Introduction by Croakey: The Federal Opposition Leader this week announced plans for “the biggest cut to immigration numbers in the history of the country”. On News 24, Peta Credlin described it as “a cracker” of a policy that is “much needed”.
Angus Taylor’s announcement followed moves by One Nation and Labor to capitalise on growing anti-migration sentiment, The Guardian reported.
Writing at Pearls and Irritations this week, Editor Catriona Jackson said it was shameful that echoes of the racist White Australia policy were returning. “Every time we talk about cutting numbers back, about excluding partners and kids, about tightening our borders, we are sending a message,” she wrote.
“It is a nasty message that questions belonging, that makes the migrants who built this nation feel unwelcome. It also puts doubt into the minds of those thinking about Australia as a place to live and study.
“None of this means we shouldn’t have a clear responsibility to make the migration system systematic and orderly, like all public policy,” she said. “But every time we sink into this ‘debate’, it makes some Australians feel less welcome in the place they have chosen as their home. It makes smart young global citizens less likely to come and live and invest and create a life here, and we are the worse for it.”
Writing in The Age (paywall), Michael Sidney Myer said that as the grandson of one of Australia’s most famous and most successful immigrants, “it feels like my duty to make an intervention into the debate around the significance of immigration in the cultural, social and economic fabric of this country”.
“As we watch the rise of populism in this country in the form of the One Nation Party, and its leader, Pauline Hanson, what seems to be lost is the profound contribution that immigrants have made, and will continue to make, to the strength and vibrancy of our nation if they are given the chance,” he said.
“It is time for us to stop giving credence to voices that see immigrants as people taking from us and being a burden upon society, worthy of condemnation and censure.”
In the article below, public health researchers Penelope Smith and Dr Joanne Flavel interrogate the harmful discourse around migrants, and caution colleagues against responses that obscure the humanity of migrants by valuing them only for their contributions to the economy or workforce.
Penelope Smith and Joanne Flavel write:
We are writing in response to the harmful and divisive commentary in Australia about migrants. This commentary, which has intensified in the last year, frames migrants variously as numbers, as problems, and as workers – but very rarely as humans.
Our motivation for writing this is to raise awareness of this framing and to challenge the silence in much of the health community as to the harms of this frame.
This framing puts conditions on who is welcome in Australia. It is not an effective counter to One Nation’s commentary, which is influencing the Government’s migration policy and is mirrored in the Federal Opposition’s newly unveiled immigration policy.
The migration debate and false premises underlying policies pays no consideration to the health, wellbeing, and sense of belonging of immigrant communities.
This is not to say there has been no defence of migrants, particularly with organisations speaking up about racism in commentary. But too often the defence of migration points to migrants as necessary to workforce needs.
As noted in other articles within Croakey Health Media, this is a crucial time for public health organisations, leaders, educators, researchers and professionals to be engaging and participating in conversations about health workforce, migration, racism and exclusion.
While the federal political agenda and impending Victorian election are influencing the conversation at present, this conversation can’t be only about elections and politics. This is about recognising that as a collective we need to commit to ongoing engagement in the conversation.
It is also, arguably most importantly, about re-examining the discourse around health workforce and the role of the migrant health worker.
Authors’ positions
We both hold different positionality, experience and roles that we highlight for their relevance to this article.
One of the authors – Dr Joanne Flavel – is involved in migration research, is Co-convenor of the Public Health Association of Australia Diversity, Equity & Inclusion SIG, Vice President of PHAA SA Branch, and was recently elected national Vice President development.
She has advocated for capacity building opportunities for international students in her PHAA roles.
Co-author Penelope Smith is the daughter of a migrant worker from the Philippines, which was one of the early adopters of the 1974 legislation for Overseas Workers. She is a University of Tasmania PhD candidate and her project is focused on the experiences of migrant health workers. She has volunteered to teach conversational English to newly arrived migrants in the northeast of Victoria and as a sessional academic teaches predominantly international students through the VU Masters of Global Public Health course.
As public health professionals, we have been involved in the production of health workforce (through our academic teaching), support of health workforce (through our advocacy and volunteer work) and the analysis of migrant workforce (through our research). This gives us a particular insight.
Addressing complexity
As many Croakey Health Media readers are aware, the delivery of healthcare in Australia is complex. It involves multiple professions across public and private healthcare organisations and includes the Community Controlled sector. We are reminded of this complexity in recent Government inquiries and reviews, including the 2025 Scope of Practice Review.
Also complex are the arrangements regarding citizenship and the many types of visas, which were of interest in the Independent review of health practitioner regulatory settings. While this review focused on registered health workforce only, it shone a light on the complex and entangled nature for all migrant health workers of applying, arriving and working in Australia.
As Farah Farouque, CEO of the Ethnic Communities’ Council of Victoria (ECCV), highlighted a few weeks ago, “Migration and multiculturalism are woven into the fabric of our health and care systems”.
Migrant health and care workers come through very different doors, including permanent skilled visas (subclasses 189, 190, and the provisional regional 491), employer-sponsored visas such as the Skills in Demand visa (subclass 482) and the permanent Employer Nomination Scheme visa (subclass 186), including union-backed Aged Care Industry Labour Agreements, working holiday visas (subclasses 417 and 462), student visas, and the PALM scheme (subclass 403), which ties workers to an approved employer.
We have intentionally chosen to provide the visas subclasses as part of our efforts to demystify the issues. It can be confusing, even for those of us within health workforce training, recruitment and retention.
Some of this complexity also feeds into a distraction, taking our line of sight away from thinking about healthcare and the role of a collaborative multidisciplinary health workforce working together for care of the population – working towards Health for all.
Framing matters
It is challenging for the public health sector to remain committed to holistic views of health, particularly when we are living within settler colonial structures which are in relationship with neoliberal capitalism.
To challenge these systems, we look to the benefits of applying a decolonial and anti-colonial lens to this conversation to enable a pathway to shift our gaze away from reducing individuals (and teams) to being seen as workers, rather than as members of our collective community working towards health equity.
It is also important the public health sector does not contribute to the framing of migrants as valuable only as health workers, as is happening in political commentary.
For example, in his Press Club speech and resulting interviews, Minister for Home Affairs Tony Burke has repeatedly separated doctors, nurses and aged care workers (with construction workers) as migrant workers of worth. This is emphasised by not restricting their family visas. Likewise, the Opposition Leader’s immigration policy puts a higher value on migrants based on skills.
For health organisations keen to address significant health workforce shortages in these areas, there is a risk of neglecting the broader migrant conversation in favour of protecting access to specific workers.
Rather than confining commentary and conversations to a focus on the migrant workforce, health organisations have a leadership role in speaking out about investment and commitment to health workforce as a whole, and to health workers as people, not just economic inputs.
It is possible to present a united argument in this current climate, without sacrificing individual professions, sectors, jurisdictions or locations.
Ways forward
We cannot be critical without presenting a way forward.
Within the history of public health, there are clear visions and supporting documents that should be referred to. In preparation for this article, we looked the Declaration of Alma Ata, Peoples Health Movement Peoples Charter for Health and the International Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel.
While these are not recent documents and nor are they perfect, they hold key tenets that are relevant today, particularly the centring of all people.
As argued above, current discourse is reducing migrant workers to ‘others’, whether this is done culturally and racially by the far right, or as bodies to work, as we’ve seen in some business and health corners.
In public health to show our support for the migrant workers amongst us, we must begin to talk about health workforce capacity differently.
Migrants are our colleagues, our team members, our managers, our collaborators, our carers. They are our friends, they are part of our families, they are more than numbers and workers.
Changing the framing to one rooted in belonging is the most powerful way to reject the divisive commentary. It is a refusal to comply with othering and a refusal to reduce migrants to an assessment of who is deemed as of worth.
• The authors wish to acknowledge Adelaide Chiang, Adelaide University, for her contributions to this article.
The art work
The artwork, Floor, is by Do Ho Suh (South Korean, b. 1962). It is polyvinyl chloride figures, glass plates, phenolic sheets, polyurethane resin, various dimensions. Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Gift of Ann M. Stack, 2004.152. © Do-Ho Suh.
Penelope Smith suggested this image to accompany the article because the artist made sure the humans were looking up, so they aren’t downtrodden. Also, the artist was thinking about the individual versus the collective and the idea of the anonymous – in this case, the anonymous health worker. “When I saw this artwork, before I read anything about it, I was overwhelmed by the idea of the collective and the power of the collective. It spoke to my values but also my hopes,” Smith said.
See Croakey’s archive of articles on populism and health
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