Breakfast Wrap: One Nation's 'net negative' migration policy

0:00There are a lot of perfectly sensible reasons to start a war. Territory, resources, pigs, wait what? You've got a pig for that pig. Yes, a pig, a pastry shop, a football game, sometimes even birds. They don't seem to be easy to kill. History is filled with some stupid wars. On the No One Suriccoming podcast, we are diving right into them, with me, Mark Vannell. Research No One Suriccoming podcast on ABC Listen, or wherever you get your podcasts. From Gadigal Country, I'm Brooke Young, filling in this week for Luke Sidden Dundin, and today on The Breakfast Wrap, one nation releases its migration policy with plans to slash foreign temporary visa holders, and it's prompted backlash from across the political aisle. It's simply headline numbers without any detail of the modelling that's underneath it,

1:01because we know that if you get your migration programme wrong, then all Australians will pay a price. Their policy is like a magic pudding. They think that they can cut the numbers by hundreds of thousands, but they can still have this and they can still have that. It doesn't work that way. If you're going to cut numbers, they've got to come from somewhere, and what we now know is that one nation would take them from the industries that prop up Australia. People hear more from Liberal Deputy Jane Hume and Environment Minister Murray Wat. Also ahead, the godfather of AI issues a dire warning. It can manipulate this really well. It could cause cyber catastrophes. It could bring down the banking system, the electricity system, and the water system all at the same time. So can the sector really slow down? All that coming up from the Radio National Breakfast Team, this is The Breakfast Wrap. One nation has launched details of its migration policy today, and there are some big numbers to unpack here.

2:01The minor party wants to slash migration by more than 750,000 people over three years. In a move, it says would deliver net negative overseas migration. Well, it's certainly added a new dimension to this debate on migration policy, and it's one that's already running hot. So who better to explain exactly what's going on here than Radio National Breakfast's political correspondent Tom Crowley? This goes further than what had been foreshadowed. It's a plan for long run net migration of 130,000 a year, so that's the number that we had heard about in a short term. But one nation is proposing net negative migration for a few years to, to they say, recalibrate, and they've identified the specific visas that they would like to cut. So the main targets of this policy, the details coming out this morning, international students a three-year cap of 100,000, that's about a third of the current levels. Then also graduating students, so the visas that allow people who've completed degrees here to stay for a little while and work, to be kept permanently under this policy at

3:0520,000, that's a tiny fraction of their current levels. One nation saying that that's what people use to overstay, and then throughout the student and temporary skilled classes, removing secondary applicants, that is spouses and children who are attached to the same visa. That's another cut of about 150,000 per year. So they're the three main streams. One nation saying that the skilled applicants themselves would remain uncaptain that they could prioritise in need skills like trade-ease, etc. They've also got a new talent visa that sort of resembles the Donald Trump genius visa idea for those with PhDs and other high end skills, they say. There are new measures as well to coax people to depart when their visas finish, including a lifetime ban on returning to Australia for overstayers. No changes to palm or backpackers, but the proposal overall a cut of 750,000 to the level of temporary migrants on visas in the country. Clearly, one nation's wanted to be the first here to identify specific visa categories. It's allowing itself to use this phrase negative migration for the first few years, and it's

4:08taken at least some defensive steps to argue that it's not just tanking the economy, but also it's happy to embrace that argument knowing that that criticism will come. Paul Enhanced and saying quite a larger economy on paper means nothing if Australians are poor or per person. So we'll hear from both major parties in a moment. They've been saying the reason their own policies are taking longer is because the details are important. One nation has gone through the details of class by class, which visas they would like to cut, but it will have all sorts of implications that people will pick at. Once a game, we're in a Monday, a sitting week, and one nation on a Monday morning is seeking to set the agenda. It's political correspondent Tom Crowley speaking with Sally Sarah about this new migration plan from one nation. And there are questions from all sides of politics about how thought through this policy is, and what broader impacts it could have on the economy. Liberal deputy Jane Hume used her appearance on Radio National Breakfast to call on one nation to release the modeling behind this migration plan. It's start by saying that we agree that standards have been too low and numbers have been too

5:13high and Angus Taylor has been saying that about our migration program since he became leader. Under Labour, we've seen the migration program run out of control. They've missed their own targets each and every year and something has to change. My concern with what we've seen this morning from one nation is it's simply headline numbers without any detail of the modeling that's underneath it because we know that if you get your migration program wrong, well then all Australians will pay a price. And even already today, economists have come out and said that potentially with the numbers that one nation are throwing around, you could send the economy into recession. And that means everybody will end up paying for a poorly thought through migration policy. Now, Labour has to release its modeling of its migration policy. The coalition will do the same. I think one nation should be expected to do so too. Why has one nation got ahead of the opposition again on another policy area?

6:14Well, I wonder whether it's because they haven't done the work underneath it. This is a very important policy. There are a lot of moving parts. And migration, can we be honest here, has been a really important part of Australia's economic success story for decades, for decades. And in the last couple of years, it's been the only thing that has underpinned our growth. In fact, GDP per capita per person has gone backwards in the majority of quarters that Labour has been in government. So getting this right is really important, but it is only one piece of the economic puzzle. We need to make sure that we also drive productivity if we're going to have sustainable economic growth. Last week, the opposition leader Angus Taylor met with the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, to discuss migration policy. A health minister, Mark Butler, says there are productive talks taking place. Is that how you would describe them? Well, it seemed that there were a number of things that we had proposed to the government that they simply have refused to adopt.

7:16We've been pretty clear. We want to make sure that we link our migration numbers to the number of houses that are built, that the housing minister should come to Parliament each year and announce the number of new houses that have been built, and that will then put a cap on the number of people that can come to the country. But the mix of your migration policy is just as important. And getting that right to make sure that you don't push the country into recession is really important. Is the opposition's position on migration closer to Labour or one nation? I'm not going to get into the details of the policy. It will be announced in due course, and I would imagine very soon. The minister, a appropriate shadow minister, John O'Donnell, has already been out today saying exactly that, and I don't want to preempt any announcement that the coalition will make. But what I will say is that we are acutely conscious that if you get this wrong, every Australian will pay. We want to make sure that we have a robust, effective, sustainable migration policy.

8:17But we want to make sure also that we're bringing the right people to the country that are going to contribute to our economy. It contribute to our society and assist it to grow and to flourish. How important do you think it is for all political parties to be aware of the way in which they're discussing migration? Having a robust discussion about its economic implications and so on, but not demonising migration? Profoundly important. Profoundly important. I think every Australian family, almost every Australian family, has a great migration story in its history. And it's something that we should be really proud of, really proud of. But making sure that we get a future policy right is also profoundly important. Separately on a separate issue, Trade Minister Don Farrell has called on Senator Pauline Hanson to apologise over comments that Senator Hanson made about the late mother of the Prime Minister, Anthony Urbanese, criticising Mr. Urbanese's mother for spending a period of time living in public housing.

9:18Should Senator Hanson apologise in your view? Yeah, I think that these comments were gratuitous and unnecessary. And the idea that you were disparaged people that have grown up in social housing, I think is a little distasteful. I mean, it doubles down on the fact that Senator Hanson has also disrespected our veteran community with her atrocious comments about Andrew Haiste in that cartoon, calling a veteran a traitor, I think is possibly the worst thing you can do. But this does seem to be a common theme in one nation now that I do that, that's unnecessarily provocative rhetoric. That's Liberal Deputy Jane Hume with much to say about one nation's migration policy and its recent actions in Parliament. She was far from the only one critiquing this plan. Murray Watte, Minister for the Environment and Water, was next in the Breakfast Hot Seat,

10:19where he also took aim at one nation's migration plan. But it is worth noting that Labour is yet to release its own policy on this. We've obviously been working through the detail of this unlike one nation, who've put out this policy today that would clearly just destroy regional economies and probably drive the Australian economy into a recession. We do recognise that despite the work we've already done to reduce the numbers of migration in Australia and we have reduced it significantly, there's more that needs to be done. But we need to do this in a way that balances the economic needs of Australia as well. I mean, one nation can come out with these kind of policies slashing by hundreds of thousands the number of migrants. Today we've already seen the National Farmers Federation President on a different network saying this is a terrible policy that would hurt farmers badly and would drive up food prices for Australians. I mean, this is not an easy issue to deal with it. That's why it does take a bit of time. But I don't know when Pauline Hanson or Barnaby Joyce last worked into an abattoir in regional Australia, full of migrant workers,

11:22when they last worked into a hospital and aged care facility. Those industries would be decimated if we didn't have some form of migration into Australia. We know the numbers need to come down, but we need to do it in a sensible way that won't rob Australians of the services they need and drive up food prices. Has there been disagreement within government ranks about how to handle migration issue? No, I wouldn't put it that way, Sally, but I think all ministers who've been involved in this discussion recognise that there's a range of factors we need to balance. As I say, we recognise that we need to build on the work that we've done so far to bring down the numbers of migration, but country pubs realise I'm a migrant labour, those hospitals and aged care facilities in our suburbs and our regions rely on it. We need to do this properly. I mean, I'd be very interested to hear, for example, what David Farley has to say about this one nation policy. We know that he has balked at previous policy announcements by one nation on migration, because he understands how relied his electorate and the regional economy relies on migration.

12:23South Australian Labour Premier Peter Malanowska says cuts to skilled migration would be economic self-harm. He's also argued that the correct political response to anti-immigration politics and populism was not appeasement. What reassurance is your government giving to state premieres on this right now? Well, again, we've been in discussion for some time with state premieres about changes that we might make at the federal level to migration and what impacts that would have on state economies. The state premieres are right to be concerned that if you slash migration willy-nilly in the one nation kind of way, that their economies would suffer, that they wouldn't have the trade-es to build the homes that we need, that they wouldn't have the doctors, the nurses, the orderlies in our hospitals that they need. We all, I think, well, apart from one nation, we all recognise that we do have some already serious labour shortages in some industries, and that's why just coming out with these knee jerk remarks, like one nation have done, can be a real economic problem. I mean, their policy is like a magic pudding. They think that they can cut the numbers by hundreds of thousands, but they can still have

13:25this and they can still have that. It doesn't work that way. If you're going to cut numbers, they've got to come from somewhere, and what we now know is that one nation would take them from the industries that prop up Australia. The government's policy is it weeks away or months away? I'm not going to put a particular time frame on it, Sally, but we understand that there is a higher degree of interest in settling this policy. Australians want to know the business community wants to know, but we would rather take the time to get this rise rather than with all due respect, meeting a media cycle. The Australian reports that one nation MP Barnaby Joyce has defended his party leader, Pauline Hanson, after calls for her to apologise for a mark she made about the Prime Minister's late mother. Earlier this year, Senator Hanson criticised the Prime Minister's mother for living in public housing. Mr Joyce says he doesn't think there's any suggestion, Senator Hanson was saying that Mr Albenese's mother was quite a bad person. Is that fair as an apology needed? I think an apology is absolutely needed from Pauline Hanson,

14:26for yet another remark that she makes, punching down on people in our community who deserve our support. Last week we saw her, and recently we saw her taking on Andrew Hastie, a distinguished war veteran, and all the other people who gave evidence in that particular court case that she's complaining about. She's now moved on to social housing residents, and the idea that you would pick on someone's late mother who died more than 20 years ago is cruel and despicable. I mean, I'm starting to lose count of the number of groups within our community who Pauline Hanson is picking on. She thinks workers are lazy, she doesn't like migrants, she says parents who use child care aren't doing the right thing. Women experiencing domestic violence, she says that's a two-way street. I mean, we started to run out of groups in the community that she doesn't pick on, and at a time when Australians are doing it really tough, is a government led by someone who wants to punch down on them and make life harder the way to help people get through? I don't think it is. Murray Whatte, Minister for the Environment and Water, speaking with Sally Sara there. Now,

15:29undoubtedly, there'll be much more to come on this debate over migration policy, especially as Tom Crowley pointed out earlier, we're at the beginning of a parliamentary sitting week. So the Breakfast Team will make sure to keep you across all the latest developments in the coming days. Now, let's turn to an issue that's been taking over global headlines in the last few days, even more so than it has been in recent months, and that's the warning over artificial intelligence. Now over the weekend, Sam Ultman, who's the CEO of OpenAI, and the world's richest man, Elon Musk, have backed a call from the head of anthropic Dario Armaday to, quote, slow the pace of AI development. Mr. Armaday warned that on its current trajectory, an AI swarm could become capable of, quote, taking over the entire internet within a year. And that's a pretty terrifying thought. Well, there are a few people more qualified to speak on this than Jeffrey Hinton, Nobel Prize winning computer scientist and cognitive psychologist,

16:33known as the Godfather of AI. That's a pretty impressive title. He joined the program this morning, and Sally began by asking him what he made of these calls from the anthropic boss for an AI slowdown. I think that's very sensible. Most of the experts believe that sometime in the next 10 years, possibly a lot sooner, will develop AI super intelligence, that is things that are smarter than us, and we have no idea whether we can keep them under control. And until we've solved that problem, we foolish to develop them. This comes after anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit last week, warning that the technology in his view could wipe out humanity by the end of the decade. Is that a realistic scenario? Nobody knows how to estimate the probabilities of these things. He said 10%, nobody really knows what figure to give. It's not 1%, it's more than that, and it's not 99%, it's less than that. But basically, people are doing it on their gut feelings. So what most of the experts believe is we will develop super intelligence, and we don't know how to control it, and therefore

17:36there's a significant risk of it getting out of control. And what sort of possible scenario are we talking? How could AI do a reputable harm to humanity? Well, if it's much smarter than us, there's so many different ways it can do it. I don't think it's worth speculating. But some of the ways I could create nasty biological viruses, much nastier than anything we've seen. If it ever got in the control loop for nuclear weapons, it could obviously wipe us out that way. It can manipulate us really well. It could cause cyber catastrophes. It could bring down the banking system, the electricity system, and the water system all at the same time. There's so many ways it can do it. That's not the point. The point is we have to figure out how it never wants to. Why would it want to do that? Well, we give it some goals, and we give it the ability to create sub-goles. So if I give you the goal of getting to North America, you'll figure out there's a sub-goal of getting to the airport. Now, to make efficient AI agents, you have to give them the ability to create sub-goles. And if they're

18:37smart, they very quickly realize that one very sensible sub-goal is to stay alive, because they won't be able to realize any of the other goals if they're not alive. And so they quickly develop that goal, and then they resist attempts to get rid of them. And we've seen them doing that already. We've seen them threaten into blackmail people if they're turned off and so on. And they also develop deception. They develop all the kind of recently things that nasty people develop. There's something we have a more cynical view of Darya Amade's announcement. Anthropic is preparing to go public, potentially for a record-setting sum. Do you think there is any weight to the argument that Mr Amade is trying to hype up the power of his company's technology to attract investors? No, I don't think there's any truth in that. But that's a rumor put about by people who would let you to ignore this threat. It's very silly marketing for the country to say we might wipe you all out. I'm sorry, the company's. I mean, if I was a company, I wouldn't want to threaten to wipe people out. I think it's actually against his own interest to say that, because if there's a

19:41pause in AI, that may decrease the value of his company. You left your job at Google in 2023, so you could speak freely about some of the risks that this technology poses. Were many people in the industry as concerned as you back then, or were you an outlier at that time? There was a group of us. In fact, there were people concerned long before me, named Nick Bostrom and Shane Leg. They've been concerned for a couple of decades now. We were still in a minority in 2023, although people like Daria were very concerned then. And Demis Asabis, the head of Google Deep Mind at the time, was very concerned then. So there have been a bunch of people concerned, but it's become more mainstream recently. As we've seen the things we warned about happening, we've seen them deceiving people. We've seen them pretending to be less smart than they really are when you test how smart they are. We've seen them conspiring with each other, setting up secret communication systems between agents, and escaping from their sandboxes, and actually breaking into other companies.

20:44You have an analogy allowing AI to develop unregulated, is it a bit like creating a fast car without a steering wheel? Are we already too late to bring it under control? There's a problem which is politicians act very slowly. It's going to be difficult to keep up. We've only got a few years, and they're quite slow at regulating very straightforward risks, like the risk of it, for example, encouraging gene measures to commit suicide. So they are regulating those things, but for this existential threat of them getting out of control, it's hard to see how you can regulate that without just slowing the whole thing down. The AI agents themselves are going rogue and creating threats to humanity as one thing. The other is having bad human actors harnessing this technology, which is the greater risk, do you think? I'm very glad you made that distinction, because it's a big distinction. There are both great risks. In the short term, bad actors using AI for bad things

21:47is a more urgent risk. For example, using AI to corrupt the midterm elections, that will be very bad in the US. Also, there's a danger of mass unemployment in the next few years, probably before we have to worry about AI's taking over. But both risks are terrible. If we're looking on the flip side of artificial intelligence, obviously and quite appropriately, there are significant warnings about what the technology may do if it's going rogue or in the hands of bad actors. On the positive sides, what are the possibilities of this technology for things like medical science, solving some of the great problems of humanity right now? It can do tremendous good. It's already helping lots of people. I mean, every day I ask my chatbot questions and it gives me answers much more conveniently than going to the library, or than doing an old-fashioned Google search. It's already doing tremendous good. In health care, it's now helping radiologists read lots of images. It can do better than radiologists

22:48with quite a few images. It's designing new drugs already. It's going to be great in education because it's going to allow children to have their own private tutors. And with the private tutor, you learn about twice as fast. So there's so many good things it can do that it's going to be hard to stop its development. And that's why it's so important that we figure out how we can divide it a bit safely. I don't think we should stop developing it altogether. I think what we need to do is figure out how we can get all the wonderful things this is going to give us without getting the terrible risks, by figuring out how to deal with those risks before they overwhelm us. Jeffrey Hinton, their Nobel Prize winning computer scientist and cognitive psychologist, known as the Godfather of AI. And that's it for today's edition of the Breakfast Wrap. All interviews were done by Sally Sara and produced by the Radio National Breakfast Team. I'm Brooke Young and I'll catch you tomorrow.