Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke’s desperate migration crackdown has collapsed in Cabinet multiple times without agreement. While his own senior ministers routinely reject his weak proposals, the department he supposedly leads is presiding over a staggering, unprecedented count of almost 3 million temporary visa holders across the nation. One Nation leader Pauline Hanson tore into him directly on Wednesday, exposing a minister who actively presides over "a mass blowout of temporary visas" while Labor shamelessly manipulates migration statistics instead of taking a real axe to the intake.
"What Tony Burke and Anthony Albanese are hiding from Australians is that they have overseen the greatest surge in foreign temporary migration in Australia's history," Hanson said in a media release on Wednesday. "Shockingly, there are now around three million foreign temporary visa holders in Australia, more than one in ten people in the country."
The damning figures come straight from Burke's own department. Home Affairs' latest official count confirms nearly 3 million temporary visa holders are currently in Australia, representing more than 1 in 10 people in the country. That includes a record breaking 2.62 million people before short stay visitors are even factored in, blowing past the previous high by 92,800. Another 432,300 people remain stalled on bridging visas while administrative refusals and drawn out appeals clog up the system. Hanson pushed the grim reality further, saying around 1 in 3 people in their late twenties living in Australia is now a foreign temporary migrant.
Labor hides behind visa tricks as VIC taxpayers fund free dental for local non-citizens
The actual metric Labor is obsessively chasing is net overseas migration, which represents the Bureau of Statistics ledger of arrivals minus departures. In the last financial year the ABS finalised, 2024-25, that figure surged to 306,000 against Labor's stated 225,000 target, a promise they have repeatedly broken.
Burke's panicked response arrived as a July directive ordering officials to send applicants already residing in Australia directly to the front of the queue for permanent places while shoving overseas applicants to the back.
This cynical priority shift leaves crucial local employers recruiting overseas nurses and teachers waiting up to 12 long months. Handing a permanent visa to someone already renting an apartment in Parramatta artificially drops the recorded net migration intake while the actual number of people living in the country does not decrease by even one.
"Now Tony Burke is resorting to accounting tricks to make the net migration number look better without dealing with the real problem," Hanson said. "Changing someone's visa status is not cutting migration. And even his own Cabinet won't accept his plan because Labor remains addicted to mass migration."
For struggling local residents, Labor's bureaucratic trick changes absolutely nothing. The massive pool of temporary visa holders nationwide requires the exact same rental homes, hospital beds, and road infrastructure regardless of which administrative filing cabinet the department sorts them into, and everyday Australians are forced to compete against every single one of them. Hanson's scathing breakdown of Labor's economic model laid bare the true cost to workers.
"Labor has run a mass migration Ponzi scheme to prop up the headline economic numbers while Australians pay the price through lower wages, higher rents, unaffordable homes and stretched services," she said.
The immense financial bill for these stretched public services is already landing on local households. In Victoria, Premier Ben Carroll recently announced $230 million in taxpayer funds for ten public dental clinics that any resident can simply walk into.
State Labor deliberately stripped out all standard income tests and healthcare card requirements from the scheme and completely omitted any citizenship or visa eligibility checks. Labor has not said that temporary visa holders are barred, leaving the door wide open for local temporary migrants to walk straight in and receive free care on the taxpayer dollar.
Burke flees Press Club speech as divided Cabinet refuses to approve his weak migration fixes
Burke was originally scheduled to parade his so called migration overhaul at the National Press Club in early August, only to pull the plug on the high profile address just days before he was due on stage. Behind closed doors, Cabinet sources confirmed to the ABC that the entire package had stalled out, with ministers deadlocked over the exact same sticking points that continue to paralyse the government today: hard caps on backpackers, tougher restrictions on family visas, and the expansive work and appeal rights granted to asylum seekers.
Rather than fixing the system, Burke quietly pushed the speech back into the long grass, hiding the details from the Australian public ever since. Hanson’s assessment of the debacle was uncompromising, declaring that the overhaul simply cannot pass because "Labor remains addicted to mass migration", a reality backed up by weeks of dead silence from a paralysed government incapable of offering any alternative explanation.
Labor’s border failure exposed as One Nation sets hard cap while Coalition stays silent
"Net overseas migration must not exceed 130,000," Hanson said, restating the cap her party has had published for months: 130,000 a year, reviewed annually, coupled with an immediate halt on arrivals from countries on DFAT's do not travel list, the red list of 23 dangerous nations that One News has already detailed in full.
"The Government is telling Australians these countries are too dangerous to visit because of terrorism, kidnapping and violent crime, while at the same time bringing people from those countries into Australia," she said. "This has to stop. The security of Australians should be paramount."
While Labor continues to run an open door policy, Hanson's sharpest political swing lands on the Coalition. Its home affairs and immigration spokesman Jonno Duniam announced in June that he is abandoning politics by the end of the year, and the Coalition has confirmed its official migration target will not be released to the public anytime this year either.
"The Liberals are very quick to criticise One Nation. But they are the architects of mass migration. And now their immigration spokesman has his foot out the door and the party is stalling on releasing their migration number. Their position is a joke," Hanson said.
Labor inflates visa numbers while cowardly Liberals gag frontbenchers and stall until 2028
Inside the factional crossfire of the Liberal party room, the sole frontbencher who dared to put a tangible number on the table was instantly slapped down for stepping out of line. Shadow Housing Minister Andrew Bragg nominated a target to cap net migration under 180,000, only for Liberal Leader Angus Taylor to publicly drag him back into rank.
"Andrew expressed some of his personal views yesterday. I've made clear to him that his job is to express ... the views of the coalition and the senior team of which he is a member," Taylor said of the party's immigration policy on 13 August.
The gutless position Bragg was forced back into contains no target at all. The Coalition's weak official line vaguely promises to tie immigration to housing completions, while outgoing frontbencher Jonno Duniam admits a real figure will not arrive until closer to the election, all while feigning that voters will see it in the near future. That cowardly timeline means everyday Australians are forced to drag themselves through state elections and most of the next political cycle before the Liberals muster the courage to state what they would actually do about mass migration.
The motive behind this political stalling is obvious: a published number is a hard target the weak Liberals would be forced to take ownership of. The second a cap goes on paper, every single rent increase, nursing shortage, and business complaint gets measured against it, leaving Labor to attack it from both directions at once as too high to believe and too low to staff local hospitals. Silence carries no risk, and Hanson's 130,000 limit is precisely the political liability the spineless Liberals refuse to carry while One Nation wears it deliberately.
Their own compromised record explains the rest of their fear. The entire temporary visa machine, the international student pipeline, the old 457 visa and its modern successors, and the bloated working holiday program were all constructed and massively expanded under past Coalition governments. Any figure the party names today immediately gets thrown back in their faces against the record intake they delivered while sitting in office. Hanson's stinging assertion that the Liberals "are the architects of mass migration" lands with absolute precision because a published number would force them to defend their own decade of failure.
The party's base and its corporate backers are pulling in opposite directions, exposing their complete ideological rot. The frustrated working class voters the Liberals are bleeding to One Nation are demanding deep cuts, while the employer lobbies, university bosses, industrial farmers, and corporate aged care providers funding the party demand the cheap foreign labour supply remain wide open. Publishing a firm cap forces that fight into the harsh light of day. It is the exact same paralysis that has Burke's migration package deadlocked in Labor's Cabinet on the other side of the chamber, with one glaring difference: Labor is forced to answer for a net migration figure every year because the ABS publishes one, whereas the gutless opposition faces no legal deadline at all.
So the number stays buried, not because the policy work is unfinished, but because the Coalition lacks the spine to publish it. Naming a target forces the party to choose between the forgotten voters it is losing and the big business donors it answers to, so it cowardes out, chooses neither, and stays glued to the fence. One Nation has already made its choice, which is precisely why 130,000 remains the only real cap sitting in the entire Australian parliament.
| Party | Migration number | Where it stands |
|---|---|---|
| One Nation | 130,000 hard cap | Published for months, reviewed annually, with a halt on arrivals from DFAT's do not travel red list on top |
| Labor | 225,000 target | Never met. The ABS counted 306,000 net arrivals in 2024-25, the last financial year it has finalised, and Burke's crackdown package is stalled in Cabinet |
| Coalition | No number | Won't release a figure this year. Duniam says it'll come closer to the 2028 election, and he's leaving parliament before the end of the year |
| Greens | No cap | Reject any hard limit on migration outright |
While Labor aggressively inflates temporary visa numbers to historic highs and the spineless Liberals hide their policy in the shadows, the political scoreboard tells the full, damning story: 306,000 net arrivals recorded in the last official financial year finalized by the ABS, a broken Labor target of 225,000 that the government continuously misses, a Coalition target that does not exist in public, and exactly one hard cap published anywhere in parliament, One Nation's 130,000 limit.
"One Nation has led this debate for years. We have put a number on the table and argued consistently to take back control of migration. The major parties are scrambling to keep up," Hanson said.
