When governments cannot, or will not, manage public systems properly, they reach for a familiar story. The problem is never political choices, administrative incompetence or chronic underinvestment. The problem is always allegedly fraudulent, undeserving or dangerous people.
There is something deeply dishonest about the phrase “ending rorts”.
For years, “rorts” was the word used to describe what powerful people did with public money: politicians funnelling grants into marginal electorates, corporations avoiding tax, consultants receiving lucrative government contracts and public resources being redirected for private or political gain.
Now the Albanese Government is using the word against migrants.
In announcing its latest migration reforms, the government declared that Australia “does not support people who seek to rort or defraud the system”. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said the government supports immigration but opposes “anyone rorting the immigration system”.
The measures accompanying this language are not minor administrative adjustments. Burke has announced 100 additional immigration compliance officers and 250 additional immigration detention beds. The government is examining whether Melbourne’s former quarantine facility at Mickleham can be repurposed for immigration detention. It will also use detention capacity near airports as part of a renewed operation targeting people who have overstayed their visas.
The government plans to impose “No Further Stay” conditions on visitor visas, restrict secondary applicants on most student visas, prevent people from moving between visa categories, limit access to review processes and punish migration agents accused of supporting applications the government regards as lacking merit.
Burke has been unusually explicit about the purpose of the expanded detention capacity. In his National Press Club address, he described detention as a way of changing people’s behaviour. Under the model he wants to restore, people who have overstayed a visa would be brought into detention, released on a bridging visa and told to leave. If they did not, they could be detained again until they arranged their own departure.
This is incarceration used as coercion.
However, the announcement has been packaged as integrity. As order. As protecting a system from “rorts”.
That word is doing an enormous amount of political work.
We have heard this story before
This is not the first time Labor has used the spectre of fraud to prepare the public for punitive reform.
We heard the same story as the government moved to contain the cost of the National Disability Insurance Scheme. The NDIS was represented as being under siege from fraudsters, organised crime, unscrupulous providers and people exploiting weak controls. Every alarming anecdote became further proof that the scheme was out of control.
Fraud exists within the NDIS. Disabled people themselves have repeatedly raised concerns about exploitative providers, inflated invoices, coercion, neglect and abuse. There is every reason to pursue businesses and individuals stealing money intended to support disabled people.
However, that does not explain why disabled people were made to carry the political consequences.
The government’s fraud narrative helped create an atmosphere in which restricting supports, redefining what disabled people could purchase and intensifying scrutiny of individual plans could be presented as responsible management. The public was encouraged to collapse several different issues: provider fraud, administrative waste, service inflation, scheme design and the legitimate cost of meeting unmet disability needs, into a single impression of a system being “rorted”.
The Australian National Audit Office records that governments committed hundreds of millions of dollars to NDIS fraud and payment-integrity programs. Yet fraud enforcement and reducing disabled people’s access to supports are not the same policy. Conflating them allows expenditure cuts to masquerade as crime prevention.
It also redirects attention away from the state’s own administration.
When a government designs a sprawling market of privatised services, fails to regulate providers, permits aggressive price inflation and relies on opaque decision-making, it cannot blame disabled people for the resulting expense. When participants must fight for wheelchairs, therapies, personal care and basic supports, the central problem is not their alleged sense of entitlement. It is a system that has placed corporate opportunity and bureaucratic control between disabled people and the resources necessary to live.
The fraudster becomes a politically useful figure. Their existence allows every participant to be treated as a possible suspect and every support as a possible indulgence.
Migration policy is now being sold through the same rhetorical machinery.
From the “fraudulent participant” to the “visa rorter”
The target has changed, but the method remains familiar.
First, identify a real or alleged misuse of a public system. Then present that conduct as widespread enough to threaten the entire system. Describe increased surveillance and coercion as restoring “integrity”. Finally, make a marginalised population pay for administrative and political decisions made far above them.
In the NDIS, the imagined threat was the fraudulent participant or provider draining taxpayers’ money.
In migration, it is the dishonest foreigner gaming Australia’s generosity: the “visa hopper”, the overstayer, the student bringing family members, the person making a protection claim after another visa pathway has closed.
These categories flatten radically different circumstances into a single accusation of bad faith.
A person may overstay a visa because of exploitation, family violence, poverty, illness, incorrect advice or fear of what awaits them in their country of origin. A student may change courses or visas because their circumstances have changed. Someone may seek protection only after learning that return is unsafe or after conditions in their home country deteriorate. A person navigating one of the world’s most complex migration systems may rely completely on an agent’s advice.
None of this means every application must succeed. It means the language of “rorting” is incapable of describing the human and legal complexity involved.
It replaces the question “What has happened to this person?” with “How is this person trying to cheat us?”
Once the public accepts the second question, detention begins to look like administration rather than violence.
Detention is not an administrative detail
Burke has attempted to distinguish Labor’s announcement from the spectacular immigration raids associated with the United States. However, a government does not need masked agents performing for television cameras to build a punitive immigration regime.
One hundred new compliance officers means a greater capacity to locate, monitor, apprehend and remove people.
Two hundred and fifty new detention beds mean plans to imprison more people.
Repurposing a former quarantine complex for immigration detention would expand the physical infrastructure available to carry out that imprisonment.
This is not simply “better management”. It is an enlargement of the state’s capacity to confine people who have not been sentenced to imprisonment.
Australia’s immigration detention system already has an extensive record of prolonged and arbitrary detention, medical neglect, self-harm and psychological injury. The Australian Human Rights Commission has repeatedly documented the human rights consequences of the system. In 2023, the High Court finally ruled that indefinite immigration detention is unlawful where there is no real prospect of removal in the foreseeable future.
Even after that judgment, the political response was not a serious reckoning with the violence of detention. It was another round of fearmongering about non-citizens, “criminals” and community safety.
That history matters when a minister speaks casually about using detention to produce “behavioural change”.
Prisons and detention centres do not become benign because the government calls them compliance tools. Confinement is confinement. The threat of being seized, transported and locked away is coercive regardless of whether it is imposed through the criminal legal system or the Migration Act.
The language of “rorts” helps hide this reality. It turns cages into beds, raids into compliance activity and forced removal into the restoration of integrity.
The budget must always be balanced on somebody else’s body
Governments routinely insist that public spending is unsustainable when the beneficiaries are disabled, unemployed, poor or racialised. Yet there is always money for surveillance, policing, imprisonment, consultants and enforcement.
Labor says migration must be reduced partly to allow housing supply to catch up, while also acknowledging that immigration did not create the housing crisis. That contradiction should be central to the public debate.
Migrants did not privatise public housing. They did not create tax settings that reward property accumulation. They did not suppress investment in social housing, allow developers to warehouse land or permit essential services to deteriorate. International students did not design universities around dependence on their fees. Visa overstayers did not create understaffed public agencies or an impenetrable migration system.
However, it is politically easier to announce 100 new compliance officers than to confront landlords, developers, investors and decades of bipartisan housing policy.
It is easier to construct detention rooms than public homes.
It is easier to blame disabled people for rising NDIS expenditure than to admit that disability support costs money, that unmet need was always enormous and that governments built the scheme around poorly regulated private markets.
This is not fiscal competence. It is scapegoating dressed as budget management.
Racism and ableism do not only appear as open declarations of hatred. They also operate through decisions about whose needs are treated as legitimate, whose presence is framed as a burden, who must continually prove their honesty and which populations are subjected to surveillance when governments want to demonstrate control.
“Almost everyone” is still a warning
Burke says that “almost everyone who comes to Australia is a good guest”.
It sounds conciliatory until we consider what it establishes: migrants are not neighbours, workers, parents, students or community members. They are guests. Their place is conditional. Their behaviour is subject to judgment by the host. Their continued presence depends on remaining useful, grateful and compliant.
And “almost everyone” leaves behind a politically valuable remainder: the supposedly bad guests against whom the state can mobilise its expanding enforcement apparatus.
This is how punitive systems grow. Governments do not announce that they intend to treat whole populations as suspect. They identify a smaller, demonised group and promise that only the dishonest or dangerous need to worry.
Disabled people were told NDIS reforms were about fraudsters and dodgy providers. Yet participants experienced tighter definitions, intrusive reassessments and reduced control over their lives.
Migrants are now being told that enforcement is directed only at people who “rort” the system. But the new officers, detention capacity and visa restrictions will not exist in the abstract. They will operate through racialised institutions with enormous discretionary power over people’s liberty, families and futures.
The government wants us to debate how effectively it can identify and punish the rorters.
We should reject the premise.
The question is not whether public systems should have rules or whether deliberate fraud should be addressed. The question is why governments continually use individual wrongdoing, real, exaggerated or merely alleged, to justify collective suspicion and expanded state power.
The greater rort is a political system that allows governments to mismanage essential services, underfund public infrastructure and build expensive enforcement regimes, then blame the people most dependent on those systems.
If Labor cannot manage migration without scapegoating migrants, and cannot sustain disability support without casting disabled people as a budgetary threat, that is not evidence that marginalised communities have asked for too much.
It is evidence of a government that has chosen punishment over governance, and found a convenient word to make it sound respectable.
