Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Australia's success as a prosperous and successful democracy is inseparable from the contribution of migrants. Migrants strengthen our economy, enrich our social fabric and increase the resilience of our communities. In seconding the member for Warringah's motion, I recognise that migrants are not only central to our national identity; they are key to Australia's economic and cultural prosperity. Australians understand this. The Scanlon Foundation Research Institute's The 2024 mapping social cohesion report found that 85 per cent of Australians agreed that multiculturalism has been good for this country, with 82 per cent believing that immigrants improve Australian society.

In recent years, real and urgent economic strain, a national housing shortage, international conflicts and an increasingly polarised public debate have rendered migrant communities more vulnerable to negative and harmful political narratives. Politicians like Pauline Hanson have repeatedly chosen the low road by politicising immigration for their own ends. The coalition has proposed to cut permanent and net migration but without a coherent plan for how we could do that without hurting our economy. Labor's approach has been to fail to specify migration targets while allowing others to imply that immigrants are at fault for the policy failures of successive governments.

The reality is that net migration has fallen significantly in the last two years, after significant, albeit belated, tightening of student visa policies. But we do still have a significant issue with onshore backlogs for both permanent and temporary migration. For the first time, we have more than 400,000 individuals in this country on bridging visas. This is an issue which started when Peter Dutton and Mike Pezzullo oversaw Home Affairs. It worsened after COVID, when the coalition stomped on the immigration accelerator, and then it consolidated under the first term of the Albanese government.

We need to discuss immigration levels in an open, honest and transparent way. Australia's birthrate is at a record low. Immigration is a major driver of population growth. Migration is playing an increasingly critical role in maintaining our quality of life and supporting Australia's long-term economic stability. Without ongoing migration, our workforce will shrink, threatening our capacity to deliver essential services like aged, child and health care. Jobs and Skills Australia data from 2025 shows ongoing unmet labour demand in key sectors such as health care, education, construction and utilities. These are shortages which can be resolved by careful, targeted migration intake.

Migrants increase our economic productivity and resilience. They tend to be younger and more educated than the general population, contributing to productivity and to wage growth. They diversify our labour market, and they often demonstrate great entrepreneurship. They own about one-third of all Australian small businesses. These enterprises translate into job creation, community investment and new enterprise development. Our universities and TAFEs also develop clarity around overseas student numbers, which have a huge impact on institutions like Swinburne University of Technology, which is in my electorate of Kooyong.

Some Australian media outlets, think tanks and politicians avoid honest debates and conversations about immigration. They prefer to mislead and to foster discord. Their narratives oversimplify complex issues, unfairly target migrant communities and risk undermining the mutual respect and shared identity that underpin Australia's multicultural success. They create division and they distract from the evidence based policy solutions needed for the real challenges that face all Australians.

I'm very proud and honoured to represent an electorate in which a third of constituents were born overseas, having come from 150 countries of origin, and as many as one in six speak a language other than English at home. I celebrate each and every one of those nations and those cultures, and I thank those who have come from overseas and who choose to make Kooyong their home. That's why I'm pleased to second this motion calling for careful, responsible, evidence based immigration policy—policy that rejects rhetoric that inflames division and recognises that multiculturalism enriches our culture and our democracy and the richness and freedom of our society.

See this speech in context