Coalition Proposes Major Migration Cuts, Raising Concerns Over Service Availability

Nationals leader Matt Canavan has warned that Australians could face longer waits for services such as Uber under a future Coalition government, as the opposition unveils plans for sweeping cuts to migration. Canavan defended the Coalition's newly announced migration policy on Tuesday, acknowledging that reducing the number of temporary visa holders would affect parts of the gig economy.

"Of course, this large temporary visa population are also doing a lot of work in our gig economy," Canavan said. "I know people get a benefit from having their Uber easily accessible, but that benefit is not outweighed by the pressure we're seeing on our housing stock, on our infrastructure, on our hospitals and schools."

The proposed policy aims to cut net overseas migration to 100,000 for the first two years and reduce the number of temporary visa holders by approximately 650,000 over four years. The plan also includes abolishing temporary graduate visas, reducing international student numbers, and requiring most applicants seeking a second temporary visa to apply from offshore.

The Coalition would maintain the permanent skilled migration program at 185,000 places annually while expanding pathways for highly skilled workers and introducing a new skilled project visa stream. Canavan argued that Australians would need to accept some trade-offs if migration levels are reduced.

"We have to balance the number of people coming to this country to actually maintain living standards in this country, and that's not happening under this Labor government," he stated. The Queensland senator characterized the plan as an effort to reverse what he called Labor's "experiment of mass migration."

"We've seen an extraordinary explosion in the temporary visa population of this country, from about two million before COVID to three million today," Canavan said. "Our cuts today, which will be the biggest planned cut to migration in Australia's history, will go back down towards those levels we had just before COVID."

Canavan contended that Australia experienced stronger economic outcomes before the surge in migration post-pandemic. "Before COVID, we had a stronger economy than we have now," he said. "We had higher productivity growth and we had actual real wage growth. Ever since Labor has been running this experiment of mass migration, we've actually had declining productivity levels and declining real wages."

He also argued that a larger pool of temporary migrant workers had suppressed Australian wages. "In my view, a cheaper foreign labour force, a temporary labour force, has been allowed to undermine and undercut the wages of Australians."

When questioned about potential labor shortages in sectors like aged care and healthcare, Canavan stated that the Coalition had protected key industries. "We'll be going back to a temporary visa population level similar to what we had before COVID, and we did those jobs then and we'll do them again," he said. "While we're ending temporary graduate visas, we'll give people in the transition the opportunity to apply for visas that are in key areas like health and education to make sure that we have skills in those fields."

Canavan also defended the plan to require some visa applicants to leave Australia before seeking another visa, asserting that the current system had led to a sharp increase in bridging visas. "I was gobsmacked that when Tony Burke addressed the Press Club a couple of weeks ago, there was no plan to deal with that massive increase in bridging visas under their watch. We do have a plan for that because this is not how the system was designed and it's not how it's meant to be working, so let's fix it."