Australia now has a migration program that fails to attract the most highly skilled migrants and fails to enable business to efficiently access workers. At the same time, there is clear evidence of systemic exploitation and the risk of an emerging permanently temporary underclass. Cumulatively, these factors erode public confidence.

While we have long prided ourselves on the focus on permanent residence in our migration program, we now have more than 1.8 million temporary migrants living in Australia with the legal ability to participate in our labour market. They are working in all parts of our economy, in some cases supporting key sectors and the delivery of critical services.

Many of these people wish to make Australia home but too often face tangled and lengthy pathways to permanent residence. They deserve clarity about their opportunities to remain. It is not in Australia’s national interest to maintain a large proportion of temporary entrants with no pathway to citizenship as it undermines our democratic resilience and social cohesion.

The Panel, tasked with reviewing the migration program, has sought to take a balanced view of the challenges presented. They have had to consider the entire program in all its complexity. While some complexity is inevitable, the design of the system, with around 100 visa subclasses, is overly complex and its operations opaque.

The Panel has identified five objectives, discussed in further detail in this report, on which to build the program:

1. Building Australia’s prosperity by lifting productivity, meeting labour supply needs and by supporting exports
2. Enabling a fair labour market, including by complementing the jobs, wages and conditions of domestic workers
3. Building a community of Australians
4. Protecting Australia’s interests in the world.
5. Providing a fast, efficient and fair system

The Australian government has considered the review’s findings to inform an outline of the Migration Strategy.