Border blitz to come with coalition’s migration cuts

Will Nicholas, Allanah Sciberras, Lucinda Garbutt-Young and Jacob Shteyman | October 7, 2026

Tens of thousands of unlawful non-citizens could be rounded up and deported under a former home affairs function the coalition insists holds little similarity to US-style crackdowns.

The coalition on Tuesday announced it would reduce net overseas migration from its annual level of nearly 300,000 people to about 100,000 in the first year if it won the next election.

Opposition leader Angus Taylor said this would be the biggest cut to migration in Australia’s history, although his overall target is still higher than One Nation’s goal of net negative migration of 130,000.

While the numbers have raised the heart rates of the business community and university sector, Mr Taylor on Wednesday made plain they are only half of the plan.

“We’ve got to raise the standards, we’ve got to get the right people coming to our country with the right skills, with the right values,” he told Seven’s Sunrise program.

Mr Taylor connected the need for values-based migration to the third anniversary of the October 7 massacre in Israel on Wednesday, and to December’s Bondi terror attack.

“We can’t have people coming to this country who don’t believe what we believe in,” he said.

“One of the people at North Bondi late last year that committed that atrocious series of murders and shooting, one of them was on a visa. This is not the Australia that I grew up in.”

Australia’s roughly 77,000 unlawful non-citizens could easily be identified and deported under a home affairs department function Mr Taylor says was established in the twilight of the last coalition government and mothballed by Labor. 

But the opposition leader parried comparison to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

“It’s not about that,” he said. 

“The federal police, border force, ASIO, all of these agencies, this is what they do, but you’ve got to give them the resources.”

The policy is not dissimilar to Labor’s plan to detain some visa overstayers to encourage others to leave of their own accord, announced by Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke in September.

But the coalition plan has gone further by also requiring most visa applications be made offshore in an attempt to curtail so-called “visa hopping”.

As a result, bridging visas would be virtually eliminated, which Nationals Senate leader Bridget McKenzie confirmed would require boosting the home affairs’ department’s processing capacity.

“We are going to be putting more resources into home affairs to actually get the visa processing sorted, we’re also putting more resources into home affairs to actually locate (overstayers) and help them leave,” she told Seven’s Sunrise.

“You won’t be able to graduate and then go be an Uber driver as an engineer – you’ll have to go home.”

Australia’s temporary visa holders would be reduced by 650,000 people over four years, while temporary graduate visas would be scrapped under the opposition’s plan.

Student visa numbers would also be reduced from 528,000 to 456,000, but there would be a new skilled visa class for major projects, capped at 15,000 a year, and a new agriculture visa.

Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Andrew McKellar said some of those measures were wise, despite slamming the coalition’s cuts on the whole as detrimental to the economy.

“Those things are quite smart, that is, a focus on essential skills that we need, rather than a lot of bridging visas,” Mr McKellar told ABC TV.

“Increasing the number of temporary skilled visas and also introducing a new category of major project visas … that’s probably the one thing we’d say: getting that composition right can make a big difference.”