About this episode

Martin Parkinson discusses the complexities of Australia's migration policy and its economic implications.

Part 1 of a three-part immigration series this week. Mark Cully (history) drops Thursday; Mike Pezzullo (acculturation, social cohesion, security) drops Friday.  Martin Parkinson ran the Australian Treasury (2011-2014), then the Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet (2015-2019). He's also thought deeply about the economics of migration policy, not just in those roles, but also in his past academic life and as chair of the Australian government's 2023 Migration Review (the most significant review of our migration system in more than three decades). We discuss the central but underappreciated issue with Australian migration policy today: we've drifted into a quasi-guest-worker system without anyone voting for it. About 2.3 million people in Australia now go to sleep here every night with work rights, but without being citizens or permanent residents. We also work through how migration affects living standards, the "Soviet-style" occupation list that governs our skilled program, how to attract true global talent, how international student fees came to subsidise roughly half of Australian university research, and what should be the upper and lower bounds for net migration…

People in this episode

Host: Joe Walker

Guest: Martin Parkinson

Topics covered

• immigration policy
• migration economics
• temporary migrants
• living standards
• geopolitical weight

Keywords

• migration
• economics
• Australia
• temporary migrants
• policy review
• geopolitics
• living standards

Sponsors

Eucalyptus

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Australian Treasury, Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet, Australian government's 2023 Migration Review

More episodes of The Joe Walker Podcast

• How Can Australia Get a Piece of the AI Action? — Danielle Wood · June 3, 2026 · 1h 39m
• How Australia Actually Selects and Integrates Migrants — Mike Pezzullo [Immigration Series] · May 21, 2026 · 3h 23m
• "Bigger and Different": The Six Decades That Remade Australia — Mark Cully [Immigration Series] · May 21, 2026 · 2h 28m

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