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Inside AusPol

Inside AusPol

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This podcast features enlightening discussions with professionals to explain pressing issues and provide partinent facts about unbiased journalism and counter misinformation and in-dept conversation with experts.

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  • Labour sets a hard migration target and admits someone will pay for it

    Labour sets a hard migration target and admits someone will pay for it
    Sep 19 2026
    Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has told the country the government’s migration forecasts are no longer forecasts. They’re targets, 245,000 net overseas migration this financial year and 225,000 the next, and he’s tying them explicitly to the price of housing.Burke unveiled the detail at the National Press Club on Thursday, in a speech titled “The Work of Managing the Migration Program: Who Arrives, Who Stays, Who Leaves.” It had been delayed six weeks amid reported disagreement inside cabinet.It arrives as a package of regulatory changes rather than legislation. Compromise talks between Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Angus Taylor broke down last week over a list of Coalition demands, including tougher rules linked to ISIS-connected partners and a push to tie migration numbers to housing completions.What changesInternational students will no longer be able to bring family members on most visas, with carve-outs for students from Pacific and ASEAN countries and some postgraduate courses. Working holiday makers move onto a ballot system: second-year places capped at 45,000, third-year places cut from 31,000 to 5,000.Visa processing is re-prioritised toward construction, health, agriculture, fisheries and teaching, after sustained complaints from those sectors about being outpaced by other visa categories. Migration agents who encourage “non-meritorious” claims face sanctions or deregistration.A hundred additional compliance officers and 250 extra detention beds are earmarked for pursuing visa overstayers. The skilled-migration points test is redesigned to weight a trade qualification the same as a university degree.Burke also flagged two further changes he wants but currently can’t deliver without Parliament: a cap on international student arrivals through an expression-of-interest mechanism, and tighter rules on protection-visa claims from countries where the refusal rate already exceeds 85 per cent.The same day, the Australian Bureau of Statistics released its own population data, showing net overseas migration had already fallen to 292,100 in the year to March, the lowest reading since mid-2022, and below the 309,500 recorded the year before. Migration was easing before Burke’s speech. The new targets are designed to keep pushing it down further and faster, from a base that peaked at a record 538,000 in 2022-23 after the pandemic-era net loss of 85,100 people in 2020-21.The word doing the workThe shift from forecast to target matters more than it might read at first pass. A forecast is a prediction a government can revise without much political cost. A target is something a minister is accountable for delivering. If net overseas migration lands above 245,000 this year, that’s now a policy failure rather than an external shock: Burke’s own number, on his own record. Setting a hard number this way suggests the political cost of leaving migration levels open-ended has come to outweigh the risk of missing a stated target, which says something about how central housing pressure has become inside cabinet’s calculations.Appreciate the newsletter but aren’t ready to pay for a subscription? Grab us a beer or snag the exclusive ad spot at the top of next week's newsletter.Who says they’ll pay for itBurke didn’t dress the changes up as cost-free. Asked about the economic flow-on, he said he “can’t quarantine any sector” of the economy from the impact. The National Farmers’ Federation took him up on it directly, warning that cutting backpacker numbers will hit the workforce that picks and packs Australian produce. Its chief executive put the consequence in plain terms: “We will see a lift in the price of food. We will see emptier supermarkets.”The criticism isn’t confined to industry. One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has spent months campaigning for deeper migration cuts than Labor has proposed, yet her own plan, unveiled just days before Burke’s speech, didn’t go as far on backpacker visas as what he has now announced. That detail complicates a simple reading of the changes as Labor chasing One Nation’s base.Neither the Coalition, reportedly circling a target of 150,000 to 170,000, nor One Nation, which wants net-negative migration through a 750,000-visa cut over three years, has locked in a final position. Both proposed levels sit below Burke’s own targets. That puts the coming argument over how far and how fast to cut, not whether cutting is warranted at all. Every major party now agrees on that much.Why it mattersMigration policy has become inseparable from housing policy in this government’s own framing, and Thursday’s speech is the clearest statement yet of that link. It’s also a reminder that regulatory action doesn’t only run in one direction. The industries built around the settings Burke just changed (international education, horticulture, tourism, the migration advice sector) now have to adjust to a policy shift made by ...
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    13 min
  • Labour's $560 million grants scheme sent three dollars to safe seats for every dollar sent to the Coalition

    Labour's $560 million grants scheme sent three dollars to safe seats for every dollar sent to the Coalition
    Sep 14 2026
    An independent investigation into a closed-door federal infrastructure fund found no link between where the money went and where it was needed, only between where it went and who was likely to win the seat.For every dollar the federal government spent in a Coalition-held seat through its $560 million Major and Local Community Infrastructure Programme, it spent three dollars twenty in a seat notionally held by Labour.That is the headline finding of an independent Centre for Public Integrity investigation published this week. It sits at the centre of a growing row over how the Albanese government decided who got a slice of the country’s largest single-purpose community grants fund.The MLCI programme was set up to deliver on more than half a billion dollars in election commitments: sports facilities, parks, and community centres. Unlike most federal grant schemes, it ran on an invitation-only basis.The government selected roughly 220 projects and invited them to apply. There was no open or competitive process, and electorates left off the list had no way to be considered.The Centre for Public Integrity’s analysis, reported by the ABC’s Jake Evans for 7.30, found 73 per cent of the funding went to seats notionally held by Labour at the 2025 election, 23 per cent to Coalition-held seats and 4 per cent to everyone else.Breaking the labour-seat total down further: about $220 million went to marginal seats. Labour was actively contesting, and about $270 million went to seats it already held safely. Just $66 million was promised across every seat where Labour wasn’t competitive.The centre also tested whether the pattern could be explained by genuine need rather than politics. It compared funding against household income data and found no relationship. In fact, the poorest electorates in the country received a below-average share of grants.It found no link either to a measure of “community connectedness”, a proxy for how much infrastructure a place actually lacks. Forty-five electorates received no invitation and no funding at all.“Prima facie, it looks like the misuse of public money or serious pork-barrelling, as it’s sometimes called,” the centre’s chair, former justice Anthony Whealy, told 7.30. Executive director Catherine Williams summarised the imbalance in blunter terms: “for every dollar spent in a Coalition seat, $3.20 was spent in a notionally ALP-held seat.”Appreciate the newsletter but aren’t ready to pay for a subscription? Grab us a beer or snag the exclusive ad spot at the top of next week's newsletter.The golf club in the Prime Minister’s seatThe single detail driving the most attention is a $6 million grant to Marrickville Golf Club, the only golf club invited into the entire program and located in Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s seat of Grayndler. The grant covers clubhouse refurbishment, an accessibility ramp and septic system repairs.ABC News revealed this week that Albanese has held an honorary membership at the club since around 2012, by his own account to parliament, and that it was never declared on his register of interests.He has said he holds no member card, has not visited the clubhouse in years, and was not personally involved in the decision to fund it. Those claims have not been disputed by any reporting to date. What is not in dispute is that the membership existed undeclared and that his own electorate’s golf club was the sole one funded nationally.Asked about it in Question Time, Albanese defended the grant on its merits and framed the scrutiny as an ordinary part of representing an electorate well: “If you’re a good local member, a whole lot of people will give you honorary membership of things. If you’re a good local member who stands up for your electorate, that will occur.”That framing sits uneasily next to the experience of Indi, the north-east Victorian seat held by independent MP Helen Haines, one of the 45 electorates that received nothing under MLCI.A local club in her electorate, Rutherglen Golf Club, nearly a century old and in need of repairs to asbestos-affected walls, white-ant damage and a sloping floor, asked Haines how to apply for MLCI funding. She had no answer, because there was no invitation to be had.“I was shocked by the scale of this, by the depth of this,” Haines told 7.30. Club member Ian Grimes put it more simply: “It just feels unfair and frustrating. We’re not asking for special treatment.”The government’s defenceInfrastructure Minister Catherine King has defended the programme as consistent with longstanding grant guidelines: ministers do not decide on applications inside their own electorate (a different cabinet colleague does), and every grant awarded is published on AusTender.She has also pointed to $1.7 billion made available separately through open, competitive schemes, Growing Regions and Thriving Suburbs.None of that addresses how the original 220 projects were chosen for invitation in ...
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    13 min
  • ASIC reveals 551 audit misconduct complaints, then faces questions about its own response

    ASIC reveals 551 audit misconduct complaints, then faces questions about its own response
    Sep 4 2026
    Australia’s corporate regulator told a federal parliamentary inquiry on Friday that the big four accounting firms have logged 551 complaints of alleged audit misconduct since mid-2023. But for the first time in this long-running inquiry, it wasn’t the accounting firms facing the toughest questions. It was the regulator itself.What ASIC told the committeeASIC’s executive director of enforcement and compliance, Chris Savundra, told the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services in Sydney that KPMG, PwC, EY and Deloitte have together received 551 whistleblower complaints alleging audit misconduct since 1 July 2023.ASIC chair Sarah Court clarified the scope: the complaints relate to whether registered auditors misused or shared confidential client information, and ASIC used its compulsory information-gathering powers to obtain the underlying material.Court was careful not to overstate the figure. “I don’t want to suggest that there’s, you know, 550 serious whistleblower issues,” she told the hearing, adding that ASIC still has significant work ahead assessing which complaints warrant further investigation or enforcement action.When Greens Senator Barbara Pocock asked whether the 551 complaints were spread roughly evenly across the four firms, in the order of 125 to 130 each, Court asked that the hearing move off-camera before answering. As a result, the per-firm breakdown was not made public at Friday’s session.A tabled report calls KPMG’s disclosures “deceptive”The sharpest material to emerge from Friday’s hearing was a report by law firm Allens, tabled at the inquiry, examining how KPMG handled the whistleblower complaint that triggered the broader audit-leaks scandal: the alleged misuse of confidential Lendlease board papers to support KPMG’s audit-tender bids for Westpac and Dexus.Allens found that KPMG’s 2024 and 2025 Transparency Reports omitted any mention of an active whistleblower complaint, “despite indisputable evidence one existed.” The firm’s conclusion was blunt: those reports were “not transparent at all but misleading — at best deceptive, at worst fraudulent.”KPMG had classified the original 2024 complaint as an HR matter rather than an audit-quality or transparency issue, which is how it came to be left out of documents that regulators, investors and the public rely on.A KPMG spokesperson told the ABC the firm is “progressing work to address integrity issues, strengthen accountability and rebuild trust” under an action plan launched in June, while acknowledging “there is more to do.” KPMG has already cut almost 400 jobs this year following the scandal, after clients including Macquarie ended their engagements with the firm.Appreciate the newsletter but aren’t ready to pay for a subscription? Grab us a beer or snag the exclusive ad spot at the top of next week's newsletter.The regulator under scrutinySenator Pocock used Friday’s hearing to challenge KPMG leadership’s repeated assurances of reform. She noted the committee had “spent hours listening to the leadership of KPMG… telling us that they’ve turned over a new leaf, that they are a new leadership, ‘there is new culture, trust us,’ and yet here we are.”Her expectation, she said, is that new leadership “requires delivery of outcomes,” and that KPMG will be called back before the committee if it doesn’t deliver.But the sharpest challenge to ASIC itself came from a separate whistleblower, whose June 2026 email to the regulator was also tabled at the inquiry. The email, following an earlier disclosure attempt in December 2021, accused ASIC of a “condescending tone” and argued the regulator “will need to be dragged kicking and screaming to take action that has been clearly available against at least one of the big four.”The whistleblower went further, alleging ASIC had “substantially done nothing bar tacitly endorse and further encourage misconduct,” despite auditor misconduct being listed among ASIC’s own stated regulatory priorities for both 2025 and 2026.ASIC rejected that characterisation in a statement to the ABC: “ASIC takes all whistleblower reports and allegations of misconduct seriously… assesses and progresses matters in a timely and methodical manner.” The regulator said a number of investigations and enforcement actions are already underway.Two further details complicate any simple read of the relationship between ASIC and the firms it regulates. Senator Pocock said ASIC signed new contracts with KPMG in March 2026, the same period the scandal became public. And the current chair of the Tax Practitioners Board, Peter de Cure, spent 25 years as a KPMG partner before taking the role.Neither fact establishes wrongdoing on its own, but both feed the underlying question this inquiry keeps circling back to: whether Australia’s audit regulators are positioned closely enough to the firms they oversee to regulate them ...
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    10 min
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