Australia need not fear foreign workers: we remain in control

With Australia's economy long aided by the arrival of immigrants to boost Australia's workforce and economy, including by skilled immigrants, students, and backpackers, there remains concern about their impact in terms of economic competition to local workers and cultural integration.

At present, One Nation seeks greater electoral appeal by its promises:

• to cap both permanent and temporary visas to 130,000 to ease pressure on housing, wages, and infrastructure;
• address skilled visa rorting that allows cheap foreign labour to undercut the conditions of Australian workers;
• end student visa loopholes that allow study here to serve as a backdoor to permanent residency or low-wage labour; and
• deport 75,000 illegal migrants or visa overstayers while imposing an eight-year waiting period before new arrivals can access welfare or citizenship.

Make no mistake about it. The recent explosion of Indian immigrants to Australia did include visa abuse from that country including fraudulent student admissions and contrived marriages from unregistered migration agents, local document-forging syndicates, and third-party scammers.

That is why Indian student applications now face stricter scrutiny with 40 per cent recently rejected, why many syndicates that facilitate fake marriages to secure permanent residency have been dismantled, and why there are now restrictions for onshore visa hopping which results in longer stays in Australia by repeatedly switching between different temporary visas.

But hold on. Much of Australia's reliance upon large numbers of foreign workers (especially Indians) also reflects our own economic difficulties with an ageing population creating a widespread shortage of workers to fulfill important service occupations.

With Australians demanding more and more from public services in recent decades, governments find it increasingly difficult to fund Australia's many policy needs with the cost of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) alone rising to around $50 billion in 2024-25 after being $24 billion in 2020-21 after participant numbers rose to 739,000 people by 2025.

At the government level, they too can use foreign labour for a number of reasons that go beyond addressing labour shortages, such as helping to stabilises wage inflation and prevent production delays while also saving the nation enormous training and education costs.

For Australia, with total net government debt by all levels reaching 35 per cent of gross domestic product by July 2025, utilising foreign labour helps also helps to prevent higher debt interest payments which can help maintain the nation's AAA credit rating, preserves financial flexibility for future economic crises, and helps to avoid intergenerational unfairness where younger Australians either pay heavy taxes to pay for past spending or have services cut.

Hence, Australian governments have utilised foreign workers to help reduce the Commonwealth and state/territory government annual cost for health, aged care, and the NDIS alone which now exceeds $325 billion annually, comprising over 30 per cent of total government outlays of $1.026 trillion.

With the total taxpayer cost of training a single general practitioner in Australia around $450,000 per student when factoring in the clinical training phase, foreign trained General Practitioners (GPs) reached 43 per cent of the workforce in 2023 and accounted for 54 per cent of the total GP full-time equivalent of Medicare claims as the total number of GPs in Australia reached around 39,500.

Australia's fiscal difficulties also help explain why 70 to 80 per cent of international medical students in Australia also transition to the local medical workforce.

As of 2024, international students comprised 18.5 per cent (824) of the 4453 students who commenced medical studies.

Foreign-trained nurses also make up about 32 per cent of Australia's total nursing workforce, while Aged Care and Allied Health services in Australia rely heavily on overseas professionals.

With around 50 to 58 million of the 168 million international migrant workers in 2022 being highly-skilled occupations, with Western trained professionals only making up a fraction of the global migrant workforce, Australia must compete with other Western nations to attract such workers.

The same competition with Western countries is also evident with regards to attracting international students with around 6.9 million students studying outside their country of origin in 2024 with China and India dominating numbers.

With India producing 90,000 medical and over one million engineering graduates annually, Australia's emphasis upon skilled migration has resulted in 68 per cent of arriving Indian migrants since 2006 already holding a bachelor's degree or higher, nearly double the rate of the Australian-born population.

Given that Australia is not alone in its heavy reliance upon foreign workers to fuel its economy, it is worth noting how Australia is both similar and different to other nations with regard to how they treat their foreign workers, as indicated by a comparison with Singapore, whose current population of 6.1 million includes 1.9 million foreign workers and non-residents.

Both Singapore and Australia do have examples of foreign worker exploitation, mostly towards low-skilled workers.

A May 2026 publication titled Inside Australia's Hidden System of Migrant Worker Exploitation by the Migrant Justice Institute found that two thirds of 9,963 valid survey responses during the 2023-2024 year were paid less than they were owed under the Fair Work Act.

Around a quarter of respondents were short-changed by at least $10 per hour, and over a third paid below the National Minimum Wage, not taking into account award rates and penalty rates for after-hours work or casual loadings.

Of the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme, which employs 38,000 Pacific Islanders on farms, abattoirs and aged care, a 2025 report by the RMIT Business and Human Rights Centre observed that workers in the meat industry were being exploited with little ability to report workplace abuse given their stay here was tied to a single sponsor employer.

Many earned less than colleagues on other visa schemes, despite often doing the most physically demanding work; were forced to work unpaid overtime; and experienced illegal wage deductions through employers or labour-hire firms frequently deducting inflated costs for accommodation, uniform, equipment, and transport directly from workers' pay checks.

In December 2024, a coroner inquest found that one Filipino worker (Jerwin Royupa), who died while working at a NSW winery in 2019, was owed more than 200 hours' worth of pay after just 5 weeks of work after being paid just $134.92 per month to work 10 hours a day for six days a week with his pay to be withheld for the first six months to offset the cost of bringing him to Australia.

In Singapore, with many low-skilled foreign workers (domestic workers and labourers) also needing to pay off their debt through recruitment processes which can take two years, they have little real capacity to report workplace abuse as their residency status is also directly tied to a single employer.

Of Singapore's 300,000 plus domestic workers, a 2017 paper by Research Across Borders titled "Bonded to the System" of 800 domestic workers and 80 employers found that 60 per cent of foreign workers employed as housekeepers and child minders were exploited through low pay, long daily work hours, little time off work and verbal and physical abuse.

During June 2021, Gaiyathiri Murugayan was sentenced to a record 30 years in prison after the death of the 24 year old Piang Ngaih Don from Myanmar who had been tied to window grills, starved, punched, burnt, and strangled while losing half of her body weight.

Gaiyathiri's mother Prema S. Naraynasamy received 17 years jail, often staying in the flat and regularly joining in on the assaults, while Gaiyathiri's former husband Kevin Chelvam (a suspended police officer) was sentenced to 10 years prison for also abusing the victim and concealing evidence.

Despite the obvious need for any country to prevent the exploitation of foreign workers in terms of decency and reputation, can Australia learn from the Singaporean experience?

While Singapore's low-skilled labourers are typically housed in licensed workers' dormitories in commercial areas heavily segregated from local residential zones, Australia could follow Singapore's strict requirement that limits any charged housing costs for certain visa schemes does not exceed 25 per cent of a worker's total salary, or 50 per cent when also taking account of food and transport.

Australia may also consider Singapore's use of cheaper foreign labour for large infrastructure projects given that Australia currently has some of the highest costs for rail and road projects on a per kilometre basis as costs often blow out, albeit Australia should never emulate Singapore's propensity to pay very low wages given foreign-sourced labourers there typically earn a monthly salary of S$1,200 to S$2,500, even when including overtime and bonuses.

Of concerns by both Singapore and Australia about cultural differences and integration, in line with the realty that most people still marry within their own ethnicity due to ingrained factors such as shared background, family expectations and traditions, both approaches have proven somewhat progressive.

Singapore, despite having an electoral system and public housing quotas that prevents ethnic enclaves in line with its population being defined as roughly 75 per cent Chinese, 15 per cent Malay and 7 per cent Indian, now has an estimated 21-23 per cent of all marriages being inter-ethnic after being just 7.6 per cent in 1990.

In Australia, while marriage between those with a British background and other Europeans has been evident for several decades, it is now estimated that Australians with mixed European and non-European heritage represents around 7 to 9 per cent of the population.

While Singapore maintains its population makeup by granting permanent residency primarily to Malays, Chinese and Indian nationals, Australia has increased its diversity with the largest sources of permanent immigrants to Australia in recent decades being from India, China and the Philippines.

Nevertheless, despite a recent ABS social wellbeing survey finding that 75 per cent of Australians agreed that having different cultures is good for society, further integration must still overcome the reality that the dominant Anglo-Celtic majority often experience limited sustained interaction with visible minority groups, and that first-generation migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds are clustered in specific suburbs for support, familiar services, and perceived or real safety concerns.

My own view is that a desire for cultural integration is a reasonable concern if a large minority group emerges that does not assimilate, which can strain social cohesion and national identity and pose a threat to political stability if many are marginalised or radicalised.

To conclude, while One Nation seeks greater electoral support from issues raised by immigration at a time of high living costs for many Australians, most Australians rightfully continue to embrace skilled immigration from a number of Asian sources.

Nevertheless, the current rise of One Nation's popularity, a legitimate part of Australia's liberal democratic experience that allows all views to be put forward and be supported, serves as a reminder to Australia's major political parties that immigration policy must always addresses concerns about foreign workers in terms of any real unfair economic competition and their ability to integrate.