Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke assures Indian community ‘immigration is the answer, not the problem’

Labor frontbencher Tony Burke has praised Australia’s growing Indian population and declared that “getting the right immigrants” is part of the solution to the country’s housing crisis.

In the same week that India officially overtook England as this country’s biggest source of overseas-born migrants, the Home Affairs Minister has also accused the Opposition Leader of “ugly” attacks against new arrivals to Australia.

Appearing on the Indian Link podcast, the Minister has described how citizenship ceremonies are “the most patriotic events you can have”, and where Indian recipients always cheer the loudest.

During a lengthy discussion with podcast host Pawan Luthra, Tony Burke, who also holds the Immigration and Citizenship portfolios, describes how Australia needs to find the best skilled migrants “more than ever before”.

“Half of our doctors now are born overseas, half of our registered nurses are born overseas, about a quarter of the tradespeople we need to build homes are born overseas”.

“We can’t run our health system or build the houses that we need without immigration now, and we have really geared up the targeting, and there’s still more that I wanted us to keep doing to make sure that we can get the best and the brightest”.

“A whole lot of the economic strength of Australia relies on us having a really well targeted immigration program and can I say in the time that that story has happened, that we’ve needed the best and the brightest and more and more skilled immigrants, has been the exact time that we’ve seen the growth in the Indian community.”

Asked about recent debate about the levels of immigration in Australia, Mr Burke acknowledged the government needed to make sure that “infrastructure and services are keeping pace”.

“It is true that you need to make sure you are building enough houses for the people to deal with the housing shortage that we have - getting the right immigrants is actually part of the solution, not just, not necessarily, part of the problem”.

“It’s not like you could have unlimited immigration without creating a problem with housing and infrastructure, so we need to make sure that it’s managed and it’s paced,” Mr Burke says.

“One of the things that really worries me about the current debate, though, if you get into a world of just saying, effectively immigration is bad, you get into a world of people casting suspicion on immigrants.”

Pressed on whether Australia’s immigration debate was being driven by populism, Mr Burke accused Liberal Leader Angus Taylor of trying to get votes from Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party.

“A whole lot of what he says is about getting Australians to blame each other. And I think that’s an ugly, horrible thing to do. And I don’t think it’s the interests of Australia.”

In September last year Opposition frontbencher Jacinta Nampijinpa Price faced significant controversy after claiming that the Labor government was prioritising Indian migration because that community “votes for Labor”.

Mr Burke’s comments come in the same week that latest Bureau of Statistics figures have confirmed the number of migrants from India has doubled in a decade due mostly to a surge in international students.

For the first time since Australia became a nation in 1901, the English are no longer the most common foreigners, with 32 per cent of Australia’s population born overseas — the highest since 1891.

Asian nations made up seven of the top ten nations for country of birth, other than Australia, with India, China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Malaysia also on the list.

New Zealand and South Africa were the only non-Asian nations, other than England, to make the top ten with continental Europe failing to make the cut since Italy dropped out in 2024.

Australia’s Kiwi neighbour and England were also the only nations with an Anglo-Celtic majority to still be a major source of migration.

India was No.1 last year when it came to the country of birth of its foreign residents, with 971,020 recorded in 2025 — more than double the 449,040 level of a decade earlier.