The fight over immigration could decide the next election. Labor has to take the gloves off | Tom McIlroy

After weeks of delay on his immigration announcement, Tony Burke appeared at the National Press Club with just a few pages of handwritten notes.

Burke’s speech on Thursday – pushed back due to internal politics within the Albanese government – was short on rhetoric and stuck mostly to explaining the changes designed to bring down net overseas migration (Nom), without knee-capping the economy.

Carefully explaining the detail, the cerebral and thorough home affairs minister expressed confidence the government’s plan would get the number of arrivals down to the forecast rate for the first time in years. That task has become more urgent as One Nation surges in the polls and increasingly sets the terms for the debate across federal parliament.

But Labor’s plans, under development since the start of the year, won’t be enough to wrest back the policy and political fight on immigration back from Pauline Hanson and her supporters. For that, the government needs a brawler mentality, and to show it is prepared to go after One Nation’s threadbare plan to slash overseas arrivals.

Announced with only 24 hours notice, Burke’s speech reflected the tough politics. Its deliberate title was: “The work of managing the migration program: Who arrives, who stays, who leaves.”

Little more than an hour before he spoke, the latest data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics confirmed Nom was 292,000 in the 12 months to March, well ahead of forecasts in the May budget of 245,000 for 2026-27.

Determined to reach 225,000 over two years, Burke came with a suite of changes.

In broad terms, he wants to shift some parts of the migration program away from demand-driven settings developed under the Hawke and Howard governments, to boost enforcement and deportations of visa overstayers, and remove some of the pull factors that have pushed up Nom since Covid-era border closures.

An expert review led by bureaucrat Martin Parkinson, prepared in Labor’s first term and delivered in 2023, showed the scale of the challenge. Australia has always been a popular destination for visitors, but the number of temporary visa holders living in the country has surged by as much as 77% since 2011, reaching 2.9 million people.

Working holidaymakers are a key target of Burke’s plans. Those looking to stay for a second year in Australia will have to join a ballot designed to cut places from about 57,000 people last financial year to about 45,000 in future. For anyone seeking a third year in the country, the numbers will drop from about 31,000 to just 5,000.

Rules for foreign students will also be much less generous. With a few exceptions including PhD candidates, people coming to study in Australia won’t be able to bring family members. In an effort to stop so-called visa hopping, anyone seeking to change the tertiary qualification linked to their visa will have to move up the educational scale, not down. That means someone doing a bachelor’s degree could move up to a master’s, but not down to diploma or Tafe course.

Burke admitted he’d like to go further, even moving some visa categories to an expression of interest system, but he can’t do that without parliament changing the law. A lack of support from the Coalition or the Greens makes more ambitious changes unlikely.

Burke hit back at One Nation’s policy, announced on Monday. Hanson wants to cut the number of temporary migrants in Australia by more than 750,000 over three years, and introduce hardline compliance measures. Experts including Abul Rizvi, a former deputy secretary of the immigration­ department, say Hanson’s deportation model would cost “many, many billions of dollars” and shut down aged care homes and construction sites around the country.

Burke warned dramatic cuts, including those proposed by the Coalition, would put medical services and nursing-home care at risk. Half of all doctors and construction workers in Australia today arrive with family members, to say nothing of the two-thirds of plasterers in Sydney and Melbourne who are foreign-born workers. The government will prioritise key industries on the skills list.

If Labor is successful in bringing down numbers and wresting back control of the debate, they might be able to show up the weakness of the Coalition’s position sooner rather than later. Albanese met with the opposition leader, Angus Taylor, at least twice in recent weeks, seeking bipartisan support for legislation that would cut the number of overseas arrivals further.

Perhaps unwilling to help Labor solve its own biggest political problem, no deal was reached and the talks broke down. But that means Taylor ends the week unwilling to help reduce Nom in any way, because, as he argues, Labor’s cuts don’t go far enough.

Taylor told 2GB on Friday the government had a “mass migration problem”, echoing the rhetoric of far-right social media debates. He says the opposition will agree to any proposal that is right for the country, yet sits on his hands without explaining how his plan to tie migration numbers to new housing developments would work. No wonder One Nation is running rings around the Liberals and Nationals.

Labor’s sales job at the end of the week was equally rough. The employment minister, Amanda Rishworth, repeatedly failed to say whether Labor had modelled the effects of its changes on wages or the broader economy, despite the government lashing Hanson and Taylor for failing to cost their plans properly.

Speaking on Radio National, Rishworth was asked eight times whether modelling had been completed during the months of policy work. Eight times she failed to give a direct answer.

Whoever wins the immigration debate likely has the best chance of winning the next election, due in early 2028.

But, as the former home affairs boss Michael Pezzullo points out, properly measuring the effectiveness of Labor’s changes will require a few quarters of Nom data. The results for the full 2026-27 financial year won’t be available until the end of 2027, ensuring the debate rages all the way to polling day.

As well as Burke’s careful and measured approach, Labor might need to show some political mongrel along the way.