where your population policy works.
JOURNALIST:
So when you finish devising your population strategy will Australians get a figure of where they'll be in 2050? Will we know how many people will live here?
BURKE:
To give a precise projection for 2050 forwards would mean being able to predict every cycle in the national and international economy. I don't see how any modelling would be capable of providing that level of precision.
JOURNALIST:
Will we ever know how many people will live here?
BURKE:
I don't see how you can determine what the economic needs of the nation will be. You can predict forward on current trends, that's what Treasury projections do. But I think it's a pretty long bow to say, in 40 years time, this is precisely what the economic needs of the nation will be in the new global context.
JOURNALIST:
What's the point of the strategy?
BURKE:
At the moment you have a two-speed economy across the nation and population movements don't necessarily match that. So you have areas of high demand for people where there is chronic labour shortage and then you have other areas, often very well served in terms of people settling there as new immigrants but not having the infrastructure, the housing, the water. To coordinate that for the first time is a new area and something that governments, on either side of politics, haven't previously attempted to do. To do that sort of work and get that sort of coordination has a capacity to improve people's lives far better than trying to second-guess precisely what the number of people will be in 40 years' time.