07/09/2025
The future
“Australian Immigration: Rule by Bureaucrat.
Australia is to bureaucratic administration what Russians are to chess. It was born a police state, evolved into a genteel British administocracy, and then following WWII and in line with the American New Deal, its bureaucracy exploded. Rule by committee has been an Australian specialty.
Abul Rizvi, who was Deputy Secretary of the Department of Immigration and managed Australia’s migration program from 1995 to 2007, is the perfect encapsulation of Australia’s Rule by Bureaucrat.
For Rizvi, migration is a technocratic puzzle to be solved, and he and his colleagues have the answer. Politicians are fickle dunderheads who need to be nudged towards it. The public are best kept out of it altogether. Australia’s immigration policy is on rails. It can be managed up or down, but you best not worry your pretty head over it — Rizvi’s caste of bureaucrats have their hand firmly on the wheel.
Rizvi’s remarkable admission goes like this.1 It turns out that Rizvi was the guy who persuaded former Prime Minister Howard and the Liberals to turn on the immigration gasket in 2001. This was done via subterfuge. A pact with universities. They would be handed control over international student numbers, from whom they profited (do you ask the barber if you need a haircut?). Their role would be to skill up migrants because there were insufficient skilled migrants to draw from. What happened was exactly what you’d expect: international student visas exploded. 108,827 student visas in 1998 grew to 786,891 in 2023, making it by far the highest percentage of international students in the world (almost 3x the runner-up’s per capita intake — the UK). Rizvi says Howard was afraid of losing control of migration via this scheme. And that is exactly what happened.
To Rizvi, all is going to plan. The number he is focused on optimising is population age. (We’re all hearing this for the first time.) Rizvi’s conception of his job seemed to be ‘pump immigration to slow down population aging because fertility is declining’. This has a name for it: managed decline. An indeterminate pessimist's view of the world. Which makes sense for a technocrat in a rudderless nation. Handling the levers of power to manage for a single number, denying any trade-offs,2 blithely unaware that he was presiding over one of the greatest policy and cultural experiments in Australian history.”
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This is a good article by Cam Murray, (link in comments) not just about immigration, but how bureaucrats run Australia.
The only point missing in the article is that Kevin Rudd poured fuel on Howards immigration recklessness by allowing foreign students to buy houses.
It’s true bureaucrats run rings around politicans because they are fickel dunderheads.
The major parties nuture these fickel dunderheads because they exclude anyone who is not afraid to call a spade a spade.
That is why we need a new political party that is run by the people and not party apparatchiks. I.e. yes men.
If you want to have a real say inside a political party that will listen to its members, please consider joining www.peoplefirstparty.au
We are setting up branches across the country with the goal of establishing a grassroots political party to implement change that will put Australians First.
