Tony Burke insists that the government’s changes to migration policy — which amount to somewhere between nips and tucks and modest reforms — aren’t a response to the rise of One Nation. But they are, by his own admission, a response to one of the contributing factors to the rise of One Nation.
“There is now an expectation on us that the pure demand-driven approach to major parts of the immigration system is not what Australians want,” he said yesterday — a somewhat bigger claim than the detail of his changes to areas like backpacker visas and international student family visas justifies, but probably an accurate reflection of where Labor would like to go.
