Tony Abbott’s hypocrisy on immigration policy: What his time in office shows

Tony Abbott’s recent immigration rhetoric sits uneasily alongside the policies and outcomes of his own prime ministership, writes Dr Abul Rizvi.

TONY ABBOTT has written extensively on immigration policy in recent years — far beyond the simple “stop the boats” sloganeering of his time as Opposition Leader and Prime Minister.

As we all know, it’s best to look at a politician’s actual actions rather than just their words. So let’s look at his immigration policy actions as Prime Minister to see if there is any substance to his current rhetoric.

In his writings, Abbott makes three key points (which are being echoed by his associates in the Murdoch press and Liberal leadership aspirants Andrew Hastie and Jacinta Price):

governments must be strong on illegal immigration;
the current level of immigration is far too high; and
too many people of a non-Judeo-Christian background are migrating to Australia.

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Illegal immigration

Abbott extols his success in stopping the boats in much the same way that Scott Morrison did (and in fact awarded himself a trophy for allegedly doing so).

Abbott says:

‘Australia is the only country in the world in recent times to have stopped a wave of illegal migration by boat... Australia succeeded because the government that I led was convinced that a country that lost control of its borders, over time, would lose control of its destiny.’

The fact is that the actions taken by the second Rudd Government to reintroduce offshore processing had effectively stopped the boats by the time Abbott took office. John Menadue and former Immigration Deputy Secretary Peter Hughes have extensively documented the impact of that action.

Menadue finds:

By the time Operation Sovereign Borders (OSB) geared up for its first boat turnbacks on 19 December 2013, the number of boat arrivals was down from 48 in July 2013 to only seven in December 2013. OSB applied only to the tail end of the boat drama. The “game-changer” was Kevin Rudd’s announcement in July 2013 that people arriving by boat after that time would not be settled in Australia. Arguably, boat turnbacks would not have been successful at all without the July 2013 decision.

What Abbott and Morrison were good at was manipulating the media to believe it was their actions that stopped the boats.

But immigration integrity is not just about irregular boat arrivals. By appointing Mike Pezzullo as head of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, Abbott set off a chain of events that led to the biggest labour trafficking scam in Australia’s history.

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New Immigration Minister Peter Dutton and Mike Pezzullo not only allowed this massive scam to flourish, but they also significantly cut back immigration compliance resources that ensured the traffickers could operate with impunity. Most Australians would be surprised to learn just how hopeless Dutton and Pezzullo were at maintaining immigration integrity.

Abbott conveniently makes no mention of this massive scam but happily talks about mass deportation of the people who came to Australia under this scam (and like U.S. President Donald Trump, with zero understanding of the issues and costs involved).

Levels of legal migration

Abbott argues immigration is currently too high, but gives no explanation of what level he would find acceptable. He complains that 30% of Australia’s population is overseas-born; much higher than in other comparable nations. But 28% of Australia’s population was overseas-born at the end of his Prime Ministership. Was he complaining then? Did he do anything about that?

In his two years as Prime Minister, the Abbott Government delivered a permanent migration program of 190,000 in 2013-14, which at that time was the equal largest migration program in our history. In 2014-15, it was slightly smaller at 189,097.

The current permanent migration program is 185,000. In other words, Abbott did nothing to reduce the permanent migration program. He and his Chief of Staff (who also now constantly bangs on about the level of immigration) conveniently said nothing about reducing it when they were in charge.

The humanitarian program was delivered at 13,768 in 2013-14 and 13,756 in 2014-15. That is around the average level of the humanitarian programs this century. Abbott also announced an additional 12,000 places for Syrian refugees that brought the overall humanitarian program to over 20,000. The current humanitarian program is 20,000.

It is true that net migration fell sharply under Abbott from 230,330 in 2012-13 to 187,780 in 2013-14 and 184,830 in 2014-15. While at times he has tried to take credit for that, he tends not to make too much of that anymore, as he has likely realised that the fall in net migration was entirely due to a major increase in unemployment in Australia.

That led to a massive exodus of Australian citizens (and to a lesser degree, people on visas). In Abbott’s two years in office, we experienced a net outflow of over 45,000 Australian citizens. In the two years prior to Abbott coming to power, the net outflow of Australian citizens was 15,450. Abbott was literally driving Australians out of the country at a faster rate than ever before. But did he engineer the massive increase in unemployment to deliver that outcome?

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In addition, there was a huge turnaround in New Zealand citizens coming to Australia. In 2012-13, a net 34,060 New Zealand citizens came to Australia. In 2013-14, that fell to 12,470 and in 2014-15, it fell to 4,670. The unemployment rate in New Zealand was significantly lower than in Australia during the Abbott years. That drove the turnaround.

Not surprisingly, Abbott no longer crows about these “achievements”.

But Abbott does complain about the massive increase in net migration immediately after international borders re-opened (2022-23). That was indeed unanticipated.

But what Abbott doesn’t explain is that the surge was almost entirely due to a set of COVID and pre-COVID policies. Indeed, as late as the second half of 2022, Dutton was arguing for an increase in immigration and was sceptical that the new Labor Government could deliver.

It would be fair to criticise the Labor Government for acting too slowly to tighten policy, but there is no basis for Abbott to exonerate his Coalition colleagues for slamming on the immigration accelerator.

Composition of immigration

Abbott complains that:

‘...today, more than two million Australians were born in either China or India.’

Yet when Abbott was Prime Minister, the two leading source nations in our migration program were – you guessed it – India and China. Abbott took no policy actions to reduce immigration from these two nations — in fact, he did the opposite through his changes to the overseas student visa.

But he did achieve a decline in UK citizens securing permanent visas. These fell from 23,220 in 2013-14 to 21,078 in 2014-15.

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Abbott also says:

‘We’re perfectly entitled to discriminate on the basis of values, if we’re to avoid importing destructive passions. And if we’re proud of Australia as it is, as we’re entitled to be, we should be wary of immigration that risks making the native born feel like strangers in their own neighbourhoods.’

Abbott is entitled to have that view, but he says nothing about how he would do this (it’s a bit like Trump’s Muslim ban). That may be because, just like Andrew Hastie, who has adopted the same language, he has no idea how he would implement his “values test” but is happy to dog whistle about it.

Abbott proclaims that:

‘...universities and colleges should not rely so much on foreign students.’

Yet the Abbott Government put forward legislation to cut university funding by 20% (it was defeated in the Senate, as was much of Abbott’s radical agenda), which would have made them even more reliant on overseas students. He also introduced a provider-level risk rating system for student visas that triggered a massive boom in overseas students.

As a result, the stock of overseas students increased from 346,962 in September 2013 when Abbott was elected to 425,741 in September 2015 when Abbott was deposed. Because of the risk rating changes introduced under Abbott, the stock of students continued to rise until the start of COVID to 633,816 in September 2019.

The fact is that Abbott complains about the level and composition of immigration but did little about it, and now provides little on how he would implement his new ideas — the ones he didn’t implement when he was Prime Minister.

Perhaps he is indeed all slogan and no substance.

Dr Abul Rizvi an Independent Australia columnist and a former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Immigration. You can follow Abul on Twitter @RizviAbul.