Thanks Grappler,
here is the transcript on immigration.
Q+A with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese
VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mx8k9k83sWwQuestion
8:52
Why is Australia continuing to maintain record high immigration levels
during the worst housing crisis in the nation’s history?
Hard working Australians are being pushed into homelessness.
Albo-
11:42
On immigration – particularly when it comes to housing – 3 quick points.
One –
is that the biggest thing that you could do –
area where you could reduce the amount is in students because some of that frankly was being abused –
we tried to do that through legislation –
Peter Dutton opposed that so it wouldn’t go through –
it didn’t go through the Senate so we’ve done it another way.
The second area of immigration is in skills we prioritized construction skills
uh – the viewer spoke about housing –
We want people to come here arr who are involved in construction
And that is an important point and
the third point –
that we won’t do that Peter Dutton will do is the $5 million golden ticket visas uh for people who are very wealthy to come here who obviously they’re not going to start up businesses straight away they they buy houses and we don’t think people should buy their way to the front of the queue and it opens up as the independent advice to government why we got it abolished it opens up to money laundering and a whole range of problems as well.
Patricia Karvelas –
PM we got a lot of questions – more than we can ask about immigration –
people expressing that they feel like immigration levels were too high –
Do you concede they got a bit too high?
Albo,
When the borders were lifted there was always going to be a spike –
Australians coming home, visitors coming here for the first time –
uh students whereas they would begin in a 4-year degree coming
one year 2025, 2026, 7,8 –
they all came at once – who’d been doing their courses online as well so it was always going to be a spike and indeed the population figures now are lower
than what was projected to be the case in 2019 –
I’ll make this point –
There’s only two times that more than 9 million visas have been
issued in any one year in Australia –
both times Peter Dutton was the minister.