TRANSCRIPT - SUNDAY AGENDA - SUNDAY 11, OCTOBER 2026
SUBJECTS: Immigration, Counter terrorism, Multicultural and security grants, Bondi Royal Commission, Tax on trusts, Fuel
ANDREW CLENNELL: Joining me live now is the Home Affairs and Immigration Minister, Tony Burke. Thanks so much for joining me, Tony Burke. And you join me following the opposition attempting to one up you this week with their net migration policy, saying they can achieve a net migration target of 100,000 in their first two years in office. What do you make of that promise?
MINISTER FOR HOME AFFAIRS TONY BURKE: Well, you might be able to achieve those numbers, but in terms of something that works for the Australian people, it would be a disaster. But you look at what they've actually done and effectively they've declared war on the skilled migrants who Australians need. Australia absolutely has shortages in aged care, in health, with doctors, with nurses, in construction, and effectively, the way they've designed it, those skilled workers are exactly the people who we would now not get. What they've done - just to give you the specifics - is said, okay, you get the best possible person - which would be someone who's actually trained in Australia, so they're trained to exactly our standards say in nursing. And instead of having a graduate visa where they can then find a job in Australia and start working straight away, Angus Taylor says, ‘oh no, they'll have to go back offshore’. Do we really think we'll get them back? The actions that they're taking mean that you'll get fewer aged care workers, you'll get fewer nurses, fewer doctors, fewer construction workers. How on earth that's meant to help Australia, I don't know. The total numbers do need to come down and we've been bringing them down. They're already 45 per cent below the peak. They're continuing to come down. But if you don't do this in a sensible, managed way, if you just take the sledgehammer to skilled migration, the people who suffer are every Australian who needs services and in particular people who need homes built.
CLENNELL: Are you hopeful the opposition will be prepared now to pass some of the legislation you want, like around an expression of interest system for those seeking student visas and in an attempt to get rid of asylum seekers quicker. Will you talk to them about this this week?
BURKE: Look, the door has remained open. They're the ones who told us it was off. But the door remains open. The reality is the more levers you've got, the more effectively you can target so that you're doing everything in the best possible way for the Australian economy. The two examples you gave, you just look at it logically. An expression of interest framework means that you no longer have the entire system basically being demand driven and you get a whole lot of extra controls for government that allows you to target for the economy. The other one you referred to, I don't for the life of me see how it's reasonable that someone- You know, we've got an asylum system for someone where you genuinely are here in Australia and to go home would be incredibly dangerous for you. That's exactly what we did, for example, with the Iranian women's football team, where we made an offer of that nature. That's what you've got a system there for. But why on earth someone who's been visa hopping from the UK can at the end find out they've got no valid visa, then put in a protection claim and get to stay here going through the appeals system for another nine years, I just think it's ridiculous and we can't fix that without legislation. It's not massive, overwhelming numbers, but it's just wrong and it's something that we should legislate to be able to fix. But I've had no indication from the opposition that they're back at the table.
CLENNELL: I want to play you something now. Your predecessor in the portfolio, Claire O'Neil, said about the immigration system in 2024. She made similar comments in 2023.
CLAIRE O'NEIL: We have come to office with the migration system in a categorical mess. Don't take it from me. Take it with the numerous eminent Australians who have looked at this system and said that because of 10 years of wilful neglect, we have a migration system which Dr. Martin Parkinson said was fundamentally broken. Now we are attempting to pursue the national interest, to protect the community and to give our government legislative powers that we need to help manage this system.
CLENNELL: It's a mess, she says. Why haven't you fixed it, then? You've been in power four years, Tony Burke. Why hasn't your government fixed it?
BURKE: There's a series of issues we've had to deal with, as you'd know. Last term we had the High Court decision where we suddenly had a whole series of people who'd been in detention with criminal offences who we weren't able to deport back to their host country and the High Court insists they had to be out in the community. When I came into the job, I put absolutely everything into making sure we had a way of dealing with that. We ended up with a new arrangement with Nauru, or now they call themselves Naoero. It's a tough arrangement, but I took the view that absolutely everything when I first came into the job should be about community safety and I don't resile from that. One of the things that Clare O' Neill refers to in that, though, goes to changes that happened in 2015 under the previous government, where basically their compliance division was gutted. What that meant was people would get right to the end, would be told they're not allowed to stay in Australia and some people just wouldn't go. We were no longer bringing people in and cycling them through the detention system to get them to voluntarily depart. We've started that again now, that's part of the announcement. Once again, the simplicity of immigration is meant to be you're deciding who arrives, who stays and who leaves. There are a series of decisions that were made under the previous government which have been complex because we had to deal with everything at once. It's like a colander, if you only plug a few of the holes, all the water still runs through. So, you had to work through to have something completely comprehensive. We're still shy of that because of what you mentioned with the legislation, but we're pretty close and effectively, it means we're now able to manage the system much more effectively than what was handed to us.
CLENNELL: What was Claire O' Neil doing?
BURKE: Well, the issues that I've referred to were issues that started back then. We had a series of decisions from the High Court which created a genuine issue of community safety, and we had to act on that. There's a whole lot that comes to the integrity of the immigration system, but you put community safety at the absolute front line.
CLENNELL: Let me put this another way, Tony Burke. There are still 400,000 people in this country on bridging visas. Now, you haven't been the Minister since 2022, but you guys have been in government since 2022. In 2022, when Labor was elected, there were 330,000 people in Australia on bridging visas. So, it's grown. There was an opportunity to address this then. Why has it grown? What have you been doing for four years about this.
BURKE: Well remember, the date you're referring to is the end of COVID. So, you go back to 2019 and you had the scaling up that we've seen was happening back then as well in terms of bridging visas.
The big change that we've made that I announced at the press club a few weeks ago now is the ‘no further stay’ on visitor visas. One of the things that's been happening with bridging visas, if you're a visitor in Australia, say you tell us you're coming as a tourist and then the moment, you're here onshore, you then put in the family claim you've been automatically transferred to a bridging visa. Now, you will end up successfully getting a permanent spot. But everybody else who applies in the proper way without pretending they were coming as a tourist has to wait offshore. The ‘no further stay’ rule takes those bridging visas out of the equation.
Similarly, some of the people on bridging visas have been the other problem that I referred to. Dated back to 2015, where the department, when they want someone to leave, gives them a bridging visa so that we know where they are, so that they're lawful at the time, but with an expectation - usually a bridging visa E - that they're expected to leave the country. What then happens, though, if you don't run the compliance is at the end of that bridging visa, they apply for the next, and they apply for the next. Because you didn't have the process happening of people being cycled through the detention network when they've overstayed and the difference isn't just the people you detain. This is not some big people turning up, doing raids every night or anything like that, like we've seen in some other countries. It's just the ordinary work of immigration that used to be done up until 2015 and it had stopped. That work has started again. But the big change I was going to say that you get from that isn't only the person who you detain who then leaves, you get a behavioural change, because people realise pretty quickly if they don't leave, then the detention network is now being used for overstayers as well, not only for people who have broken the law, but also for overstays. You get something like, historically, for every person you detain, more than six people voluntarily depart and that makes a real difference.
CLENNELL. So, you're going to start locking more people up. That's the bottom line, yeah.
BURKE: Oh, that process with the department and that work is already happening.
CLENNELL: Why didn't it happen four years ago?
BURKE: Look, I've given the answer three times in terms of the priorities that we had on community safety. I don't apologise for that. The detention centre network, we've been making sure that we put as many resources as possible into people who should not be on the streets, getting them off the streets. The thing that's happened with the arrangement that we established with Naoero isn't only measured by the people who have now gone there and are now out of Australia. But it's also measured by the fact that the moment Naoero issued their visa, we’re able to detain the person straight away. So, as those visas have been issued, people who were previously in detention, prior to those High Court decisions, had a period out in the community, have now found themselves back in detention again. People will say, oh, that's tough, but I don't shy away for one minute.
CLENNELL: The coalition claims it can get rid of the 400,000 people on bridging visas if elected. How doable is that? Over four years, they reckon they can do it.
BURKE: You need a lot of voluntary departures. We've stopped the significant inflow that was coming off visitor visas, which was the main pathway that was leading to those bridging visas. We've stopped that with the no further stay condition. But if the coalition is saying they're going to massively ramp up beyond what we're doing in terms of the detention capacity in Australia, then they need to let us know how many beds, how many compliance officers and where the new detention centres are going. Because those sorts of numbers that they're talking about, we are talking billions and billions of dollars, I suspect. It's a part of their plan that they haven't explained. I use the word plan lightly. There's a whole lot of gaps around the place.
I can see what they're doing. They would know full well that what they've announced doesn't work. But they're playing a political game of trying to chase One Nation. I think every Australian knows what they're doing. But it's also true that there's areas like what you just raised which are only possible with a massive increase in compliance numbers, where last time they were in office they cut them with a massive increase in detention capacity. This is really expensive stuff. They haven't said how they'll do that. But the thing that we do know is the impact of their policies, we'll have fewer skilled workers. Go to a regional hospital in Dubbo, go to an aged care centre in the regions and see what the impact is of visas currently filling essential skills. That's all under attack under those proposals.
One Nation - who you won't get to question today from what you said in the intro - but they’ll have a similar impact because they're pretending we'll get the same number of skilled workers, but saying they won't be allowed to bring their family members anymore, well the doctor who's considering coming to Australia, if Australia won't let them have their partner with them, they'll go to a different country. That's what will happen and it’ll be felt in the cities as well. But the real sharp end will be in the regions where the skilled workforce will be smashed under either of those proposals.
CLENNELL. So, you've had to say you're curtailing migration. The Opposition's going even further. The One Nation's going even further than that. Do you admit that the Labor government set the conditions for where we're currently at in this debate when you allowed more than 500,000 people in the country in terms of net migration, and even if you blame the coalition government for that 2022 - 23 year with you said it's their settings or whatever, that's been your line. Another 446,000 positive net migration. They were allowed here in 23-24. So, do you concede now that this was a mistake, the way the Labor government handled the immigration program at this time?
BURKE: A few things. First of all, I can understand why decisions were made at the time we were out of COVID, there were skills shortages everywhere, massive public pressure from business. Don't forget, at that point, even Peter Dutton was calling for us to let more people in. So, let's not forget where we were at at that point in time. But what then happened, because the system traditionally has always run as if an employer needs someone, you just let employers get whoever they need. That's the way the whole thing's been run for a long time in a demand driven program. What we came up against was the clarity that we now didn't have the housing supply that we needed for the number of people. Not simply because the number of people arriving, but we weren't getting the departures. So, previously for the same number of people arriving, you’d get people who were at the end of their visa and were departing. But because we'd had COVID, none of those people were at the end of their visa anymore because people had been told to leave during COVID and largely, they had. So, I can understand exactly why those decisions were made and I can see what was going on. What we look at now, though, is a situation where for housing and infrastructure, we need to get some breathing space, in part because of the fact that people are now living, fewer people per household. So, that's largely what's driven it. But when you look-
CLENNELL: Was it a mistake, though, Tony, that's my question. Was it a mistake? Can you concede, even if it's with the wisdom of hindsight now, that that was a mistake?
BURKE: I think it's disingenuous for me to do the wisdom of hindsight thing when back then everybody was looking at the needs of the economy and we can't live the counter life. What we know is, housing hasn't been able to keep pace, we need to give some breathing space and that's what we're now doing. But if you go too hard, you smash the economy. In particular, you smash the health sector, you smash construction. Also, while a whole lot has been said with respect to areas like agriculture with backpackers, don't forget the extent to which agriculture is relied on, as a skilled workforce as well. And they're the exact people who are less likely to be here working in Australia under either of the two proposals that are put forward by the other parties.
CLENNELL: Why are you so confident your plan can reduce net migration to 225,000? Because you haven't been able to meet your targets so far, this government.
BURKE: Up until now, they were viewed as forecasts, not as targets, so, let's not forget that. We've now accepted and this is the first time for anyone who's held my portfolio in history, that the budget projections are now expected to be delivered. That is a shift in the Australian debate. So, looking back and to say, ‘oh, we hadn't met targets’, they weren't actually targets, they were forecasts. But if you look at the most recent figures, the last budget update, I think had the order of 290, and we're coming in on the latest tracking at around 285,286. So, we are now finding ourselves closer to those numbers. What I want to make sure is we get as near as possible but do so in a way that best serves the Australian economy. Because it's not just the numbers, it's also making sure you get the skills you need. No one would thank any government of Australia, whether they were adopting our policies, the Liberal policies or the One Nation policies if the impact was you got the numbers, but you got the wrong people and suddenly hospitals are closing and construction projects can't happen. That's why I say that is the impact, not just because the Coalition and One Nation have gone harder in their numbers, but also they've got policies that specifically directly reduce the number of skilled workers who we rely on.
CLENNELL: Do we - just to change topic here, Tony Burke, do we have a problem with a serious problem, widespread problem with Islamic radicalism in this country? I see a report overseas the alleged fly Dubai terrorists became radicalised in Melbourne.
BURKE: Well, a couple of things on the public comments I saw that were given from I think it was the Minister in the UAE. It was while he was in Melbourne, but it was also online that the material was coming and this is where we need to deal with both. We need to deal with those specific networks whether it be ISIS inspired or any of those horrific groups, where those networks still exist and our intelligence and security agencies are constantly monitoring, breaking up, intercepting in that work, because that is, that is a very real problem and remains so. We have to make sure that we've got tough powers, we've now got the toughest powers we've had and I've been using them to be able to scan and assess whether someone has a history of being a problem before we give them a visa. We've been cancelling visas when people are here and we've been stopping people from coming here in the first place. But the third thing we have to do, and so this is in addition to the two that I've just gone through. The third thing that we have to do is not only look at who comes over the border, but look at what comes over the browser. This is why the Counter Terrorism Online Centre that we announced some months ago now is so important - it was funded in the budget.
But effectively we don't just have the problem that you've described that is still there, that is real, that can't be ignored. But we also have on top of that now, young people being radicalised online. They're getting younger, they're often teenagers, they're usually male, and it's often on gaming platforms. We need the sort of people, the sort of work that we've always done with our intelligence agencies on the different monitoring of networks here in Australia. We need to be monitoring where Australians are going online in those sorts of networks and do the same sort of interception work. This makes it a whole lot more complicated. What you have said is absolutely true. Those networks remain a problem. Those networks remain something where our agencies devote tremendous resources to making sure that we keep people safe and that we get our information and then we intercept and we charge. But we also need to deal with the new areas that are coming at us as well. Where sometimes we're now getting people who have that ISIS style horrific ideology but often mixed, sometimes mixed with Nazism and with environmental extremism. We're getting some weird mixed ideologies, logically inconsistent, all cohering on violence.
CLENNELL: News24.com reporting that this MyCentre that he was involved with the pilot received a $60,000 grant from the Department of Home Affairs. Do you have a reaction to that? It's a multicultural, multicultural youth centre in Melbourne called the MyCentre. It was mentioned in the court report out of the United Arab Emirates.
BURKE: I don't have more information on that Andrew. I'm sorry I'll be able to find something out on that. I don't directly manage that part of the program but okay, it's a reasonable question. If I can put it in these terms it is really important that we use every lever we have to be able to make sure that we are denying oxygen to people who want to do us harm. We need to make sure that we are making it harder for them to operate in every single way. So, that's the principle I'd apply to it. I'm sorry I can't offer you more in this interview.
CLENNELL: Just briefly, I'm out of time really but it was recently revealed the level of grants from the government to multicultural groups has gone up to 300 million and includes the second highest grant being 25 million to the Australian National Imams Council in you were electorate did you play a role in securing that grant? And why is taxpayer money going there?
BURKE: No, anything that's in my electorate the way we operate is that other Ministers sign off on things that are involved in my electorate. The moment I came in and I've said this to the Parliament as well; I established some very clear rules as to how things would be dealt with. Can I say though they're a national organisation the fact that they're in my electorate sort of is neither here nor there. The work of Sheikh Shady Alsuleiman who heads up the Imams Council, he doesn't reside in my electorate, but his work is second to none in terms of his cooperation and work both in the community and with the security agencies. He's worked with both sides of politics over the years and, and we are a safer country by a whole lot of the work that they do. I think the Imams Council work that you're describing just to clarify back, I think the grant that you're referring to is one that goes to security. So, because it's national, I just want to backtrack, I may well have signed off on part of it, so I just want to give you that. But can I just say, this is security to make sure that people are not attacked when they're praying, similar to what we've done for the Jewish community. It's a similar program, so it doesn't actually stay with the Imams Council, but this is the exact work that every Australian, I think, would support. Just as we never want to see another Bondi, we don't want to see a Christchurch here either.
CLENNELL: Briefly, again, I'm kind of out of time, but I just want to ask you about a couple of more things. Were you surprised you weren't called upon to give evidence at the Bondi Royal Commission?
BURKE: I was ready if they’d wanted me. My view was always; that's a matter for the Royal Commission.
CLENNELL: The Government had to delay the credit card surcharge tax bill measures. Now you're about to hit small business with a tax on trust. They may have to - they'll have to get professional advice on that. May have to turn themselves into companies. That's after your capital gains tax changes. Doesn't it feel like the Government's a bit at war with small business at the moment? Is that good for the economy?
BURKE: Look in terms of trusts. The number of trusts over the last 20 years has doubled. There's 800,000 of them at the moment. There are some trusts that at the moment, people are operating within the law. But you're always reviewing whether the tax laws are fair and whether the ordinary Australian taxpayer is being put at a disadvantage to people on higher incomes who are able to structure their finances in particular ways to avoid taxation. For example, the testamentary trusts, which are set up for when someone passes away, we're making sure that we quarantine changes in those sorts of areas. Similarly, there can be trusts that are set up for the purposes where you've got a particularly vulnerable young person, where they're set up in particular ways, that's reasonable. But where something is set up for the purposes of avoiding the tax that every other Australian taxpayer pays, you can understand why the government's been doing a whole lot of work to make sure that the system is fair.
CLENNELL: Just finally and briefly, a reaction to Donald Trump's decision to do a diesel deal with Vladimir Putin.
BURKE: Australia has no interest in buying fuel from Russia. One of the things that's not often mentioned when I go to immigration decisions we've made. The highest number of individual compassionate decisions we've made has been for the Ukrainian community. The war in Ukraine has been horrific and unacceptable. There is no way in the world we want to see a situation where Putin gets advantages from those sorts of conflicts.
CLENNELL: Tony Burke, thank you so much for your time.
BURKE: Great to be able to talk to you. Thank you.
ENDS