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Morrison-era immigration minister Alex Hawke says the Coalition policy to restrict welfare benefits to citizens needs to be revised as opposition MPs worry the tough stance is being misunderstood and causing alarm in Chinese and Indian communities.
The debate over Australia’s high migration rate, measured in comparison with OECD nations, sharpened when Opposition Leader Angus Taylor announced a policy to exclude permanent residents from the family tax benefit, Jobseeker, NDIS, the disability pension and other payments.
Adding to the national conversation was an intervention from former Treasury boss Martin Parkinson, who said the migration system had turned into a de facto guest-worker program for which Australians had never voted.
Coalition MPs are mostly satisfied with Taylor’s cultural conservatism as a way to reclaim voters flocking to One Nation. Yet some are worried that large diasporas were being pushed further away by the welfare plan, which blindsided senior shadow ministers from Taylor’s conservative faction and the moderates.
“It hasn’t yet been run by colleagues or come to the party room,” Hawke, Sussan Ley’s former lieutenant, told this masthead before a party room meeting on Tuesday at which migration, tax and the rights of biological women will be discussed after the controversial Tickle v Giggle ruling.
“People are hoping that the policy is developed into something more positive and targeted at what we’re trying to achieve, rather than working migrants.”
Hawke, who served as immigration minister from 2020 to 2022, was one of the biggest losers from Ley’s ousting and is a long-time factional opponent of Taylor in the NSW division of the Liberal Party.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has told associates that he believes Labor can win Hawke’s once-safe seat of Mitchell, where nearly a quarter of the population had either Indian or Chinese heritage at the 2021 census.
Liberal senator Andrew McLachlan also bucked the party line last week when he said Taylor’s policy would create “two types of members of the community”, which he said was un-Australian.
One MP said they were worried that Labor and activists in multicultural community groups would turn the welfare plan into “work-from-home 2.0”, referring to the campaign run by Labor at the last election on Peter Dutton’s office attendance policies.
The MP said that while non-citizens did not vote, many of them are on a citizenship waitlist and would vote in coming years, and that their families voted and paid taxes.
A source close to Taylor said the plan required explanation, and the Coalition could win the argument if communities understood the changes would be grandfathered, meaning nobody on welfare at the time of the policy change would be affected. There would also be exemptions for refugees, domestic violence and child protection cases. Another source close to the leadership acknowledged members of diaspora communities had been raising concerns.
Taylor’s allies believe the policy is popular among the broader community, even in some parts of migrant communities. Conservatives in countries such as the UK and Germany are increasingly focusing on the level of welfare uptake among non-citizens.
Taylor has said the policy would yield “billions” in revenue, without specifying how. Party sources said this revenue would not be realised in the short term because the policy would be grandfathered, but would bear fruit in future years because many non-citizens were on programs such as the NDIS. Reporting in The Australian Financial Review has found that suburbs in the most ethnically diverse sections of Melbourne and Sydney, including Liverpool and Tarneit, had the greatest number of NDIS providers.
Finance Minister Katy Gallagher previously told this masthead that fraud in welfare was a growing problem and said the government was aware of sophisticated criminal operations manipulating the NDIS, including at least one sending proceeds to nations in Africa.
Parkinson, an esteemed bureaucrat who reviewed the migration system for Labor in 2023, said the program’s flaws were “clearly a legitimate issue for people to be concerned about”.
“Government and oppositions need to be concerned because you lose social licence,” he said.
Parkinson’s comments come after he made frank admissions on The Joe Walker Podcast, a show focused on public policy.
In the lengthy episode, Parkinson said a big uptick in temporary migration over many years resulted in a “group of permanent temporaries, almost a quasi-guest worker system”.
Asked if the electorate would have voted for such a program if it was taken to an election, he said: “I don’t think they would have at all.”
Parkinson said the gradual shift from a program that previously centred on highly skilled migrants had potentially led to low productivity growth because employers had “become used to relying on really low-skilled cheap labour”.
