Migration law changes coming but what will they say about our country

The Australian Government is due to sign off on some migration law changes in the next few days, according to assistant immigration minister Matt Thistlewaite. He told News24

we want to make sure that we meet the commitments that we've made in the Budget regarding net overseas migration and permanent migration to Australia. So, we've made some changes to student visas, to the processing and the priority given to skilled visas and family visas and they've been able to reduce net overseas migration. But we need to go further if we're going to meet those…

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke was booked at the National Press Club on 6 August and then he cancelled. His office said details were not finalised. Cabinet had considered the package more than once.

What has been reported about the possible changes:

• Work rights removed from people applying for protection once their claim has been refused at first instance.

• Appeal rights will be narrowed.

• Caps on backpacker extensions applied.

• A bar on people applying for family visas while they are in the country as visitors, which in practice means partners or children heading back offshore, for years, until a decision arrives.

The stated purpose is to meet a forecast — net overseas migration down from around 300,000 to 225,000 by 2028. This is a number the government set for itself in a budget.

I want to be precise about what troubles me here, because it is not the number. I don’t know enough about the numbers to comment on them, or the maths behind them. I am concerned with the human rights trade offs that seem to be ignored by those doing the maths.

In May, the Migrant Justice Institute published the largest survey of migrant working conditions ever conducted in this country. It contained nearly 10,000 responses in multiple languages, and was funded under the Commonwealth's own modern slavery action plan. It found

• Two-thirds of temporary visa holders were paid less than they were legally owed.

• A quarter were short-changed by at least ten dollars an hour.

• Among the underpaid, the overwhelming majority told nobody.

The report speaks about the problem of sham ABN arrangements and cash payments.

Australia's Anti-Slavery Commissioner, Chris Evans, said the system produces vulnerability at scale and lets willing employers exploit it.

We can’t avoid facts— a worker whose lawful status depends on an employer's goodwill is not in a bargaining relationship. A worker with no lawful right to earn is not protected by the Fair Work Act in any sense. Every anti-exploitation dollar we spend downstream is spent trying to correct an incentive we created upstream.

Which is why removing work rights from tens of thousands of people is a serious human rights problem. More than 160 organisations including Anglicare, the Human Rights Law Centre, Multicultural Australia among them — wrote to the Prime Minister this month to say so. Most people seeking asylum cannot access Centrelink. If we remove lawful work, we push them off the record and directly into exploitation.

We know this because other countries have done this. The United States has a workforce of several million people who cannot report a crime committed against them without risking their own removal.

The right to their family question is not sentimental; it is about recognising that immigrant labour is human labour and we cannot make inhumane demands on people that treat them as non-human resources to endlessly extract from.

The Department's own estimate for a new Contributory Parent application is fifteen years. For a Parent or Aged Parent visa, thirty-three.

If we layer the new reported proposal on top of this, we see an increasingly cruel and extractive system: If we bar people from applying onshore as visitors, then the onshore priority you have just created becomes unreachable for exactly the families it would have helped. A partner who is here goes home to wait. A child grows up on a video call with them.

Chris Bowen, a former immigration minister, pushed back publicly, calling family reunion very important. He is right.

Look at the PALM scheme if you want that type of extractive policy in its purest form. Around 32,000 workers from nine Pacific nations and Timor-Leste, mostly in horticulture and meat processing, tied to a single approved employer. Modern slavery risks have been flagged in it, including by the NSW Anti-Slavery Commissioner. Since 2024 there has been a family accompaniment pilot. It is capped at 200 workers, drawn from five of the ten participating countries, and a worker cannot apply unless their employer agrees . Two hundred out of thirty-two thousand.

The Migrant Justice Centre wants the Government to make the Workplace Justice visa permanent, and widen it. Introduced in 2024, it lets an exploited worker stay six to twelve months to pursue a claim, and it protects them from cancellation where the breach was their employer's doing. It also tripled the window, from 60 days to 180, in which a worker leaving an exploitative employer can find new sponsorship. Its introduction was a positive step but it is also a pilot, narrowly drawn, and unevenly available across the states. Who can certify a claim needs to be expanded.

Employers shouldn’t be able to sponsor a migrant worker if they have a bad compliance history, and implementing that idea is possible by integrating data from the Fair Work Ombudsman, the ATO and the courts.

We should also untie PALM workers from single employers, regulate labour hire nationally, and give them Medicare.

None of these ideas are in the reported package.

When Burke’s speech is finally delivered, there will be a lot of talk about control, integrity, and the social licence for migration.

The test we need to ask is does the package treat the people already here as subjects of the law, or as a variable in it?

If the only instruments are removal of rights — to work, to appeal, to have your family beside you — then the government has chosen the cheapest and meanest available lever and hoped no one would examine where the burden lands.

It will land, as it always does, on people who cannot afford a lawyer, in industries where no one is watching, in houses where a wage is under and nobody says anything.

We have done this before, to other people, and we have apologised for it afterwards. What do all these policies say about our attitude? We either treat people as human or we don’t.

If we can’t afford the family reunion, then perhaps we should be rethinking the “extraction” part and shaping our policy accordingly.

Note: Use of AI to locate sources which were manually verified.