The home affairs minister, Tony Burke, has defended the time Labor has taken to release its immigration plan and laid blame with the Coalition, who he believed “might have more of an appetite for legislation”. Burke appeared on ABC’s 7.30 program after releasing the plan was released on Thursday, and was asked “what took you so long” given he was meant to speak at the National Press Club six weeks ago. He said the Labor party had spent time “working through all the policy issues”, and navigating the visa system was complex.
Every part of the economy is affected by immigration these days for Australia, and so … dealing with the challenges we’ve got with housing supply, which is not immigration’s fault, but immigration needs to be part of the answer, to do that in a way that has the softest landing for the economy is something you’ve got to get right. The opposition leader, Angus Taylor, told 7.30 that the Coalition had “laid out what we needed as preconditions in order to be able to work with the government and they couldn’t meet the preconditions”. The numbers are too high and what we’ve seen from the government today is no cut to the numbers … We are a great immigrant nation.
Make no mistake about it. But immigration needs to be capped based on the housing supply, the infrastructure, the services we have, and that has not been the case in recent years.
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