Australia's Rule by Bureaucrat

How the technocrats lost control over Australia's borders

[T]he characteristic talent of Australians is not for improvisation, nor even for republican manners; it is for bureaucracy.

— AF Davies, Melbourne Studies in Education, 1964

Australia is to bureaucratic administration what Russians are to chess. It was born a police state, evolved into a genteel British administocracy, and then following WWII and in line with the American New Deal, its bureaucracy exploded. Rule by committee has been an Australian specialty. Not only is this embedded into its system of government which subordinates the executive branch, but the Australian penchant for unions, industry boards and Royal Commissions is telling. In the 80 years up to 1939, royal commissions were in session at an average of 6 — 7 per year.

The explosion of employees and spend on government employees following WWII

This (excellent) interview by Joe Walker (the Jolly Swagman) with Abul Rizvi, who was Deputy Secretary of the Department of Immigration and managed Australia’s migration program from 1995 to 2007, is the perfect encapsulation of Australia’s Rule by Bureaucrat.

For Rizvi, migration is a technocratic puzzle to be solved, and he and his colleagues have the answer. Politicians are fickle dunderheads who need to be nudged towards it. The public are best kept out of it altogether. Australia’s immigration policy is on rails. It can be managed up or down, but you best not worry your pretty head over it — Rizvi’s caste of bureaucrats are in control.

Rizvi’s remarkable admission goes like this.¹ It turns out that Rizvi was the guy who persuaded former Prime Minister John Howard and the Liberals to turn on the immigration gasket in 2001. This was done via subterfuge. A pact with universities. They would be handed control over international student numbers, from whom they profited (do you ask the barber if you need a haircut?). Their role would be to upskill migrants, because there were insufficient skilled migrants to draw from. What happened was exactly what you’d expect: international student visas exploded. 108,827 student visas in 1998 grew to 786,891 in 2023, making it by far the highest percentage of international students in the world (almost 3x the runner up’s per capita intake — the UK). Rizvi says Howard was afraid of losing control of migration via this scheme. And that’s exactly what happened.

To Rizvi, all is going to plan. He is singularly focused on optimising for population age. (We’re all hearing this for the first time.) Rizvi’s conception of his job seemed to be ‘pump immigration to slow down population aging because fertility is declining’. This has a name for it: managed decline. An indeterminate pessimist's view of the world. Which makes sense for a technocrat in a rudderless nation. Handling the levers of power to manage for a single number, denying any trade-offs,² blithely unaware that he was presiding over one of the greatest policy and cultural experiments in Australian history.

Without post-WWII mass migration we’d be a “smaller, whiter Japan”. It’s unclear exactly why that’s bad — Japan seems pretty good to me, but maybe Rizvi has a problem with the white part. A good reason might be that Japan is poorer than Australia, and we’d rather be richer. But it’s not clear that we are richer because of immigration. Our GDP per capita growth has not been better than Japan’s since we started pumping those numbers. Perhaps we would have been a Norway instead — a smaller nation with a much smaller foreign-born population, sitting on a giant mineral and energy inheritance. Or like the Gulf Arabs, if we also really wanted to build new cities in the desert with foreign labor and otherwise live in opulence (on top of sitting on a giant energy inheritance).

But Rizvi is so convinced that he and his priestly caste of bureaucrats are the Keepers of the Truth, that Japan and China will soon copy his immigration scheme.³ It’s inconceivable to him that they may not be optimising for the same thing. To a worm in horseradish, the whole world is horseradish.

Technocratic myopia here is severalfold.

First, where would Japan and China source these foreign young people? Europeans are not moving to China and Japan soon — even if they wanted to, there aren’t enough of them. Africa? Maybe. There are many African migrant workers in the Gulf countries. But those countries do not offer a path to citizenship or permanent migration. There is absolutely no reason to believe the Anglo and Western obsession with self-imposed ‘multiculturalism’ will bleed into China or Japan.

Second, age targeting implies *growing cohorts* over time. Because prior cohorts age out! So to maintain the same population age without a self-replicating population (ie. sufficient fertility), it implies growing cohorts of immigrants. Which is exactly what has been happening. And maybe (?) that’s worked for now, but that dramatically changes Australian ethnic and cultural mix over time. Is that what the Australian government is proposing? Is that what the Australian people want? Probably the answer to the second question is no, as Rizvi admits. It’s a perfectly narrow and short-sighted technocrat’s perspective.

Rizvi says his mentor “Peter McDonald did the calculations and he came to about 200,000 as the optimum level for net migration” in 1999 based on age targeting. In fact, McDonald’s figure was 80,000. The population is only 25% larger now. So what’s with the 700,000 migrants? The reality is that the technocrats lost control too.

Not only is Rizvi myopic, not only has he lost control of his borders, but he displays exactly as much agency and will as you expect of a bureaucrat: none. What is his solution to 60 — 80,000 illegal migrants in Australia? Well you can’t deport them — “that will cost you a fortune and it won't work”. He doesn’t believe Trump can follow through with the planned deportations — it would be too expensive and too ugly. Of course, Obama deported 3 million people. Rizvi hides political judgement behind technocratic language and bureaucratic timidity. Of course these things can all be done. Just not by men like him.

University visa mills

Not only have international students caused an uncontrollable migration torrent, but they’ve damaged universities. Around 40% of the Group of Eight Australian universities are now international students. It’s hard not to be anecdotal with assessments, and COVID also made a big negative impact, but I do have a perspective born of experience. Aside from being a former student, from 2007 - 2009 I tutored and occasionally lectured in a range of subjects to both domestic and international students at a G8 university. A fine group of people. But many international students struggled with basic English. Overall this has led to lower standards, and the universities push to pass them through (they’re paying customers after all). Lack of English and different cultural backgrounds negatively impact campus life. Universities are also increasingly positioning themselves for international markets — see for example the merger of UniSA and University of Adelaide. The growth of non-academic staff employed by Australian universities has grown much faster than the number of teaching and research staff. And their export value is dramatically overstated.

Does the policy even work? There is limited evidence of universities actually upskilling students — they’re a mix of signaling, mating markets, and now, thanks to Rizvi, they are by design visa mills. Skills-based migration may not work at all. It might all be selection effects.

It could all just be a technocrat’s dream.

Australian society

In another fascinating exchange, Rizvi dismisses out of hand the possibility of immigrants without a path to citizenship:

WALKER: I guess the argument would be if it raises the welfare of the immigrants and it raises the welfare of the locals, why not make it possible?

RIZVI: Because countries are more than economies, they are societies. And any society does not want to have, I think, a permanent underclass of exploited people. That’s not Australia. It might be America. It’s not Australia.

This is interesting for several reasons.

First, again it shows the narrowness of the bureaucrat’s aperture. There are no other models to consider: one can safely disregard the US (the greatest economic and innovation powerhouse of the last century). Disregard the Gulf Arabs, who are popping up new cities in the desert like daisies on the back of immigrant workers (who benefit, as Walker astutely points out).

Second, it appears the bureaucrats do have a view after all. They have a view on Australia beyond an economy, as a society. Perhaps Rizvi was not just about age targeting? Perhaps Rizvi and his colleagues preferred the dramatic immigration shift we’ve seen over the last few decades. In the US this conspiracy is called the Great Replacement. In Australia’s it’s an op-ed from a former politician:

Before WWII, around 90% of immigrants came from the British Isles. Post WWII, that number fell to around a third. By 2023 that number fell to about 12%.

In 2021 when the ABS took its final census on ethnic background (why did they stop?), the percentage of Australians of British isles descent was 60 - 70%.⁴ Prior to WWII that number was around 98%.

The comparative social and political homogeneity of the community also makes it fairly easy to enunciate general rules and to enforce them through a rational-legal bureaucratic system.

— Equality and Authority, Solomon Encel

Migration has been a defining feature of Australia since 1788. Until WWII and even after, it was essentially all British. Queensland explored ‘coolie’ Pacific Islander labour in the 1860s. Chinese prospectors were subject to a riot during the Victorian gold rush around the same time. As a British imperial outpost and amidst the gold rushes, Australia became the highest per capital GDP country in the world. The colonies federated into the Commonwealth in 1901 for many reasons, but “the demand for a white Australia in the last two decades of the nineteenth century was a principal factor in the federation of the Australian colonies, and one of the first legislative acts of the new federal parliament was the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901.”⁵

On 10 September 1919, wily and tough Prime Minister Billy Hughes told the House of Representatives that Australia joined the Great War to keep Australia white and democratic.

That changed post-WWII, and that change accelerated with Howard in 2001 and has only kept accelerating since.

Nice chart from the Australian Bureau of Statistics:

It shows the scale of recent migration, but not its change in composition. Australia has historically excelled at integrating migrants but it has never before tried to absorb as many from non-British backgrounds as now. I hope we succeed. But the failure of integration implicit in the changing rhetoric from ‘assimilation’ to ‘multiculturalism’ is not encouraging. Rizvi refuses to acknowledge the issue exists at all:

RIZVI: I’m reluctant to advocate for governments getting involved in the business of culture because that, more often than not, just becomes an ugly debate about what is the correct culture.

Just pump those numbers, he says. Who are we to tell one culture from another?

A nation divided

We don’t need to consider colourful examples like terror-nurses and Opera House demonstrators to see the cultural challenges that are emerging.

In the 2024 movie Conclave, one of the best scenes is between the reactionary Cardinal Tedesco and the film’s protagonist Cardinal Lawrence:

Lawrence: Our new brother…

Tedesco: Did I hear correctly, Afghanistan?

Lawrence: Yes. A marvelous testament to the Universal Church, so many men of different cultures, races, bound together by their faith in God.

Tedesco: (snorts with laughter). Look around you. Notice how everyone gravitates to their fellow countrymen. Italians over here. Spanish speakers there, English there. French. Divided by language… Without Rome, without the tradition of Rome… Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold.

Tedesco describes a Fall within the Church, a post-Tower of Babel lingual fragmentation. In his conversation with Rizvi, Walker is Lawrence: “Australia is this great multicultural society”. And then you look around and, well, maybe. But also 46% of Harris Park's residents were born in India (per 2021 census). 37% of Hurstville were born in China. These do not take into account second-generation migrants, which would push those numbers way up. Does this look like an Australian melting pot or ethnic enclaves?

These numbers measure stock, not flow. The flow of migrants is very different to Australia’s population starting point. It’s surprisingly tough to get a breakdown of migrant flows, but for a sense, in 2023, 21% were from India, 12% from China, and 7% from the Philippines. The point is that we have not yet dissolved into a utopian melting pot. Migrants tend to stick to each other (my family certainly stuck to Soviet emigres; my parents still do). It basically took WWI to dissolve American Germany communities that barely spoke English. Some Australian communities have their own alternatives to UberEats, their own security and ambulance services. They have their own voting patterns and are increasingly courted as blocs. This has profound implications for a parliamentary system that swings on a few key seats.

And if we are going to import a working underclass, maybe there are other ways to do it? Rizvi may dismiss them out of hand, but we need not.

A vision for the future

For decades, Australia has drifted under the quiet rule of bureaucrats like Rizvi — men who see the nation as a spreadsheet. Immigration, once a nation-building project, became a managed dial, tweaked for business interests and university profits. But no one ever asked: toward what end?

A country is not just an economy, nor merely a machine to prevent aging populations. Nations are built on shared histories, cultures, and choices — none of which can be outsourced to committees. The question is not whether migration is good or bad, but who decides, and for what purpose? Left unchecked, rule-by-technocrat leads nowhere in particular, only forward, blindly. It’s time Australians took back the wheel.

They lurk in every Gov’ment lair

Mid docket and dusty file,

Solemnly squat in an easy chair,

Penning a minute of rare hot air

In Departmental style.

— CJ Dennis, The Glugs of Gosh

Thanks to Cameron Murray and Jordan Knight for reading drafts of this essay.

1. You won’t believe me and you’re probably too lazy to read the transcript, so I extract the relevant parts here:

Walker: In 2001, the Howard government introduced a series of regulatory changes to immigration policy that increased our immigration intake to levels that we hadn’t seen since the ‘populate or perish’ days of the post war era.

Now, the Howard government didn’t want to compromise on the skill level of migrants, but there wasn’t a deep pool of applicants waiting to come here.

The innovative solution was to massively expand our intake of international students and working holiday makers. And the idea was that we would have these people come to Australia, upskill, and then they would be given the chance to apply for permanent residence.

The decision worked. In the two decades since then, more than 2 million international students and working holidaymakers have come to Australia, many of them settling permanently. In recent years, international students have made up more than 40% of annual net migration. And it’s probably not too much of an exaggeration to say that in Australia today, immigration policy boils down to decisions about international students.

…

Rizvi: it’s only the permanent program that the government caps. The temporary program is demand driven. So that’s the international students, the working holiday makers. And that program probably amounts to a larger portion of overall net migration. And so in the sense that we kind of lose control of the numbers, it’s because we have all of that demand driven temporary migration coming in, blowing out net migration. And that’s the sort of context there for people.

…

Walker: And so back in the late 90s, early 2000s, when you were advising Ruddock and Costello and then persuading Howard to, you know, implement the changes that we did, how much of that decision was about slowing the rate of population aging? Was that the main motivation?

Rizvi: Probably 80% was demography. It would have been 80% demography and it would have probably been 10% pressure from universities – we need a way of making money and we can’t fund ourselves unless we can make money. And so we had to open up the international education program. It just happened to be the case, that was the best way to also increase the migration program in a manner that it contributed skills to Australia, it contributed export income to Australia, and it slowed the rate of ageing and it was a budget benefit. Put all that together and it was too attractive for any government to refuse.

…

Walker: Right. International students are the number one funding source for university research, aren’t they?

…

Audience Member: Do you think that if you put to a vote the immigration policy that you implemented in 2001 to the same voters from 2001 today, that they’d vote for it?

Rizvi: No.

2. According to Rizvi, the politicians are being nasty when they speak in trade-offs:

Walker: Right. So we’re not really confronted by those trade-offs, practically speaking.

Rizvi: No, no. And I mean often politicians will present it that way, but they’re presenting it that way knowing they’re wrong. I think most of them know they’re wrong about that, but they’ll present it that way because of political advantage.

3

Walker: So Japan is set to become much more multicultural.

Rizvi: Absolutely. As is China. They have no choice. They have the same problems. Indeed. China probably is worse off than Japan because of its one child policy. Too many blokes.

4. If you include all who marked “Australian”.

5. Equality and Authority, Solomon Encel.