With all the talk about Australia’s migration “issue”, there is one question that has remained noticeably absent.

What problem are we solving?

It’s not jobs. Right now, 63.9 per cent of adults have a job, which includes those retired and not looking for work. In December 2019, that number was 62.4 per cent, so we can’t claim the MAGA line of immigrants are “taking our jobs”.

It’s also not as though there has been a sudden solution to Australia’s skill shortages – in 2025, 29 per cent of occupations were considered to be in shortage, compared to 33 per cent in 2024. So there has been a slight drop but nothing that would cause this level of national attention.

Two minutes ago, migrants were being blamed for Australia’s unaffordable housing market, but now that there has been a slight drop suddenly that narrative has been dropped (by the way – that “drop” is just 0.3 per cent down in the past quarter. No matter what the headlines are telling you, the housing market in Australia has not seen any major returns to affordability, and is still up from where it was last year – by about 8 per cent – but that’s not the story critics of the federal budget changes want told). It’s no longer about house prices.

There has been a switch to a focus on rents, which is a more complicated story – one in which interest rates plays a major role. But that’s also because while the house price slowdown is welcomed by most punters not connected to a real estate group, rents are biting the government, and that’s something people will happily blame the tax changes for (despite that too, being bupkis – there are no reasons for landlords to increase rents as negative gearing has been grandfathered).

So what is the problem being tackled here?

No one can answer it. Not really. There are plenty of declarative statements being thrown around blaming migration for Australia’s falling living standards and real wages, but no actual proof. Certainly none where you can draw a straight line from migration to whatever issue migration is being blamed for.

It’s not the fault of migrants that successive state and federal governments have not kept up with infrastructure needs. It’s not the fault of migrants that neoliberalism has created a system where wages are suppressed but the price of goods keeps rising, even as company profits do.

It’s not the fault of migrants that Australia does not have a population plan and doesn’t even know how big it wants to be, or what population size it needs. It’s not the fault of migrants that Australia is still so heavily reliant on fossil fuels that an energy shock overseas has a detrimental impact on the domestic economy.

We have an ageing population. That’s only getting worse as the next few decades roll round.

How do we think we are getting through the next few decades without migration? From a purely economic position, what do we think removing 750,000 taxpayers from the country in a short period of time – as One Nation wants to do – is going to do to the budget?

None of these questions can be answered because there isn’t a substantive problem here. There is a political one. And today, when you watch Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke respond, you’ll be watching a government create a “solution” to an issue that’s just smoke and mirrors.

The current debate about migrants went mainstream when Nazis marched in the streets. Photo: AAP

Labor is doing this because of the political reality it needs to show control. And on what? An issue that became mainstream after Nazis marched the streets and made it one.

And despite the lack of actual substantive problems, the media started asking if maybe the Nazis and those who walked with them had a point. And One Nation jumped on that permission, which was then legitimised by the Coalition and now the government is creating policy. Because it’s been told it has left a “vacuum” that One Nation has filled.

But still, no one can actually answer the question. What, beyond a political narrative, largely inflated by a media narrative, and fed with misinformation, racism, lies and bad faith, is actually being solved here?

Australia has had a permanent temporary migration system since the Howard government changed the rules to allow people on bridging visas to apply for their next visa in Australia.

It was the Howard government, 30 years ago, that got the nation’s higher and tertiary education system addicted to international students, making education our third-largest export by the 2000s. Successive Coalition governments inflated the number of working holiday agreements, signing almost seven out of every 10 agreements Australia has.

Every time Australia needs something – cheap labour, economic gap fills, growth, population age balancing – it turns to migration. It’s the reason the Coalition brought in the post-study work visa after the Rudd years – to boost population growth.

Becoming a permanent resident or citizen is very difficult and expensive and nerve-wracking and you have to be prepared to be used as a temporary gap-filler for as long as we need you too. Until, of course, there is a political issue to solve. And then we’ll blame migration – so as not to blame the successive policy failures that have led to drops in living standards.

More than almost any other issue, the focus on migration shows One Nation represents nothing but consistency. It is the status quo, falling back on a divisive issue Australians have torn themselves in racist pretzels over since the end of the White Australia policy.

Burke’s announcement of Labor’s new policy today will not end this – it will only help drive it all the way to the election as the throup-o-lition continues to scream that it doesn’t go far enough.

But even it will stop short of any policy that removes the ability to exploit cheaper labour – which is why backpacker and PALM visas always get a carve out in this debate. All of which proves there is no actual issue to solve here. It’s just, depressingly, business as usual dressed up as “radical” change.