TRANSCRIPT - SKY NEWS SUNDAY AGENDA - SUNDAY 14, JUNE 2025

SKY NEWS SUNDAY AGENDA, ANDREW CLENNELL

SUNDAY 14, JUNE 2025

SUBJECTS: Jonathon Duniam’s retirement, migration, visa policy, Bondi terror attack, ISIS brides, NZYQ and Nauru deal

ANDREW CLENNELL: Well, joining me live is Home Affairs and Immigration Minister Tony Burke. Tony Burke, thanks so much for joining the program. I might start by asking you for a reaction to news I’ve broken this morning, the retirement of your opposite number, Jonathon Duniam. It seems very much for family reasons. He’s got three teenage boys, but an early retirement at 43, you’d have to say.

MINISTER FOR HOME AFFAIRS AND IMMIGRATION, TONY BURKE: The Liberal Party lose one of their best and brightest when he leaves the Parliament. There’ll be plenty of times when Senator Duniam and I are sparring and he’ll say some pretty harsh things, as you’d expect a Shadow Minister to say. But the reality is, whenever there’s been something squarely in the national interest, I’ve never seen him be anything other than professional.

Can I give just one example? In Australia now, and I’ve been battling for 20 years to be able to get to the point where a group like Hizb ut-Tahrir could be banned and where hate groups could be banned. Hizb ut-Tahrir and the neo-Nazis are banned in Australia and that’s because of legislation that was only made possible, that were shepherded through the Coalition processes by Jono Duniam. Can I say, doing something on that, it wasn’t necessarily easy internally for them because this was to go below the normal thresholds where it was words that were not specifically calling for violence. But we are a safer nation because that’s been done and it wouldn’t have happened were it not for his leadership as well.

CLENNELL: Well, let’s talk about migration now. There’s been reporting during the week in The Daily Telegraph there were through net permanent long-time arrivals 478,000 came into the country, but there are only 175,000 new homes built in Australia for the year up until March 2026. But the more accurate net migration figure, I’m told, those coming in versus those leaving, is around the 300,000 mark. Is 175,000 new homes enough for the migration we’re getting?

BURKE: We need to keep doing what we can to increase housing supply and we need to make sure migration is tailored to what we can do there. If you go at migration the wrong way, then you can actually make the housing situation worse. So, for example, something like more than a quarter of the various tradespeople who we rely on to build our homes are born overseas. Similarly, 60 per cent of our GPs are born overseas. So, we need to make sure that we are targeting the people who we need most in Australia, but also make sure that we don’t inadvertently stop us from getting the people we need to be able to build the houses.

Now, the big visa where that needed to happen was student visas, because international education is the only industry in Australia where you need to find a home for every single customer. Now, when we put through the legislation to directly link that to housing, the Opposition opposed us on that. We found another way to be tempering that and to be bringing it back. But effectively, what we’ve been doing in migration is effectively bringing the numbers down and bringing the standards up. The total numbers now are down 45 per cent from their peak. That peak occurred when we still had the settings in place from the previous government.

There’s further changes that we’ve made in the Budget there as well, Andrew. In addition to the other changes we’ve made, such as student visas, we’ve also now shifted the permanent program, where you used to have most people from overseas. Now 70 per cent of the permanent program will be made up of people who are already here, helping to take the pressure off. We’ve also got further changes we’re making on working holidaymakers. I still haven’t heard whether the Opposition actually supports those changes. All the Opposition parties, they’ve normally been in favour of reducing migration numbers in the general, but the moment you get to a specific visa class, they’ll never commit.

CLENNELL: Just briefly, what are you trying to do on working holidaymakers there?

BURKE: What we’ve announced in the Budget is a ballot system. Effectively, there are some working holiday visas where we have international obligations that have been signed up to over the years, including the UK, where it’s very difficult to control those numbers without breaching an international agreement. But for wherever we can, we’re looking at now starting to pull it back into a ballot system so that you actually start putting constraints on how many people are here for years two and three.

CLENNELL: Net migration for the calendar year of 2025 is expected out this week. I understand it’s been put to me that figure will likely come in at 320,000. Do you accept that?

BURKE: Look, the figure comes out on Thursday, so we’ll deal with whatever figure is there. You need to remember with net overseas migration, not everybody in that figure is a migrant. Some of those figures are driven by whether or not citizens are going off to work overseas or those who’ve been working overseas are coming home. There’s an agreement with New Zealand where effectively those numbers are affected as to how Australia’s economy versus the New Zealand economy is doing at any point in time. But what I’ve been determined for is to make sure that everywhere that the government does control the lever, that we are making sure those levers work directly in the interests of the nation and very conscious, very conscious of making sure that the immigration program is working in terms of where we’re at with housing supply.

CLENNELL: Alright, in 2025-26, according to the Budget, net migration is set to be 295,000. That’s expected to come in actually at around 310,000. Now, the Prime Minister’s said now, as the Budget papers do, Tony Burke, he wants net migration to hit 225,000 consistently every year, year after year. 225, we got 310, 295, whatever it is, he wants it every year to be 225. So, you’ve got a job in front of you. How are you going to deliver that as Home Affairs Minister? Effectively, a cut of close to 100,000 fewer people coming into the country versus leaving.

BURKE: What we need to be looking at is who arrives, who leaves and who stays. Across those three principles, we need to work through our different measures. Now, the ones that we’ve already announced is that shift 70-30 per cent on the permanent program is very significant. We will get complaints from people who were wanting someone to come from overseas, who’d found a worker or had someone who they’re married to and they’re wanting them to be permanently in Australia, where there are delays because we’ve gone to 70-30. But we simply can’t be in a situation where we ignore the fact that we need to bring these two issues of housing supply and immigration numbers into line. What we’re doing with respect to student visas, very significant on that. But finally, what we’re doing with working holidaymakers. This is a very significant area which effectively has been entirely uncapped where we haven’t had a situation where the Minister has the different levers to be able to pull that back. So, we are introducing those new areas where a Minister is able to make those changes. Those things will matter.

CLENNELL: That’s the Opposition policy, isn’t it, matching home construction with migration? Are you doing something similar to the Opposition policy now, trying to match the two?

BURKE: Well, it’s actually the reverse. The whole concept of taking into account student housing for student visas is something that we put to the Parliament in the last term and the Opposition opposed. When we do something about working holidaymakers, let’s not forget the National Party previously have said they won’t support anything that’s limiting working holidaymakers. These are the examples I give where the Opposition talk about things in the general, but whenever they’re confronted with the specific, they go running, they’ve gone missing every time.

What we’ve continued to do is to make sure that we’re bringing those numbers down and, as I say, 45 per cent reduction, that’s real. But if you just do random numbers and random cuts, the way any of the three Opposition parties, One Nation, the Liberal Party or the National Party, have been talking about, I want them to be able to explain which regional towns they say won’t have a GP anymore. I want them to be able to explain whether or not they’re willing - because we’re not - to cut the aged care workforce. There’s a whole lot of Australia that is dependent on people on visas, some of whom are on temporary visas, some of whom are permanent residents. If you, without thinking through the consequences, start to commit yourself to numbers that attack our health system or attack our capacity to build homes, then you’re not acting in the national interest.

CLENNELL: You spoke about spouses. Is the government deliberately delaying allowing spouses to move to this country to keep the numbers down? It’s been put to me, the partner backlog is currently around 115,000 and in 2026-27 there’ll be another 60,000-plus applications.

BURKE: Family migration is really slow now and that’s already been slowed right down and it’s not just spouse applications. If you’ve got an aged parent and if you put in the application today for an aged parent visa - and you need to remember the application doesn’t go in until they’re 65. At the moment, it’s a 30-year wait. So, you do the maths on that. The family numbers are really, really slow now.

CLENNELL: Deliberately, in order to try to get it down? Deliberately, you’re slowing down spouse applications. Is that not a breach of the Migration Act?

BURKE: Well, no. What you do is you put your resources of the department in your planning levels in different places. And obviously there are areas where we need to put the resources. We need to put the resources into the health system, we need to put the resources into construction, we need to put the resources into those skills that the economy is absolutely relying on, and we have with some of these other areas.

CLENNELL: So, is your message to someone trying to get their partner, wife or husband out here: suck it up, you’ve got to wait a bit longer?

BURKE: Well, the waiting periods, they’re on the internet, they’re on the webpage of the department. People with these applications know that they’ve been taking a long time.

CLENNELL: How long do they take?

BURKE: I just gave you those numbers and —

CLENNELL: Well, you spoke about 30 years for aged - partner, sorry, can you tell me the spouse number again? I must have just missed that. How long are people —

BURKE: Sorry, for new spousal applications, we’re starting to look now in the order of two years those applications take. Obviously, some never get through because you get some that turn out to be not genuine applications. But for genuine applications, that’s the order of what we’re looking at. It’s been continuing to get longer. Some of that’s driven by where you put your planning resources. Some of it’s also driven by the number of applications and we have a cap, as is published in the Budget numbers every year, on how many people are going to be able to get permanent visas and a partner visa is a permanent visa.

CLENNELL: Do you accept house prices have been driven up in this country partly by more people coming in and less homes being built?

BURKE: If you look at the number of houses over time, in terms of the rate of housing completions and the rate of demand for new houses, in terms of how many people that you need for those houses, they’ve been a bit out of sync, but not actually that much. The big shift that’s happened, which Australians have a complete right to, is Australians are now living fewer people per house than they used to. Now, that hasn’t been largely driven by immigration, but there needs to be an immigration response to it. This is why it’s been so important that we get those total numbers down. We’ve already got them down 45 per cent from where they were and as the Budget papers make clear, we’re continuing to get them lower.

CLENNELL: Do you concede it’s unacceptable that there are more than 400,000 people in this country on bridging visas at the moment?

BURKE: Some bridging visas are, for example, while you’re waiting for processing to happen, where we’ve got a skilled worker. So some bridging visas, you’ve got a skilled worker who we desperately want to keep in the country, they put in their renewal, the renewal hasn’t been fully processed yet, and they go onto a bridging visa. Some of those bridging visas are absolutely essential and in the national interest. We have other bridging visas that people are on where they are persistently challenging, first, after they’ve had a negative finding, you then go through the Administrative Review Tribunal, then through the courts, and some of these applications, people know that they’re not valid, but they’re wanting to stay in Australia.

CLENNELL: Is there anything you can do legislatively about that?

BURKE: The first thing that we’ve done, we haven’t actually waited for legislation, we’ve changed the process in the department and in the ART. There’s work that Michelle Rowland can explain more effectively than me as to what the courts themselves are doing. But effectively the principle has been, there are some applications now where instead of just dealing with them in a queue, we’re dealing the most recent application first. In doing that, both at the department level and at the Administrative Review Tribunal level, it means that if somebody is just playing for time to try to get work rights, instead of that being a process of many years, it becomes a process of a few months. What we’re doing there is starting to break a game that has been happening in Australia against the national interest for many, many years in this country. But we’ve started to have real impact on that. That work actually started in terms of the department’s processes before I became Minister under Clare O’Neil and Andrew Giles. The work of the Administrative Review Tribunal has been going for a little while now and there’s further work happening from the courts. But that whole abuse is based on the premise where you’ve got someone who knows it’s not a valid application; they just want work rights. So the more we can shorten that entire process, the more we can have the immigration system we need.

CLENNELL: Tony Burke, do you concede that the inability of your government over the last four years, some of which you weren’t Minister, to hit your net migration targets has contributed to the rise of One Nation?

BURKE: There is a claim that is made that has contributed to them that I hear repeated. I’ve never heard it repeated on your network by any of your commentators during daylight hours. But there is a claim that is often made as though the peak number that happened under the previous government settings in our first 12 months is effectively a design of the government, and we have continued that way. and we haven’t. We’ve brought it down 45 per cent. We’re continuing to cut it, we’re continuing to make sure it’s tailored to the needs of the nation. But what we will not do is create a situation where the people building houses can’t get workers, or a situation where your local community, particularly in the regions, can’t get a doctor, can’t get people to look after elderly Australians in aged care, can’t get nurses in the hospitals. Effectively, there are parts of the economy that absolutely rely on immigration and there is no way in the world that we want to jeopardise that.

CLENNELL: Do you accept the Bondi massacre and the fact that led people to believe that too many radical people had been let into this country is also responsible for the rise of One Nation?

BURKE: I’m really glad you’ve raised that. Obviously, today is the six-month anniversary of that horrific antisemitic terrorism attack and we brought in new laws to make it easier for me to cancel visas. Because one of the things that was relevant and that our agencies keep telling us is relevant is when the temperature is higher because of hate speech, effectively that always makes it more likely an event will occur. There were people wanting to come on public speaking tours just to engage in hate speech. I’ve been blocking their visas like no one has before. I’m proud of that. I wanted to make sure that we had more powers to do that and we have. But I also just want to raise this.

CLENNELL: How many?

BURKE: I don’t have a total number because some of them have been done by me personally and some of them have been done by the department following on from me. But there’s a large number of them have been reported and there’s more.

We need to make sure to keep people safe. There are three people currently behind bars, so I’ve got to use the word alleged. But we’ve obviously got the alleged attacker at Bondi with an antisemitic attack. We have the person charged who’s alleged to have tried to throw a pipe bomb in an attack against First Nations Australians where we just got lucky and it didn’t go off. We’ve then got a third person alleged to have wanted to be planning attacks who hadn’t got to the start of initiating those attacks but was into the planning stage. It will be alleged in court those attacks were against Parliament, against the police and against mosques. All three of those people who were behind bars were born in Australia. So what we need to make sure of is there are aspects of this where immigration is important, but it is against the interests of national security for us to somehow hive this off as though it is only an immigration problem. All three of those people were born in Australia. For those three, where it will be alleged in court that all three of them were wanting to cause mass carnage, that we need to make sure we deal with all the aspects of national security and not just blame people who’ve come here on visas.

CLENNELL: The dead Bondi attacker, I should point out, wasn’t born in Australia. But look, when it comes to the ISIS brides coming in —

BURKE: Can I just pick up really quickly on that? Which is to say that’s true, but let’s also remember he came under the Howard government 30 years ago on a student visa.

CLENNELL: Yeah. I knew you’d say that.

BURKE: Well, it seems pretty clear that he was radicalised in Australia, that that’s the period. When I talk about the biggest risks of radicalisation, we have to be careful of what comes over the border, but I am more worried about what comes over the browser I have to say.

CLENNELL: When it comes to the ISIS brides coming into this country, are you satisfied there’s nothing more you could have done to stop these people coming in and what’s the cost of monitoring them?

BURKE: We never give away the levels of monitoring because obviously we don’t want people to know or to be able to quantify how much monitoring that we’re doing, because that then changes people’s behaviour. Everything that people would want to be being done in terms of monitoring this cohort is being done.

In terms of what we could do, there are limits to what can be done with respect to an Australian citizen. There was one person where I was able to put in a temporary exclusion order, where that brief came to me. Whenever the briefs came to me, or it was one where the department said, here’s a temporary exclusion order for you to be able to deal with, I dealt with it. That’ll be challenged in court, I’ve got no doubt.

Our agencies have been doing everything required to be able to keep people safe. These are not the only Australian citizens who we have to monitor, obviously. There are other Australian citizens, some of whom are of more concern than these. But can I also say that my biggest concern as well is the understandable horror that Australians, particularly people such as the Yazidi community, have felt. Now I’ve met a woman - who was brought to Parliament by Michael McCormack and he was good enough to organise for me to meet with her - who effectively was living as a slave. These individuals, they’re citizens. There’s limits to us being able to stop them from coming in. Sometimes you can delay it a bit, but none of that changes the absolute horror of the decision they were part of. It is hard to imagine a more offensive decision than wanting to join an organisation like that. Anyone who wasn’t arrested at the border just needs to know, investigations from the Australian Federal Police don’t stop the moment you arrive here. Evidence continues to be gathered and let’s not forget we’ve had people recently charged. Those charges came six months after they arrived. We do not stop collecting evidence.

CLENNELL: Are you confident there won’t be another terror attack like occurred at Bondi?

BURKE: You can only go with the ASIO advice, which the current terror rating is probable. That’s a terror rating in Australia right now. The three examples that I gave you. One of an attack that caused horrific slaughter of people six months ago today, another where we just got lucky, it’ll be alleged, and the bomb didn’t go off, and a third where our authorities were able to intercept and arrest at the stages of planning before someone had acted. There are people in our country who mean harm. This is why every call that’s made to the terror alert line, to the national hotline, 1800 123 400, every one of those calls, that information is taken seriously. It’s all collated. Everything that people can do in terms of feeding information in keeps us safe. I am really proud that I’ve got people who report to me at the Federal Police, at ASIO, at AUSTRAC, at the Criminal Intelligence Commission, and the Department of Home Affairs, who’ve dedicated their professional lives to keeping people safe.

CLENNELL: So, you lie awake at night, I guess, thinking Bondi could happen again, by the sound of things.

BURKE: The terror alert is probable and that’s why if people have information at any point in time, they should pass it in. As I say, we’ve had three very significant arrests over summer. It is not only one form of bigotry. In terms of the forms of bigotry most likely to give rise to violence, antisemitism is our top priority. It is the form of bigotry where it is most likely to give rise to violence. But it is not the only form of bigotry that gives rise to violence. Wherever people have information, we want them to put it in.

CLENNELL: During the week, just finally, a matter of time, during the week, the government had a setback in terms of the NZYQ case in the High Court. A man’s been allowed to sue for false imprisonment and there are concerns this could lead to the Commonwealth paying out tens of millions in compensation to people who are criminals. Do you think that’s likely? Briefly.

BURKE: I am so glad we have established the arrangement in Nauru. The courts are yet to determine on this, so there’s limits on what I can say. There was one part of law that had a decision during the week, but the full case is still being worked through in the High Court. But if your visa is cancelled, you should leave Australia. That’s what should happen when people’s visa is cancelled. We’ve had a situation for decades in Australia where when someone couldn’t be returned to their country of origin, they just stayed here. Now we’ve got a situation thanks to Nauru that the Albanese Labor Government has put in place, and I’m glad we have, where if someone’s visa is cancelled and they can’t be returned to their country of origin, there is another country that will take them. I am grateful to the Government of Nauru for that because when your visa is cancelled, we do not do it lightly. But when that happens, it is a decision that you should not be in Australia. If someone’s on a visa, they are a guest in Australia and almost everybody is a very welcome guest here and behaves as a good guest in Australia. But when a visa is cancelled, people should leave. Now we have a system where that can be made to happen. I certainly wish, and I expect that most Australians would wish, the arrangement we now have with Nauru is something that had been negotiated by previous governments. The earlier it had been there, the fewer challenges we’d be faced with now.

CLENNELL: Tony Burke, thanks so much for your time.

BURKE: Always good to talk.

ENDS