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.