- Improving Research Capacity
- Throughout the evidence received by the Committee for this inquiry there was a strong theme of attracting migrants with research and academic qualifications to enable a vibrant education and research ecosystem in Australia’s society. There was also consistent referencing of research outcomes and data analysis from a wide range of sources to support the witness’/submitter’s argument on how best to improve the existing migration system.
- However, shortcomings in the capacity for the Australian Government to undertake research, or enable research of, migration trends and factors to inform evidence-based policy was acknowledged in the evidence received by the Committee and raised as an area of concern regarding the ability for research to inform better policy outcomes.
- As mentioned above, while many submitters and witnesses referenced research outcomes in their evidence to the Committee, that research was often drawn from disparate sources, ranging from academia, to privately engaged consultants, to research undertaken by NGOs and migration advocacy peak bodies themselves. Data presented by the Australian Bureau of Statistics was referenced regularly, but without a large proportion of analysis of that data by government.
- While the Committee recognises the value of this data and research, the drivers behind the commissioning of such efforts and the outcomes can sometimes be skewed by the aims of the research undertaken or the methods applied.
- The ability for the nation, through government, to understand the drivers behind migration inputs, and also the outcomes once migrants join Australian society, is a critical element of migration (as well as economic, social, and employment) policy consideration, development, and implementation. Such research is also vitally needed if migration is to play a central role in Australia’s nation building endeavours.
- To this end, the Committee was concerned to discover the continuing absence of specialised and directed migration research capability within government itself, or enabled by government, in recent years. The Committee did receive some evidence of targeted research efforts within government, but not in a consistent or centralised manner.
Centralised Research Capabilities
Previous Considerations
11.7In the late 1980s the Australian Government established the Bureau of Immigration Research, which became the Bureau of Immigration and Population Research in 1993, and the eventual Bureau of Immigration, Multicultural and Population Research (the Bureau) in 1994, an independent, professional research body, created within the then Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs.
11.8The Bureau’s objective was stated as:
…to enhance understanding of the economic, social, environmental and other impacts of immigration, population and multicultural change, both to raise the level of public debate and to aid in the formation of government policy.
11.9The Bureau, as a dedicated institution to undertake and deliver targeted research and analysis, was a resource that could be used by the Government to inform policy and program design, up to its closure in 1996 to meet budget savings measures.
11.10Between that date and 2013, some elements of the Bureau’s research capabilities were continued by government, but not in a coordinated fashion.
11.11As commented on by this Committee’s predecessor in its 2013 Inquiry into Migration and Multiculturalism in Australia, the ability for the Australian Government to coordinate and commission research was a role of the then Department of Immigration and Citizenship, through the then Policy Innovation, Research and Evaluation Unit.
11.12That inquiry found that while there was ebbing and flowing capacity within government over time to conduct research and deliver useful policy from such research, the Committee agreed with concern ‘about the decline in research capacity, especially qualitative research, relating to immigration, cultural diversity, settlement and participation’.
11.13That inquiry ultimately led to the following recommendation:
Recommendation 15
The Committee recommends the establishment of a government funded, independent collaborative institute for excellence in research into multicultural affairs with functions similar to that of the former Bureau of Immigration, Multicultural and Population Research.
The institute should have a statutory framework articulating key principles of multiculturalism, functions in research and advice to government, and a cross sectoral independent board.
This institute should actively engage with local communities, private business and non-government organisations and provide data for better informed policy.
The qualitative and quantitative research capabilities of the institute must enable up-to-date and easily accessible data and research analysis on social and multicultural trends.
More dedicated research into long-term migration trends occurring within Australia and the social effects of migration—such as the local impacts of migration on cultural diversity and social inclusion within Australian society—should be supported.
The Committee particularly recommends an increased emphasis on qualitative data collection.
11.14However, as identified in the current inquiry by Dr Andrew Theophanous, the Australian Government in 2017 responded to that report and its recommendations, by supporting the recommendations for research capability in principle, but not supporting any concrete action. The response stated that the then Government:
…does not consider that all of the suggested approaches, such as the establishment of an independent research institute, are necessary to achieve the intent of the Committee’s recommendations in this area.
The Australian Government’s Multicultural Access and Equity Policy recognises the significant role that data plays in the delivery of effective government programs and services. The Policy encourages government departments and agencies to collect, analyse and share data on the cultural and linguistic diversity of their client base in order to facilitate the reduction of barriers inhibiting access to government services and the effective achievement of program outcomes.
A range of research assessing migrant settlement outcomes is currently being undertaken through collaboration across government agencies and in partnership with researchers and academics. The work includes data matching and longitudinal studies, and will continue to build national capacity.
11.15Dr Theophanous also noted recommendation 8 in the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee’s February 2021 report Nationhood, national identity and democracy:
The committee recommends that the Australian government establishes and
resources a national research centre on migration, citizenship and social
cohesion, to monitor:
- flows of migration and migrant settlement;
- issues of diversity and cohesion;
- affiliation and identity;
- civic participation and engagement;
- evaluation of service provision and access; and
- gaps in existing research.
- Unfortunately, the 18 recommendations of that report were not substantively addressed when a response was tabled in May 2024, stating ‘[t]he Government notes all recommendations. However, given the passage of time since this report was tabled, a substantive Government response is no longer appropriate’.
Current Mechanisms in Government
11.17When questioned about the data collection, research, and analysis capabilities of the Department of Home Affairs (the Department), the then Secretary, made the following comments:
In terms of research, data collection and the like, I put a contention back in response to both the premise as well as the inference that I draw from your question, Madam Chair. Has there been a loss of data collection? No. All the statistical capability, the data collection and our ability to understand who's coming across the border and who's getting visas was maintained throughout that period. We've got a deeply expert statistical team, a data team and a data science team, and they're people who are experts in both data science and immigration. All of the statistics that we're able to generate for this committee and others come from those areas.
11.18Secretary Pezzullo then expanded into an explanation of why migration data and employment outcome analysis and research was not currently centralised in the Department:
I'm responding to what I think was the implied premise of your question, which was that, if you have a deeply expert immigration department, they can do this sort of end-to-end understanding of what's happening in the labour market and the arrival of immigrants and their settlement and integration into the labour market. Yes, there was that capability, and it was completely disconnected from the employment department. Both of my predecessors started to put in place transitional arrangements that I, if you like, consummated and finalised to in fact transfer it.
To this day, it's still vested in the employment department because they've got the holistic view on how the labour market is working and where the skills hot spots are. In combination with other departments, such as the agriculture department, they need to tell us who they need and what types of skills they need and we'll go and get them. So we're more the recruiting part. If Australia were a corporation, we'd be the recruiting part of the HR department. We're not setting the strategic direction. Otherwise, you end up having two visions of the employment market, two visions of the labour market and two visions of what kind of human inputs you need into your economy. Then you had Treasury over here separately working on population. That, to a number of us, appeared to be rather odd.
We've got a very deep knowledge of how the programs work, of where the talent is in our applications and of where to go and recruit. We provide input to Treasury, as they think about population, and we provide inputs to the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, as it's now constituted. But we don't see ourselves as leading on employment dynamics, because you'd then have two departments, potentially, with a degree of policy and intellectual tension between them. So we provide inputs, but there's a very clear lead as to who the employment minister is and who the employment secretary is.
11.19This current mechanism was challenged by the Migration Hub at ANU, who submitted that a ‘by-product of over-securitization and over-centralization in Australia’s current migration system is that decisions are too often made by senior officials parachuted in from distantly related portfolios, with little or no specialist training or operational understanding of migration that would allow them to speak meaningfully about the effects of policies’.
11.20The Migration Hub also contended that the lack of a real understanding of the impact of migration policies on the ground (due to decentralised research and migration functions residing in Home Affairs), leads to artificial focuses on perceived priorities, fuelled by lower quality journalistic commentary. This results in:
…periodic moral panics…that migration policy is often the outcome of ad hoc defensive responses to political attacks, rather than the outcome of well-reasoned deliberation based on rigorous evidence. As well as thinking about where in government the migration bureaucracy should sit in Australia’s future migration system, there is a need to consider:
- What institutions around society need to be equipped with knowledge and skills about how migration works and how to manage it?
- How can Australia provide the necessary capacity in those institutions where it does not exist, so that a wider range of stakeholders can contribute to better-informed public discussion of migration and its implications?
- This contention ultimately led to the Migration Hub suggesting that a National Institution on Human Migration and Mobility could ‘conduct rigorous, independent research and analysis, to inform and advise the government of the day on policy for the present, and for the future’.
- The Migration Hub argued that such an institution should stand separate to government, think-tanks, and NGOs, to ensure that research outcomes stand independent to political and industry drivers, being convened from ‘leading migration experts across academia, policy, non-government organisations, and industry, to share knowledge, collect evidence, question assumptions, and inform solutions to major challenges related to the movement of people’.
- In public hearing evidence, Professor Alan Gamlen, Director of the Migration Hub, expanded on international exemplars, and the possibilities for an independent institute domestically:
There's also at various times been the International Migration Institute; a range of other initiatives around these two pillars of forced migration; and the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society. So, yes, there is a model, and I think we need something like that down here. Australia has been really a world [leader]—I always say that Australia has some of the best migration policymaking in the world but also some of the worst. We have often led the world, being a classical immigration country, in innovating in migration regulations and in building a socially cohesive, migrant-founded society. But I think in recent years, partly because of this loss of capacity that I've described, we risk no longer having that status. I think that building capacity through having an interdisciplinary, broadly focused institute that looks at how people move around over space is critical to rebuilding that capacity.
The Need for Reform
11.24The Committee received other evidence spread throughout submissions and hearing evidence of the importance of research and evidence to inform outcomes, but also to demonstrate that community concerns and consultation are recognised, centralised, and inform migration policy outcomes.
11.25Identifying a need for centralised consideration and coordination of migration data and policy outcomes, linked to employment outcomes, was emphasised by primary producers and business owners in Robinvale in Victoria:
I ask, 'Is this microphone on?' because we haven't been listened to. We've been served these people with these penalty rates and they are not fit for service. I've said this at a previous inquiry. If you go to a lawyer's office and ask them to fix your sink, they'll say, 'Go to a plumber.' It is the same for us. If we ask for a particular skill set of workers, it is ludicrous that we are being delivered a totally opposite skill set of people to what we need, which then equates to whether these guys can make money in the job that they can. If you are asking a plumber to have the same skill set as a lawyer and to walk into a lawyer's office and be competent as a lawyer, it's not dissimilar to a South Pacific islander coming and picking table grapes at a profitable level. We know that. We've tried to say that so many times, but we are not being listened to.
11.26When hearing from primary producers and businesses about the need for better outcomes and reform in evidence-based policy creation, the Committee heard recurring requests for:
- Government to develop more effective processes for consultation, where outcomes are tied to concrete migration and employment solutions; and
- Government to review existing reports and inquiries and implement appropriate recommendations, so stakeholders do not end up engaging on the same issue through multiple channels.
- When questioned about current research capacity and the potential need for an institution to provide centralised research, data and analysis, a number of witnesses agreed on the merit of the proposal. As one such example, Ms Catherine Scarth, Chief Executive Office, AMES Australia responded:
…there are smatterings of research undertaken by different institutions, including AMES. We have a small policy and research unit. But there is no major coordinated national body tasked with tracking the experiences of all migrant pathway groups and being in a position to make recommendations to government about streamlining or whatever that might be. So I think that is a gap. It would enhance the efforts of the immigration department unit within Home Affairs if it had that level of intellectual capacity to provide sound, evidence based policy advice to policy-makers.
11.28Ms Scarth further elaborated that any such institution ‘…needs to be ongoing and independent, because to trace and understand patterns and the impact of policies on migration and cohesion takes a longitudinal study, not sporadic inquiries. It needs to be dedicated research that can analyse data, collect data and have access to data. Often what occurs is researchers try and do small bodies of work but they don't necessarily have access to the data, and we're not necessarily collecting the right data. So at least a body like that could also provide advice about what kind of data we need to be collecting’.
11.29The NSW Government submitted a number of recommendations to the inquiry, drawing from and building on submissions made to both the Employment White Paper and the Migration System Review. One of these recommendations (number 23) identified under the banner of ‘[t]he role of settlement services and vocational training in utilising migrant experiences, knowledge, and opportunities’ stated:
Improve data collection, coordination and sharing mechanisms to provide states and territories with timely opportunities for input and information about incoming migrants. their skills and potential needs, including the enhancement of the Continuous Survey of Australian Migrants.
11.30This identification of data and knowledge access and delivery to states and territories is an important acknowledgement of the requirement for open sources of migration and employment data and research outcomes to stakeholders wider than the Australian Government.
11.31In their submission to the inquiry, Estrin Saul Migration Specialists and Welcoming Disability, noted that despite the continuing migration policy focus on potential costs to the community of granting visas to migrants with pre-existing health concerns, there was a historical acknowledgement of the lack of a mechanism of quantifying that cost:
Other than protecting public health, the main argument used in support of the current health requirement concerns notional costs to the community. The Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) pointed out in a 2007 review of the administration of the Health requirements of the Migration Act, that the Department of Immigration (then, DIAC) did not have the technology in place, nor any sort of adequate information gathering structures, to determine the actual cost of the migrants who had been granted or refused visas, and put in place recommendations that would enable the Department to collect such data. There is no evidence that the Department has put in place those recommendations for data gathering.
11.32When questioned about the state of the future migration program for the next 30 years, the Grattan Institute identified that a lack accessible information prevents informed opinion:
Grattan does not have a view about what the optimal size of the permanent migrant intake is. That's because we don't think that we have enough information yet to really know what the full sets of benefits are that you get from the migration program to weigh up against the costs that migrants do impose on the broader community via increased demand for housing at a time, say, when supply is short.
11.33Settlement Services International identified a number of considerations for the Committee in responding to the first Term of Reference for the inquiry — The role of permanent migration in nation building, cultural diversity, and social cohesion — but emphasised that research and data plays a central role in guiding policy:
Dedicated research funded by the Commonwealth could generate evidence to better guide all aspects of migration policy by undertaking its own research, supporting greater consistency across immigration and census datasets and making them accessible to researchers. This should include providing research outputs that document migration policy outcomes for different cohorts (e.g., temporary migrants, women) and jurisdictions (e.g., national, State/Territory and LGAs).
11.34This observation led to their recommendation that ‘[t]he Australian Government should invest in building the evidence-base for the migration program. Ideally, this investment would establish a stand-alone agency, such as the Bureau of Immigration and Population Research which existed until the mid-1990s.’
11.35Mr Rafael Azeredo submitted on the issue of protracted temporariness for migrants residing in Australia for extended periods without Permanent Resident status, drawing on his own doctoral research. Mr Azeredo identified an inability to draw authoritative conclusions for his research, acknowledging that ‘[t]he exact number of migrants in this situation is not clear, as there is no information publicly available on how long migrants on temporary visas have been residing in Australia for’, with an acknowledgement that ‘[m]ore research into the reasons why migrants are unable to access the Migration Program is needed.’
11.36Mr Azeredo submitted the following recommendation:
Fostering research and improving the transparency around protracted temporariness. There is limited data publicly available that allows for a clear analysis of protracted migration temporariness trends in Australia. Data on Australia’s Estimated Resident Population (ERP) on temporary visas and on the average number of years migrants remain living in Australia on temporary visas before obtaining PR status, for example, would be valuable in that direction. Improving transparency around this issue would also help to evaluate whether the recent reforms to the Migration Program will be effective in improving the transition from temporary to permanent status. Promoting research into protracted temporariness, including into the reasons why migrants are unable to access the Migration Program, would also be beneficial for research informed policymaking.
Committee Comment
11.37The Committee appreciates the diverse opinions provided in evidence to this inquiry, and the general acceptance of the need for centralised and coordinated research and data analysis to guide migration policy and migration-related, social, economic and employment outcomes.
11.38The Committee agrees with the sentiment that in recent years, and mostly over the past decade, migration policy settings have adjusted in a reactive and often misguided way. This is clearly changing with the current Australian Government focus in reviewing, simplifying, and resetting the migration system.
11.39However, the Committee is also discouraged that repeated recommendations over the previous decade, including from this Committee’s predecessor from the 43rd Parliament, to establish an independent collaborative research institution remain unactioned.
11.40The research focus in the 1990s, enabled by the Bureau, set Australia on a course to be a world-leader in migration policy. However, with the devolution of this research-informed focus, exacerbated by the shift in migration policy focus following the Children Overboard incident in 2001, Australia has deviated from this course to instead develop an extremely complex and hard to navigate system, realigned to whatever reactive pressure was seen as the priority of the time.
11.41As acknowledged in earlier chapters, the COVID-19 pandemic has provided a circuit-breaker for the migration system, and alongside the current Government’s review and reform focus, the Committee again sees merit in resetting the policy direction for migration, supporting the critical impact that coordinated and collaborative research and data analysis can have on policy settings going forward.
11.42Global priorities have shifted, and the Committee received evidence that the traditional attractiveness of Australia as an immigration destination has diminished due to the impact of the epidemic and migration policy settings. Therefore, without basing migration targets, outcomes, and policies on solid research, the Committee believes that other countries will overtake Australia as a destination of choice for skilled migrants, as well as surpass our nation in fulfilling international obligations.
11.43To this end, the Committee is recommending, in a similar light to the previous historical recommendations outlined earlier in this chapter, that the Australian Government scope and fund the establishment of an independent, collaborative institution for migration studies and research.
11.44This institution should draw from existing data sources, as well as academic research capabilities, but also community, business, and non-government organisations for their expertise in linking migration to ‘on the ground’ outcomes from the experience of migrants themselves and the societal and economic sectors they support and work in.
11.45This institution can be established as an adjunct to any reformed machinery of government changes that eventuate from reviews or this inquiry’s recommendations, but be independent, funded by government, and overseen by an advisory panel drawing from the key Australian Government departments (Home Affairs, Prime Minister and Cabinet, Employment, and Health), with liaison from state and territory governments, but also from identified leaders in the research, community and business sectors, to ensure that research efforts achieve agreed and aligned outcomes.
11.46The Committee recommends that the Australian Government develop and implement the establishment of a fully funded, independent collaborative institution for research and data collection and analysis related to migration policy, and associated policy impacts in social cohesion, employment, health, and any other relevant policy and portfolio considerations.
The institution should be overseen by an advisory panel of eminent experts and representatives from key Australian Government departments, state and territory governments, as well as leaders in the research, community and business sectors.
11.47In order for research and analysis outcomes undertaken by the institution to be accessible and relevant to supporting and stimulating positive migration, and other, policy outcomes, all research data and outcomes not made public through other means should be made publicly available through the DATA scheme established under the Data Availability and Transparency Act 2022 and the Office of the National Data Commissioner.
11.48The Committee recommends that any research or data analysis outcomes resulting from the work of the institution be made publicly available through the DATA scheme administered by the Office of the National Data Commissioner.