SPEECH - NATIONAL PRESS CLUB ADDRESS - THURSDAY, 16 OCTOBER 2025

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

NATIONAL PRESS CLUB ADDRESS

SUBJECTS: HOME AFFAIRS PORTFOLIO, ANTI-MONEY LAUNDERING COUNTER-TERRORISM FINANCING ACT AMENDMENTS, VISA CANCELLATION RULES, IMMIGRATION NUMBERS

THURSDAY, 16 OCTOBER 2025

TONY BURKE: Thank you very much, Tom, and join in acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we’re on and elders and ancestors.

I want to also, in thanking the National Press Club, acknowledge the leaders of the number of organisations that report to me who are here today, some of the most professional and impressive people I’ve worked with in my life: Stephanie Foster, the Secretary of the Department of Home Affairs; Mike Burgess, the Director-General of ASIO; Krissy Barrett, the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police; Heather Cook, the Director-General of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission; Brendan Moon, the Director of NEMA; and Gavan Reynolds, the Commissioner of Australian Border Force. They are just a few of the names, and could I also, in acknowledging them, acknowledge the more than 25,000 people who work to them in different ways, making sure every day that Australians are being looked after and working with all the sense of what you would want the term “Home Affairs” to mean.

I wanted to have a chance just to be able to explain a Labor approach to Home Affairs and to be able to give a bit of an insight as to how this portfolio is seen. A lot of the changes that were made after the last election have been seen very much in the context of, “Oh, is this a response to the Coalition? And I just want to get back to a first principles approach to Home Affairs and why we’ve structured things the way we have and then go through a little bit on national security as to how we’ve used that structure. And a little bit on the immigration part as to how we’re using that structure as well, as well as responding to some of the debate that’s been out there in the community of late.

So the concept of a Home Affairs portfolio is not new. It’s a federation portfolio. It’s not something owned by one side of politics or the other. It was established by Barton. It existed until 1932, when it was abolished by Lyons. It was not brought back for some time, but Home Affairs actually came back when Kevin Rudd became Prime Minister in 2007. And the abolition of the Home Affairs portfolio was done by Tony Abbott. It was then, in 2017, that it was brought back in an incarnation.

So the history of the Home Affairs portfolio is not owned by any side of politics, but the concept is very much in the name. It’s on the lid. You think of what you would want the principles to be at home, and that for me gives the mission of this portfolio. Just as people would want to be at home, people want to be in their country. They want to be able to be safe, to feel safe, to be welcomed and to feel at home. And those four principles govern everything that the portfolio seeks to do.

Now, to explain how the threat environment and the challenges to those principles has changed, I first take you to 1997. Steve Jobs gives a speech at Apple about convergence. Back then the phone was - the mobile phone was something quite exciting because it meant you could talk to somebody without having to carry a cable, and you could occasionally not have to remember every phone number that you dialled. But that was still the job of a phone. We had different things called cameras. We had photo albums. We had tape recorders and DVD players, and – not DVD players - VHS at that point. We had CD players. You had a series of different devices. We had encyclopedias, we even had something as, you know, what you used to go to for good news called a letterbox. And we were told that that was all going to start to converge.

The convergence that we’ve seen on our phone is similar to the convergence that we’ve seen in our threat environment. Some threats always overlap, so there’s always been an overlap, for example, between organised crime and the drug trade. But many areas of Home Affairs we used to look at and think about back in 1997 as not being overlaying or converging in any way. We would have largely separate conversations about terrorism, about foreign interference, about espionage, about child exploitation, people smuggling, human trafficking, cybercrime or money laundering. There might be occasional overlap, but you could have a sensible conversation on each one in isolation. That is no longer the threat environment in Australia.

The Dural caravan investigation involved overlaying work between the Australian Federal Police, ASIO, the NSW Police and the NSW Crime Commission. The Adass Israel Synagogue ultimately involved the intersection of a whole lot of principles that we had in general conversation, not seen overlaying with each other before – characteristics that we would previously associate with terrorism, with foreign interference, with community violence, with social cohesion and with organised crime. All of those converging and overlaying with each other.

Organisations facing international threats like Scattered Spider, see a merging of cyber with artificial intelligence, with child exploitation, with money laundering. The illegal tobacco trade involves cooperative work between Border Force, the Federal Police, the Criminal Intelligence Commission, AUSTRAC as well as our state enforcement authorities.

So, for each of the different challenges now, this concept of convergence, just as we saw with our phones, is what we have as a threat. So when we have a convergence of threats we need to have a convergence of protection. And there are four key elements that have characterised how we have now set up the Home Affairs portfolio.

The first – and this was done as soon as we came to office – was to bring cyber security squarely within the Home Affairs portfolio. Cyber security had had a history of moving around different parts of government, sometimes being in communications, moving in and out of Cabinet at different points in time. Cyber security and cyber attacks now intersect with almost every one of the examples that I have gone through, and it belongs in Home Affairs.

Secondly, the agencies which had been tested in different parts in different portfolios, have now moved back with a home in Home Affairs. So obviously the Australian Federal Police, ASIO, the Criminal Intelligence Commission, AUSTRAC and, by virtue of the Criminal Intelligence Commission coming in, the Institute of Criminology comes with that as well because of the way that they’re structured.

The third thing is keeping a total portfolio of national security and immigration within the same department. Now, doing that at the time that it happened was quite controversial because there is a legitimate argument that we need to make sure we don’t get to a point where we are constantly securitising all of the language about immigration and multiculturalism. That’s not good for social cohesion, and it’s not accurate about what we do. But it’s also true that while not everything in national security is about immigration and not everything in immigration is about national security, there is an overlap between the two, where there is a huge advantage in having them in the same portfolio.

And if you were to try to separate them, where would you put Border Force, which does both immigration compliance and does all the compliance of goods at the border and critical to interception of a whole lot of illegal products coming into Australia as well. So the logic of keeping that together was thought about and decided that there was an advantage in making sure that we were delivering what the Australian people want in that third element of keeping national security and immigration in the same portfolio.

And then the fourth thing was to say, “But how do we send a message of making sure that we are not securitising the conversation about immigration and multicultural affairs?” And for that reason we established the Office of Multicultural Affairs, which has been up and running now for a few months and gives a direct interface which makes sure that when we engage with communities throughout Australia we’re engaging quite clearly through a celebration of the value of modern Australia and respect for modern Australia rather than every conversation being questioned – “Is it within a security frame or is it not.”

So that effectively is what we’ve done with the portfolio. That’s an interesting structural conversation and important for me to explain. But the next question is, what do you do with it? Once you’ve got that architecture in front, how do you take advantage of it for the protection of Australians? How do you take advantage of it for the cohesion of the nation?

Now, I want to focus on one element that goes through almost all of the different threats that we deal with in the national security environment, and that’s the movement of money and money laundering. And there are two areas of money laundering on each of them, where having everything in the same portfolio has enabled me to make decisions that I’ll announce today, that go a long way towards resolving some of the weaknesses that are in the system right now.

Let me start by explaining what we have with crypto ATMs. Now, a whole lot of people will engage in cryptocurrency as an economic tool. A whole lot of people will engage with it in terms of different purchasing methods. It is a form of currency that is in the world now. Crypto ATMs are not everywhere. And Australia comes third in the world rankings of crypto ATMs. And we’ve got there pretty quickly. Six years ago, Australia had 23 of them; three years ago, Australia had 200 of them; now we have 2,000 of them. It’s grown, and grown rapidly.

And if you think about the normal purchase of crypto, if it’s done online through a bank account, that first transaction we have a direct line of traceability. But when it’s crypto being purchased with cash, while there is some identity work done to varying extents, the reality is our capacity to trace is much less than what it is with crypto being purchased on online through a bank account.

Now in 2024, AUSTRAC, their taskforce linked this to money laundering, to scams and fraud, to illicit substances and to child exploitation, with every one of those a link was found to the use of crypto ATMs. When they looked at the top users, the top users who are putting the most money into crypto ATMs, 85 per cent of the money going through for the top users involved scams or money mules. I’m not pretending for a minute that everybody who goes in and uses a crypto ATM is a problem, but proportionately, what’s happening is a significant problem in an area which is much harder for us to trace.

And the scale of this? We’re talking about 150,000 transactions a year. We’re talking about $275 million. And if you think about a normal ATM that we use, where people will go in, some people will make deposits, some people will take money out – it’s actually pretty hard to find a deposit machine these days – the crypto ones, 99 per cent of their transactions are deposits. 99 per cent.

A quick case study: a 77-year-old woman, widowed, downloaded a dating app and met a Belgian man online. Without ever physically meeting for eight months, they were what they would describe as dating. Once the relationship had been established, he then talked about how he’d been able to make a whole lot of money through crypto. And this woman, an Australian citizen, started turning up to different crypto ATMs depositing her cash. The first one, he was on the phone telling her exactly what to do, exactly what account to put it in. She would go to different ATMs to withdraw the cash, different places to withdraw the cash in quantities that didn’t alert anyone. And at one point, she said she was carrying $20,000 in cash around.

Because we don’t get the same alert at the deposit because of the nature of cash going into these machines, we did end up getting on to it - $430,000 later. You can only imagine the difference for that individual. But it’s also the case that when you think about the way these are being used, it is an easy point of entry for some of the worst elements in our country to be able to transfer cash into currency in a way that is harder for us to be able to find.

For that reason, I’m now having drafted legislation amending the Anti-Money Laundering Counter-Terrorism Financing Act to give AUSTRAC powers. I want AUSTRAC to have the power to restrict or, if it decides, prohibit high-risk products. And be with no doubt, crypto ATMs are a high-risk product.

The second example that I want to tell you about that I’m announcing today goes to mule accounts. Now if you’ve been near a university, particularly in a capital city, you’ll find signs all over the place – promising to make a heap of money, you  don’t have to do much, grab the phone number, and you do the tear offs. This has been raised with me by my security agencies and by the Australian Banking Association.

What increasingly has been happening has been overseas students in particular have been told, “Okay, you’re leaving the country soon. Before you leave give us your bank account details, we’ll give you a heap of money. You’ll be out of the country, we’ll use your bank account.” What then happens in terms of our organisations trying to track and trace is an account that has been completely legitimate for three years, for five years, sometimes for longer is now in the hands of organised crime. So instead of the different points where we know to be able to look for financial transactions, we have accounts that have never been previously used for these purposes, but have received international deposits because they’re overseas students, suddenly being used to fund some of the worst examples of organised crime.

The extent to which these mule accounts exist – in the last financial year, our banks had to close 22,000 mule accounts being used in this way. Overseas students need to be warned. Part of this is public messaging, which is why I wanted this speech to be at the National Press Club and this announcement to be here. We need the public messaging to get through to international students the fact that if you are offered to hand over your bank details, not only are you breaking the law in doing that but you are also creating a situation where you are probably providing a means for child exploitation, for drug trafficking, for some of the worst elements of organised crime. And getting that public message out to overseas students in particular is a really important part of the messaging. And I’ve written to the university peak bodies with that exact message to seek their help in being able to get this message out.

But public information is not the whole of the task. The banks want to help with this, but at the moment, the banks, if they think there’s something suspicious, don’t have access to the immigration data to work out if this account that’s behaving quite differently belongs to somebody who’s meant to have left the country. For that reason, I’m updating the visa entitlement verification online terms and conditions. Financial institutions will, as a result of this, will be able to get access to visa information if they believe that they’re dealing with a mule account to determine whether or not someone, in fact, is likely to have left Australia.

It's a simple passing of information, but with each of these, the combination of my policy role with Home Affairs in the first one, with respect to the crypto ATMs, having AUSTRAC within the portfolio makes that conversation seamless. In the same way as having the Home Affairs responsibility directly in the same department as the immigration responsibility allows us to look at this particular national security problem and be able to merge the two with a change to those regulations that I referred to.

All of this gives me more tools to try to deliver on the first two parts of those objectives – for people to be safe and to feel safe, but I also have the obligation for people to be welcomed and to feel at home.

A whole lot I said with respect to immigration earlier – a whole lot of immigration has absolutely nothing to do with national security. A whole lot of national security has nothing to do with immigration. But it is also the case that there is a crossover, often in visa cancellation.

I want to say something quickly about visa cancellation before I talk about the migration debate broadly. The first thing I’ll say is there are some things I do in visa cancellation that I think are utterly indifferent to what’s happened beforehand, but there’s a couple where it is different and I want to say something about them.

The first, when you’re given advice from national security agencies or intelligence agencies that a visa should be cancelled, I think I do the same as any minister would do, no matter which side of politics. In the history of this portfolio, when you trust your security and intelligence agencies and when they advise to cancel, you cancel. You always act on the side of caution. But I’ve also gone further, as has been reported recently, on some issues of criminal behaviour where the behaviour has either fallen short of full convictions or the convictions and jail penalties have fallen short of mandatory cancellation. And that’s in cases of family and domestic violence.

With the challenges in getting convictions up in this area, I do err on the side of caution. I do err on the side of caution. And the test for visa cancellation is a test of character, not necessarily a test of criminality. And for family and domestic violence cases, I have been willing to go further than where it has always gone previously in erring on the side of caution in making sure that the people who have had the courage to speak up about their treatment are in a stronger position to make sure that they are being kept safe.

The final one is the inciting of discord. Some of you would have seen written today a rare point of solid alliance between myself and Andrew Bolt over a visa cancellation with respect to Candace Owens. My view, as I’ve said before, is when someone applies for a visa, they are asking to be a guest in your country. If their purpose for coming is to start an argument and to incite discord, we don’t have to say yes. If someone knocks on the door to your home and the reason they are turning up is to disrupt everything, it’s up to you whether you let them in. And my approach is with all the challenges we have to social cohesion, I’m very proud for Australia to draw a line and say, “Yep, Australians have freedom of speech. But people who come here wanting to cause harm in different ways, people who come here wanting to disrupt, people who come and want to promote their own brand of bigotry, we don’t need to say yes.” We can refuse, we can cancel. And I have, and I’ll continue to do so. I think there is a strong case for the national interest of Australia being well served by Candace Owens being somewhere else, and she is not alone in that category.

But in the general debate that we’ve had about national security, we haven’t had in the political debate a lot of honest discussion. I am very conscious that an argument about immigration can be had in a civil way, can be had in a decent way, but it is impossible to have a civil and decent argument about immigration in a fact-free way.

Now, many people, many people have used the term over the years about dog whistling in debate. I’ll never forget the Laurie Oakes article some years ago – it would have been in the 90s in The Bulletin – where he referred to dog whistle politics and explained the capacity for something to be said that will be heard one way by everybody and will be heard differently by the exact people you were trying to reach.

I think it’s fair to say the days of dog whistle politics are well and truly over. When people want to play cards designed to divide people, everybody hears them. It’s no longer a dog whistle; it’s now a set of bagpipes that you can hear from the other side of the hill. People are on to it, and when individual communities are singled out, they hear exactly what’s being said.

Because I’m at the Press Club, I should mention I was amused when one publication -- when I called out my political opponents for being specific in their criticism and suspicion of people whose heritage was China, India or the Middle Eas -- that was written up by one publication as me playing the race card. Which I must say I had respect for the creativity of that particular argument. But our language matters. Our language really matters. And I am glad at least in the argument that seems to be happening within my political opponents that for some communities I had thought they were starting to move away from this, although I note in the last two days they appear to have re-embarked on that with respect to one.

The debate, though, about numbers also needs to be had honestly. First thing – after the pandemic, net overseas migration was always going to go up. Always going to go up. It was going to go up for two reasons: first of all, a whole lot of people who had been waiting to come here were all going to come at once. Student visas, for example, first-year, second-year, third-year students who’d left were all going to come in the same year. There was always going to be an increase in net overseas migration.

But also, everybody who was coming, overwhelmingly, some still had life left on their old visa. But a whole lot of people who were coming post-pandemic got a new visa, so the expiry dates were pushed out. So we had a situation where normally you get a natural overlap of expiry dates of a similar amount coming up each year, we had a series of years where that didn’t happen. Which obviously has a huge impact on a net figure.

That’s not to say that there weren’t areas that needed to be addressed. But if you want to have the conversation about net overseas migration, you do need to say where we need to address them. The government did exactly that, and we did that with respect to student visas for a very simple reason. International education, a really important industry for Australia, but one of the only industries in Australia – one of the only ones – where you need to provide a new home for every customer. That’s unusual. And so what had happened for some of our educational institutions was they were not pulling their weight in terms of student housing. They weren’t.

And so we’ve set up a system now where, as different institutions do more with respect to student housing, they will be able to get more students. But they can no longer feel that they can completely outsource that responsibility to the general housing market. That’s not a reasonable business model for international education.

That has had an impact on net overseas migration what we’ve done there, but that’s what you need to do. And if the Opposition want to say they need to get net overseas migration down faster than the 40 per cent drop that the government’s already done, there needs to be a discussion, not simply about what’s the total, but what’s the visa class. What’s the visa class where you’re going to do it?

A whole lot of focus on the permanent migration numbers actually doesn’t get you very far. A huge portion of the permanent migration numbers go to people who are already here, who move from temporary visas to permanent visas have no impact on net overseas migration. A lot of the ones who come from overseas are partner visas who have very little impact on housing because they’re partners – they’re not just in the same house; they’re in the same room. If you want to argue we need to go harder than what the government’s doing, you need to answer the question of where.

In terms of saying that we need to restore manufacturing, it’s a simple case – the story of Australian manufacturing and the story of labour, of workers on visas, has been the same story for the history of Australian manufacturing. In terms of other occupations, last year 21,000 visas for health care workers, 4,300 visas for teachers, 15,524 for construction. We’ve tripled the number of visas that we’re giving for construction.

If these are the areas where people want to cut, then they need to explain which hospitals they’re going to say don’t have to fill every shift. Which education providers won’t be teaching the full range of subjects anymore. Which construction projects they are willing to wait longer for, including housing projects, if we’re not going to have the labour we need to get them built. If they want to turn up for that argument, I am there. But to have the argument about total numbers, without saying where you want to cut, is spin without any substance at all. The simple question of where is something that my political opponents haven’t wanted to deal with, but there is no pathway of being an alternative party of government unless you have that conversation.

Finally, though, that concept of welcome and feeling at home. Everything I’ve gone through so far are things that are always in the public eye. In both national security and in immigration, a lot of the most special moments don’t hit the public eye. And I think they matter for social cohesion. I think they – the work that’s being done by  both the antisemitism and Islamophobia envoys, the extraordinary work that they’re both doing, it’s reflected in their reports, but it goes way beyond their reports as well, of their work with community, their work in social cohesion.

I just want to give three quick examples - and I’ll only give these as examples of some of the things that very quietly happen when you welcome people because they’ve each of them in their own way found their way into the public eye anyway. And I think they go a little way to what sort of country we are.

Rabbi Shlomo, the rabbi for the Adass Israel Synagogue. People decided that they – and we now know actors beginning in another country, in Iran – decided that they would send a loud message that you should not be welcomed and feel at home. As it happened, Rabbi Shlomo was waiting for his temporary visa to be renewed and was worried that it wasn’t going to be. Within a few days of that arson attack, I had a video call with him and his whole family – there’s a lot of them – and made them permanent residents and said to them, “Welcome home.”

A couple of weeks ago, there was a mother and daughter who came back to Australia, or came to Australia for the first time, meeting with family, some who’ve always been here, some who’ve come here more recently. That mother and daughter had spent 18 months hiding in a church in Gaza. Before I had the portfolio, just by chance, someone had handed me a phone, and I’d found myself having a video conversation with them while they were hiding. It’s the same church where you would have seen reports at the time of a woman having gone to the toilet and being shot by a sniper, a woman going to help her also being shot. That happened early in those 18 months, and they remained hiding there for those whole 18 months.

When I heard that they had now found their way out and were coming to Sydney, I knew that they had spent 18 months in fear of what might happen with respect to the war and the fighting from the Israeli Defence Force, and they’d spent about a decade before that living in fear of Hamas. They had no reason to know that there was a place where government would keep you safe. I was really pleased to be a minister in the sort of country where I could meet them at the airport and I could say, “You’re welcome here. You’re safe.”

And an HSC student who’d come from Ukraine, who’d been put on a temporary visa. When I first started meeting with Ukrainians, soon after I had the portfolio, she was about to do her HSC last year. And when I met with her and her mum, I said, “How do you think you’ll go?” Like is the case with a whole lot of people who come here on visas, she’s doing brilliantly at school, and it turns out particularly in maths and science. The Ukrainian students are largely blitzing it. But she said, “I don’t know,  even if I get the marks, whether I’ll be able to go to uni because I don’t have permanent residence, and even if I paid, my visa expires next year.” And I was able to say to her, “Well, let’s make you a permanent resident. Welcome home.”

Those small messages of welcome are messages that are given in a big public way at every citizenship ceremony. There’s a banner at the big ones that I do that says, “Welcome home.” My citizenship message, which is given at every citizenship ceremony throughout Australia, finishes with the words, “Welcome home”. We are a good country. Modern Australia and multicultural Australia are the same thing. Part of loving Australia, which I do, is loving who we are and who, as a nation, we have become. And I’m really proud, in one of the honours of my life, to lead a portfolio dedicated to all the things that Australians would want in their home – to be safe, to feel safe, to be welcomed, and to feel at home.

TOM CONNELL: Thank you, Minister. So, the ATM, crypto ATM ban seemingly coming from a place of saying, “Well, this is too hard to police, why have it?” We’ll see what AUSTRAC have to say about it, obviously. I wonder, thinking about that and applying it to illegal tobacco, so it’s very high cost of cigarettes – what, 50 bucks or so? I’m old enough to remember in high school, even the markup price was $5. Not that I bought any, of course!

TONY BURKE: Were they selling them individually?

TOM CONNELL: No, it was a packet. Mid-90s. Anyway, I digress. Have you thought about not just the policing approach, which is already being applied to this, but given how dire the outcomes are and smoking rates are not coming down, is that, the high price of it, too big a carrot for organised crime, and you might need to look at that as a government?

TONY BURKE: I start with this principle – and a lot of what I’ve talked about is what sort of country are we – I don’t want to be the sort of country that lets organised crime dictate our health policy. And I’m very, very conscious of that. The last meeting with the state police ministers, there was a sense of resolve. This, initially, I think most people saw what was happening with illegal tobacco as being a government revenue issue. I think that’s how the debate sort of started. Everybody now acknowledges we are talking about an organised crime issue. And I have met with small businesses and seen the challenges that they are facing, the behaviour of organised crime, and what it means is we need to throw everything at it.

What I’ve announced today, particularly with respect to crypto ATMs and the powers of AUSTRAC, are relevant to that. Any time you hit any part of the business model of organised crime, you hit everything connected to organised crime, and this is part of it. The additional $40 million we’ve provided to Australian Border Force is being used well, and the interception rate at the border is becoming more effective.

  Effectively, this cannot only be solved at the border; it needs to be dealt with in terms of policing. It needs to be dealt with in terms of the border. It needs to be dealt with pre-border work with different partner countries. It also needs to be dealt with where we find warehouses, making sure that we can seize and destroy and do so quickly. It also means for the financial model that these organisations are doing everything that we can do to disrupt makes this issue – makes this form of business less profitable. So, everything that we are doing – and there will be more announcements that will continue to come – is making a difference on this. But I would never want to see a situation where we decided that organised crime determined our health policy.

TOM CONNELL: All right. I’ve got follow-ups, but I’m going to set the example – just the one. Natassia Chrysanthos from the SMH and The Age.

NATASSIA CHRYSANTHOS: Thank you, Minister. Jumping on your invitation for an honest conversation about NOM, so you note that migration has dropped by 40 per cent, but it’s also true that the NOM that’s coming is consistently exceeded Treasury forecasts and Treasury has regularly revised up its forecasts for NOM. There were indications from your government around 2023 that it was aiming for pre-pandemic levels of NOM, but that hasn’t happened and some expert analysis suggests that it won’t. Given the many challenges in the workforce that Australia is facing – aged care being a very prescient example – can you outline what you think is the appropriate NOM level and the appropriate rate of population growth going forward for Australia, why that is, and how you plan to get there?

TONY BURKE: Okay, thank you very much. First of all, there is a limitation that will always be there on the predictability of net overseas migration. And that is because it is a combination of levers which are within the control of government and levers that are not controlled by government. The classic one that is not controlled by government is the behaviour of Australian citizens leaving and returning. At the moment, one of the drivers of net overseas migration is the weakness of some of the, the economy in some of the countries that Australians often go to work. I remember when I was Minister for Population back in – what was that – 2010. At that time there’d been a huge spike and a lot of it was driven by following the global financial crisis, a whole lot of Australians returned home. So, I think we need to be honest when you started, Natassia, with the question about predictions being wrong. There are parts of this which are not within the gift of government to be able to predict. There are parts of it which are completely within our control.

So, I start with this: the challenge in terms of total numbers, there is a real intersection at the moment that the community is deeply feeling by housing shortage. Deeply feeling by housing shortage. And we need to make sure that we are continuing just to curtail net overseas migration and to bring it down while we are improving housing supply. If we go too hard, we will, in fact, reduce our capacity to improve housing supply, or we will mean that farmers won’t be able to get working holiday workers and PALM workers, or we would have a situation where our aged care system went into collapse. So, there is an issue. For me, the big moving part is as housing comes online, that’s effectively a huge part of this.

The second thing that will be a driver of net overseas migration that will be a pressure upwards will be AUKUS. There are going to be really significant high-paying jobs that a lot of Australians will move to, and we will need to make sure that the jobs they are going to are still backfilled. Some of that might be done by Australians moving up a little bit, but I have no doubt there’s going to be some situations, particularly in South Australia and Western Australia, where AUKUS as a driver of employment is going to create new situations.

So, I won’t give you a magic number. I don’t think there is a magic number. NOM provides useful information as a guide, and its predictability will always be uncertain because of the behaviour of Australian citizens. It doesn’t mean you stop predicting it, but I think we need to be honest about the limitations there.

NATASSIA CHRYSANTHOS: What about like a general rate of population growth when it comes to migration?

TONY BURKE: Well, as I say, for me, the critical point there is how are we going with housing stock? That’s a critical point. If we’d got our housing legislation through two years earlier than we did last term, when both the Green Party and the Coalition blocked it in the Senate for all that time, it means we are already years behind on our housing policy, two years behind. Clare O’Neil is doing an incredible job getting things moving again, but I think the principle you start with is not a magic number; the principle you need to start with is making sure that our immigration system is tailored to the needs of the nation. That’s the principle. And there’ll be a few moving parts with that. Housing is an important one. Labour shortage and skills is an important one. We need to make sure, in tailoring it to the needs of the nation, we create a situation where we don’t put too much pressure on our infrastructure and housing, but we also want to make sure we don’t inadvertently cause other parts of the economy that Australians rely on to effectively collapse.

TOM CONNELL: David Speers from the ABC.

DAVID SPEERS: Thanks, Tom. Thanks, Minister, for your address. On the crypto ATMs, you’ve explained the dangers that they’re posing – scams, links to child exploitation as well. You’ve said you want to give AUSTRAC the power to prohibit them. Why don’t you ban them altogether? Why do we need crypto ATMs? Does the crypto industry really need these ATMs? What’s the reason for not just saying we’re going to ban them? And an adjacent question, if I can squeeze it in, Tom, both on that issue and the foreign student bank accounts, you’ve pointed to child exploitation. Where do you personally stand on mandatory minimum sentences for child exploitation?

TONY BURKE: Okay, first of all on the issue of the ban, with respect to the ban, I am trying to make sure that our national security legislation is not locked in time in a way that doesn’t – well, I’m trying to make sure that our security intelligence and law enforcement agencies all have the flexibility to deal with a really fast-moving, changing threat environment. So, for example, at the moment we’re talking crypto ATMs. I’m not sure what the next thing is going to be. And there will be times when AUSTRAC may decide for something that doesn’t quite fit that definition but is similar to -- do they want a ban or do they want to regulate? How do they want to deal with this? Are there ways of actually avoiding the problem [indistinct]. That’s why they’ll be able to have this power with respect to high-risk products. Crypto ATMs will be one of them, but I want them as, you know, one of our really significant agencies, AUSTRAC, to be able to look at the threat environment, look as the technology changes and be able to have rules that are fit to make sure that we’re doing what we need to do in terms of protecting national security without taking away what would otherwise be reasonable opportunities for some people who want to work in particular markets.

With respect to child protection, I’ll say two things: first of all, some of the most important child protection work that we do, I give full credit to Peter Dutton for. I’ve been to the centre in Brisbane. I’ve met with the workers there. It was probably one of the most – one of the more challenging days of work I’ve ever had, and I met people who put not just their professionalism and career but a whole lot of their personal emotion and strength on the line to be able to keep children safe. Their world is becoming much more difficult. A lot of us thought with artificial intelligence, that will mean they don’t have to look at every image. Legally for convictions, they still do. But what they’re looking at now, because of artificial intelligence, a whole lot of the images are AI-generated. If it’s an actual photo, there’s metadata within it. We used to be able to conduct rescues. Now, we still try to conduct rescues, but the challenge is our first question now is, is this actually a child? It’s still a criminal offence either way, but a whole lot of the help we were able to do in the past is challenged by new technologies.

So, I just go through all of that to say we are much better positioned to be able to deal with those issues because of the work that Peter Dutton did. I will never, never politicise child protection as a partisan point. I will actively praise the work that the other side of politics has done. I think Australians expect that we behave that way.

With respect to anything on penalties, there are some penalties that have only recently been established and recently increased with the support of the parliament. And I think that reflected well on the parliament. The issue of mandatory minimums always carries a simple question: Does going there mean we’ll get fewer convictions? Now, there are examples where the result of mandatory minimums appears to be that we’ve ended up with suspended sentences in other offences rather than getting prison terms where we thought that was what a mandatory minimum might do. If the judicial system thinks the mandatory minimum doesn’t match what they want to give, there’s some history as to how sometimes things unfold. I’m not saying they look at anything other than the law, but there’s – you know, we can look back at the success of parliaments on this. So, I think they’re the issues to weigh up. But I really believe of all the things that we should be able to have as a debate in a non-partisan way, I struggle to think of one more significant this.

TOM CONNELL: Katina Curtis.

KATINA CURTIS: Thanks, Minister. I just want to pick up on part of your answer to Natassia, where you mentioned that AUKUS will be one of the factors putting upward pressure on migration. The state Premiers this week, including Roger Cook from WA, but also Peter Malinauskas in South Australia and Jacinta Allan in Victoria, have talked about the cuts to the state-nominated visa places. And particularly in WA and South Australia, the state governments there are concerned about AUKUS and about getting tradies to build houses for the people who’ll come here because of AUKUS. This is, I think, the second or third year that Roger Cook has raised these concerns about the setting of places in this part of the visa system. Is it perhaps time to relook at those state-nominated places and how that system works?

TONY BURKE: Yeah, I’m having discussions with my department on exactly this at the moment. The first thing I’ll say with the Western Australian example – I think it’s not a bad one – where the number of applications they are able to put in has not historically been matching the number of visas they’ve, in fact, got. So, what’s being talked about as though it were a cut is not, in fact, a reduction from what the real-life experience had ended up being.

That said, the issue of making sure that we have a system that is fit for purpose, it is reasonable to describe there being quite a different employment market in each state. And AUKUS will accentuate that. The issues of AUKUS, I haven’t met with Premier Cook on it, but I have met with Premier Malinauskas, who’s raised exactly these concerns. So, the issue of should we be having a conversation about whether or not there’s a different way of doing this, I think that is the right conversation to have. But we’re early in that part of it.

TOM CONNELL: Karen Barlow from The Saturday Paper.

KAREN BARLOW: Thanks, Minister. You said that Candace Owens is not alone in being best outside Australia. And also, that Andrew Bolt is your new best friend. I’m wondering about –

TONY BURKE: It might have a time limit on it, but we’ll take it for today.

KAREN BARLOW: So, I’m wondering about the magnitude of the use of the incitement to discord. You’ve said that most of the cases are not publicised, you get only the high-profile ones out there. Is it in the tens, the hundreds, the thousands? And what is the test, the threshold, for using that, and are security agencies involved in this particular area of cancelling visas?

TONY BURKE: Okay. So first of all, the Migration Act is unchanged. So, this is a point where the Migration Act says if this is so, the minister may. Many ministers historically have chosen not to on the basis of freedom of speech. I have a particular view as to where we’re at right now with social cohesion. And so that same power, it’s not a new power, but it’s effectively a different point of being willing to use a power that was already there.

What I have done is I made the Candace Owens decision personally and said to the department – and, you know, the statement of reasons from memory went back and forth a few times in terms of making sure I was completely happy with the principles that were there – and I said to the department from my perspective that’s the sort of standard where I would go. Delegates – since then most decisions have been made by delegates, not by me.

The principle in terms of the agencies, there are separate national security parts of visa refusal where the agencies are directly involved. The incite discord provisions, if there’s information from the agencies, it’s always welcomed, but a lot of this comes – a key agency here is the Department of Home Affairs. I think that’s part of what you raised.

KAREN BARLOW: And the size of it. I mean, how many are being refused? Is this the fraying of society?

TONY BURKE: No, no, we’re not in the hundreds. We’re not in the hundreds. But I do take seriously the general principle that people applying – you know, even if I view them as bad actors, people make a visa application, and I generally don’t put their names in the public domain. With the exception of Kanye West, all the others that are in the public domain were put there by the applicant, not by me.

TOM CONNELL: Nicola Smith from the AFR.

NICOLA SMITH: Minister, thanks for your address. I wanted to ask first of all if you had read the AFR story today about Mary, a pensioner in her 80s who lost almost half a million in life savings to a sophisticated scam involving crypto ATM deposits? And will the new powers that you are introducing today do enough to protect people like Mary, who are often in their 60s and 70s? What more can you do to protect this growing cohort of people who are being deceived by very sophisticated and manipulative scams? Specifically on the AUSTRAC power to restrict or prohibit ATMs, crypto ATMs, what would be the threshold for action there if you’re not going to ban them outright? And what are you doing with overseas partners to prevent the origin of these scams, as many scammers are based overseas?

TONY BURKE: Okay, there’s a lot in that. First of all, have I read the article? Yes. And I changed the speech accordingly. I was going to talk about Mary in the speech – you beat me to it. I didn’t know her name, but I knew someone in their 80s and the exact description that you gave, so I reckon it was the same person. So, I then provided a different example today.

What I want to make clear is I don’t – because it would result subsequently in legal challenge – so I’m not going to announce what AUSTRAC will do with the power to be able to ban. But I’m giving them the power to be able to restrict or ban those devices. If they restricted them, would they restrict them in a way that would have helped Mary? Probably. If they ban them, would that have had an impact on Mary case? Certainly. So, I think the powers that are there give an exact power for AUSTRAC to be able to deal with cases exactly like the one which you published today.

In terms of overseas partners, there are some countries overseas that don’t have crypto ATMs already. They certainly exist, for example, in both the United States and Canada. I think, from memory, the United Kingdom doesn’t have them. Our decision, the capacity for AUSTRAC to make a call on it, will be given by legislation that I’ll introduce.

When you refer to the fact about what are we doing with overseas partners, because a lot of the actual scammers and sources of this are people overseas, that is a huge part of our work. Huge. And we do it with respect to pretty much every threat that we face in Australia. We have partners, countries that we cooperate with. Obviously, the Five Eyes are the most public of those relationships, and the relationship between myself and the four other ministers in the Five Eyes is really strong. We met in London earlier this year, and most of us were meeting for the first time, and it could not have gone better. I’m really confident about the Five Eyes relationship. But there are relationships beyond that with different countries where you deal with transnational crime on a transnational basis, and that’s what we’re doing.

TOM CONNELL: Next question, Andrew Probyn, Nine Network.

ANDREW PROBYN: Minister, Andrew Probyn, Nine Network. I want to ask you about the ransomware payment reporting regime which started in May, it’s been going for almost six months. And for those who don’t know it, it basically forces big companies to declare when they have been attacked with a ransomware cyber attack. How many have been reported since May? How many have been paid? And what’s the average size of the ransom?

TONY BURKE: I might have to give you a second question – I know that’s for you to decide – but if I can just tell you upfront, there are some briefs I’ve seen on this and I’m just not sure what I’m allowed to provide publicly. So, I always err on the side of caution, and I’ll tell you that upfront. The regime that we put in place is very successful. I’m very happy with it. But some of the best parts of this job I don’t get to answer, and so I’m just going to have to –

ANDREW PROBYN: And to be clear; like, I have actually –

TONY BURKE: It’s a reasonable question. But on something like this, I wasn’t expecting that one. I’m really pleased that we put the laws in place. We’ve been challenged a few times; would we have done better with a ban? And my view is if you do a ban, you then guarantee you’ll never know what’s happening. It’s in our interests for us to know what’s happening. Our advice remains to everybody, don’t pay a ransom. And it continues to be so. But the issue on where we’re up to in terms of the reporting regime, I just can’t give you an answer now.

ANDREW PROBYN: But when you say you’re happy with how it’s gone, does that mean that 80 per cent are not paying ransoms?

TONY BURKE: Nice try, Andrew.

ANDREW PROBYN: Just give us an idea, Minister. Come on.

TONY BURKE: No, no, no. I take – this is a serious job. This is a really serious job where I can weaken our agencies by giving information that they don’t want out, and I will always check with them. And Australians should be more confident knowing that’s exactly how I’ll behave.

TOM CONNELL: I think it’s been taken on notice. We’ll see if more comes out. Sara Tomevska from SBS.

SARA TOMEVSKA: Minister, thanks for your speech. My question is about skills recognition. You mentioned 21,000 health workers, 4,000 teachers, 15,000 construction workers have come to Australia in the last 12 months. How many of them are actually working in their sectors given 50 per cent of skilled migrants in this country end up working below their qualification level – it takes years to have qualifications recognised. So that’s one part of it. The second part is, what is the point of bringing people over to plug critical skills gaps if it takes so long that they’ll end up delivering food or, you know, driving Ubers?

TONY BURKE: So it depends which part of the immigration system you’re in. So, a whole lot of the skills program are sponsored visas. So, they’re sponsored visas where there’s already an employer who says, “I’m employing you with your qualification to do this particular work and this skill.” And the circumstances that you’ve described don’t exist for people in that situation.

The biggest part of the problem with skills recognition is actually with people who come through other parts of the system who have skills which are not recognised. This happens very strongly with the humanitarian program. It happens very strongly for students who might already have other qualifications before they come here not being recognised. But it can also be a problem in some areas of the non-sponsored skilled migration situation program.

Now, on this, we are working with – and there’s work being done between my department and Jobs and Skills Australia. I’ve had Julian Hill, the Assistant Minister, doing a lot of the back and forth on this as well. There are a few specific proposals that we are working through. Some of these came up in the roundtable. We, in the lead-up to the Treasurer’s roundtable we had some Home Affairs ones, and one of them dealt very squarely with this. There are some good ideas that we are working through as to whether they can go forward or not. There’s the concept of whether you establish an ombudsman sort of role within Jobs and Skills Australia. Not my portfolio anymore, but that sort of concept is something that’s been socialised and worked through.

We haven’t landed on it. This has been a wicked problem that no government has been able to solve in the lifetime of any of us. But it’s something that if we can unlock this, then everybody wins. The economy wins, and the immigrant who’s been given a promise of what it will be to work in Australia wins as well. Part of what has started to happen is even if it doesn’t go to the full level of recognition, because obviously the recognition authorities are largely state-based, often non-government authorities that make the final call on recognition of different skills. We’ve increasingly – and it’s not my portfolio – but the government increasingly has been making available programs where we can take the general skill that someone has and how can we slightly modify to be able to give people a higher-paying job and something closer to their skill set than driving an Uber, for example.

SARA TOMEVSKA: Is it worth trying to look at doing it while they’re still overseas and perhaps have, you know, community or family support so that once they get to Australia, they can actually just get a job?

TONY BURKE: Yeah, that’s something that – there’s conversations about exactly that, and I’ve had partner countries raise that with me as well. The challenge is to find which of the careers and skill sets you could train for that don’t require a practical. So the issue, wherever you get to the point of the practical involvement, it’s very hard to do that to the right skill set without it being done in Australia in a way that people would be confident approving. But, for example, for cert II level, which usually doesn’t involve the practical component, we may well be able to do offshore training that gets people to a higher level there. Now, none of that, you know, is at the point of announcement or any of that. But they’re the sorts of things that are being raised with us that we’re working our way through.

TOM CONNELL: Next question comes from Noah Yim from The Australian.

NOAH YIM: Hi, Minister. On the antisemitism envoy’s report, I think you’ve been sitting on that for about three months. What recommendations are you going to go ahead with, and what’s the delay in the response?

TONY BURKE: Thanks, Noah. First of all, we gave a response on the day it was released, which was to say that a whole lot of Jillian Segal’s report represented things that we were already doing. There were some things that we regarded as being closer to lower-hanging fruit, and there were also a lot of – and arguably much of the report says what the envoy will do, if you read the report. Now, obviously, all the recommendations that are what the envoy will do are things that the envoy is doing. A lot of that report was done in that form.

Can I say, though, you’ve given me an opportunity which I haven’t had for a while just to be able to say something about the work of Jillian Segal. Because whenever you step up in one of these roles when you’re dealing with hate speech, everybody who does this – and it’s similar for Aftab Malik – you are always in a situation where you’re suddenly getting scrutinised by both people who you would feel were your supporters and scrutinised by people who think hate speech is great.

So let me say this: I think the world of Jillian Segal and I support the work that she’s doing--

NOAH YIM: Minister, there were specific recommendations that she put forward –

TONY BURKE: I beg your pardon – no, no, no. I’ll be interrupted on many things, but I will not be interrupted where I'm talking about someone who has put herself out there publicly, and I'm getting the first chance I've had in a while to be able to say how much I support her work. And I will not be interrupted on that.

Jillian Segal is doing excellent work in promoting the fact that antisemitism is a deep evil. I look at the report that’s been – the Scanlon report over a number of years, and there are a series of communities that face challenges. For a long time most Australians would have thought that antisemitism was something that we didn’t face. But the number of people who have said for the first time they have experienced levels of hatred that they never thought they would see in this country is a disgrace. This report is a report about ongoing work. It is not a Senate inquiry; it is not something that you deal with in the normal way. Some of the challenges had particular proposals, for example, where it was, for example, on the funding of universities, the objective of that was never to defund universities or for the government to make an announcement about defunding universities; the objective of that was to make sure that we could do more to stamp out antisemitism at universities. That’s the approach that we are taking, which both the Prime Minister and I announced the day that Jillian Segal issued that report. We said that we supported it. We said how we would be dealing with the report. And I welcome the chance that you’ve given me with this question to be able to indicate my support for what Jillian Segal is doing.

NOAH YIM: I didn’t mean to interrupt you before, but if I could – there were specific proposals in –

TOM CONNELL: No.

NOAH YIM: There were specific proposals that do require federal leadership. I’m wondering if there’s any movement on that?

TONY BURKE: It’s your third go of one go. I’ve given you the response I wanted to give.

NOAH YIM: Thank you, Minister.

TOM CONNELL: Dana Daniel

DANA DANIEL: Thanks, Minister. A double-pronged one if that’s okay. Your political opponents say the decision to move AFP and ASIO back to Home Affairs was an admission that the government was wrong to dismantle the department. Could I get your response to that? And also, why do you think Home Affairs has a reputation in the public service as the worst department to work for, as shown by recent APS surveys?

TONY BURKE: Okay. First of all, if the worst the Opposition can say about the structure of the portfolio that I described is they wanted it to happen, good on them. Good on them. Very relaxed. The structure that we’ve got now, particularly with the involvement of cybersecurity, is a structure that has never existed before. Didn’t exist under them. Hasn’t existed before. I’m completely comfortable with the structure that we have, and I couldn’t be happier with the leadership that we have.

With respect to the surveys, I think what you’ve said would be true up until a couple of years ago. I don’t think it’s reflected in the latest survey. The latest survey I saw with respect to the Department of Home Affairs, the census data had Home Affairs actually moving from right down the bottom to towards the middle. And I have made a big effort, as I know Stephanie Foster as secretary has, to make sure that I’m spending a lot of time speaking to the staff, working with the people who work at Home Affairs and letting them know a couple of things, but none more important than the fact that it is a privilege to work with them. I know that we are running systems that are constantly being challenged. I know we are running a system also, where we have bad actors constantly wanting to break our systems. But they should be proud of the fact that those public servants are the absolute frontline of Australians being safe, feeling safe, being welcomed and feeling at home. And they should be proud of that.

TOM CONNELL: Ellen Ransley from Courier Mail.

ELLEN RANSLEY: Minister, thank you. There’s been a lot of talk the last couple of weeks about the return of the so-called ISIS brides. I know the government said that the only thing that they did to kind of help was provide, you know, passport assistance. But why wasn’t the government willing to say, really, at any time in the last couple of weeks that there had been that engagement? And given evidence before estimates last week we heard that we’re expecting more of this cohort to come back in the next couple of months, will the government be more upfront with the Australian people about what – how the government is being involved?

TONY BURKE: Okay. First of all, I don’t accept that public servants doing what they are legally obliged to do is assistance in any form. I just don’t accept that. When you’re under repatriation, you assist. When you go out of your way to help someone beyond the absolute bare minimum of legal entitlements, you’re helping, you’re supporting. But for public servants, where they have a legal obligation if there's an application to process it, I just don’t – I think it’s absolute spin from the Opposition – and I’m glad that you’ve put it to me – absolute spin from the Opposition to try to characterise that as somehow being assistance.

What it is, is exactly what they did from 2014 to 2017. But let’s remember, from 2014 and 2017, the people who were coming back under their watch included people who had gone there for the purpose of armed combat – to fight for ISIS. Now, there are times when Australian citizens go off to do absolutely horrific things. Australian citizens then return to Australia. When Australians come off their own bat, my whole priority is not the media management of it; my priority is the security management of it. We make sure that our security agencies, our intelligence agencies and our law enforcement agencies are ready. We make sure that we work with our state counterparts for whatever assistance is required. And we make sure that everything that is required for Australians to be safe is ready and is done.

If for some reason we think that there is a direct threat to Australians by someone coming back and we need to delay their arrival to make sure that we are ready, then we have legal powers to be able to delay. But we have those in a context where the legal threshold has not been met and there is no circumstance where – and I’ve interrogated this advice very carefully personally – we have not yet had a circumstance where the recommendation is that we’ve met the legal thresholds to take legal action to delay an Australian citizen returning to Australia.

Can I say in terms of threat profile, the people who – there are a number of people around the world who are Australian citizens who are on our radar. If any of them at any point come back to Australia our priority is safety. Sometimes safety and publicity do not run hand in hand. And my priority will always be safety.

TOM CONNELL: I think we’re going to squeeze in Cameron Reddin from Sky News.

CAMERON REDDIN: Minister, thank you very much, Cameron Reddin from Sky News. You’d be aware of the call from Pauline Hanson to send all Gazan refugees currently in Australia back. You might wish to respond to that. But on the broader issue, the most recent numbers we have are from the end of last year. So I’m wondering if you could update us – how many Gazan refugees are currently in Australia, how many more applications are waiting processing, and also whether, since you mentioned it in your speech, you intend to appear or visit more of those arriving as they come to the airports, as you did in one example.

TONY BURKE: Just on the last, I think you’ve misrepresented what I said. There’s not a – there is nobody else who I had had a video conversation with before I had the portfolio, had watched get thinner and thinner in different photographs that people had sent me and thought it would be a really decent thing for me to go out at night and just stand there and say, “You’re welcome and you’re safe.”

CAMERON REDDIN: That was a special case, that one, for you?

TONY BURKE: That’s why I described it that way, yeah. And I’m really proud that I was there. And I think as a nation in my role as a minister in representing Australia’s immigration system, I do think it was a decent thing to do. And for those individuals, you know, it’s not just what they’ve done in 18 months hiding in a church. Like, the years before where they felt under threat from Hamas, they’d been through hell. They’ve got family here. And right now, for the first time in living memory, for that mother and daughter, they’re safe. We’re a good country. They’d been checked repeatedly, as all those individuals had by ASIO. They’d been checked against the movement alert list. We’d made a decision that they had family in Australia. Australian citizens desperate for their safety. And I wonder why it is that I haven’t been asked the question about returning for any of the Israelis, who I’ve also provided visas for.

CAMERON REDDIN: And just on those numbers, do you have an update?

TONY BURKE: No. In terms of the numbers, the number I can give you is how many we have who are in Gaza who are on our case load. And I made sure I had this because there’s been – there was a bizarre allegation that somehow, we’d been involved in resettlement of people who’d been in prison. There are resettlement countries; Australia is not one of them. The people who we have on our caseload, there’s roughly 600 to 700 of them who are in – well, roughly 600 to 700 of them on our caseload. Sometimes we have people on our caseload where we don’t know if they’re still alive. But we’ve got roughly 600 to 700 on our caseload. And for those individuals the – and they’ve had all the checks that I just described – effectively they would have been here some time ago, but they haven’t been able to get out. Some of them may well start coming.

It’s also true if the peace is successful, as happens with any conflict, some people might decide they don’t want to leave after all. And that happens with any conflict. The concept from Senator Hanson which you put to me, whenever we have taken people on a humanitarian basis and the humanitarian need has gone away, some people have completely found a home in Australia, they are valued members of our community and they decide to stay. Some people, the moment they know it’s safe in the place that all their memory and parents and grandparents live, they want to go back. And they do.

And that has been the story of Australia, you know. There’s no longer a potato famine – I got to say. You know, this is how Australia has always been. Some people return. Some people return home, some people will. Occasionally, someone, while they’re still at visa status, behaves badly, and they get their visa cancelled and they get told to leave. But usually what happens in Australia is people come for the right reasons, and we are enriched by them, and we should have the courage to celebrate that.

TOM CONNELL: As the peace process does roll out, is it incumbent on surrounding Arab nations to resettle Gazans if they wish to go down that path, not through forced displacement but for them to step up more, some of those neighbouring nations, do you think?

TONY BURKE: My understanding is there are countries that are operating as partners with resettlement, but it’s for them to put themselves forward. I’m certainly not going to start making announcements as to what other countries should do when clearly Australia has not been willing to do that.

TOM CONNELL: And just on the processes, the Opposition has been sort of questioning things around security. Do you feel confident? Would you say there’s a guarantee that no Hamas operatives have been able to get into Australia by this process or will be able to?

TONY BURKE: What I can say is there has never been that I’m aware of a group that has been so heavily scrutinised. Let’s not forget, for the ones that are already here, they didn’t just go through our own checks. If they went through the Rafah crossing they also – the Rafah crossing is controlled by Israel and Egypt. So, you’ve got a cumulative impact of the number of checks that have happened with respect to these individuals. So the quality of the information that we have is used. We take our responsibilities seriously. And where somebody has applied and we’re not sure, I don’t issue a visa. I don’t wait for – I don’t say, “Oh, if it’s not a no, I’ll just go ahead.” If we’re not sure, if we’re cautious, I always err on the side of caution. But I am disappointed that some of the debate is seeing us put a standard on the most heavily scrutinised people that we don’t put on people from any other part of the world.

TOM CONNELL: Well, we appreciate your time today. You’ve been generous with us. I’m going to be keeping a close eye on the Manuka Bitcoin ATM and see what pops up and what it holds. But here’s a membership for the club with our thanks as well. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, please thank the minister.

ENDS