00:00 Australia has seen a massive surge in its migration intake since COVID.
00:05 The forecast was for a jump to around 400,000.
00:09 It's expected to come in at something more like 500,000, a record number over the past
00:13 year.
00:14 It was earlier regarded as a bounce back to pre-COVID levels, particularly foreign student
00:18 numbers, but it's now seen as something broader than that, an international move of people
00:23 from middle income countries, India, Southeast Asia, even Latin America, seeking better lives
00:29 in countries like Australia, Canada, the US and the UK.
00:32 And each country is trying to deal with this in its own way.
00:34 Tomorrow, we'll see the government's migration strategy.
00:38 This is going to be a wide ranging policy reform.
00:41 It will seek to tackle that surge in foreign student arrivals in particular.
00:45 I understand they're not going to place a cap on foreign student numbers, but they will
00:49 crack down on low quality course offerings that are attracting a lot of these so-called
00:54 students who many of them are coming, studying perhaps for a little while, but then moving
00:59 into low paid work and trying to remain in Australia.
01:02 So there'll be efforts to limit their opportunities to stay.
01:05 There'll also be efforts to attract more high skilled temporary migrants and permanent migrants,
01:11 giving them a pathway to permanency as well.
01:13 We know the government's under a lot of political strain over the migration issue from the opposition,
01:17 which blames the government for allowing in this number of people, putting upward pressure
01:22 on house prices and infrastructure as well, making the rental crisis even worse too.
01:28 And polls show, another one today, a Resolve poll showing a lot of Australians are worried
01:32 about the migration number at the moment.
01:34 So the government is determined to try and put as much downward pressure on that migration
01:38 intake as possible.
01:39 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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