THE SYDNEY INSTITUTE ANNUAL DINNER SPEECH 2026 – PETER MALINAUSKAS

On 9 September 2026, The Sydney Institute held its 37^th Annual Dinner at the Fullerton Hotel, Sydney for five hundred guests. The guest speaker was The Hon Peter Malinauskas, Premier of South Australia. Born in Adelaide, to parents of Hungarian, Lithuanian and Irish descent, it was timely that the Premier chose to speak about Australia’s immigration program, highlighting the positives of decades of settlement in Australia of people from across the globe. The Annual Dinner was sponsored by Virgin Australia and the Introduction to the Premier was given by Australia’s Trade Minister The Hon Senator Don Farrell. The vote of thanks was given by Adam Siddique, Head of Strategy and Corporate Affairs, Zurich and a member of The Sydney Institute’s board.

THE SYDNEY INSTITUTE ANNUAL DINNER SPEECH 2026

PETER MALINAUSKAS

I willingly and gladly acknowledge we’re on the lands of the Gadigal people and pay my respect to elders past, present and emerging.

Ladies, gentlemen, honoured guests – Sydneysiders – fellow Australians. It’s a genuine honour to join such a distinguished lineage of Australian experts, innovators, and leaders – to address you tonight.

The privilege this audience extends is not lost on me. Nor is it lost on me that having a Premier speak in this forum is rare. Even rarer for that Premier to be from the smallest mainland jurisdiction in our country.

The thesis I want to put to you tonight is simple. The correct policy response to Australia’s present economic challenges and the realisation of tomorrow’s economic opportunities is this: Above all else, preserve our strong migration program. While the correct political response to anti-immigration politics and populists is not appeasement.

After hitting the shores of many other countries around the world, the wave of populist politics has more than arrived in Australia. It is an undeniable reality. And depending on your point of view, the resulting panic in the body politic is either utterly enthralling or terrifying.

If you believe the polls, cutting immigration is now a top three issue, if not the issue, motivating a full third of voters. This is unfortunate. More troubling is the prospect of mainstream politics entering a race to the bottom for who can cut migration numbers the most. This is not unfortunate – this is madness.

I’m here to tell you that if politics becomes the principal determinant of migration policy and a numerical race to the bottom ensues, it is going to hurt every Australian economically, and it will only further undermine our democratic discourse. And I’m here to insist that Australians in positions of leadership must now take stages like this one and explain how unreasonably slashing our immigration intake is not going to fix our problems. It is only going to make them worse.

Let’s start with the economics where three, virtually uncontested realities make it clear. One: our population is aging. I’ve never believed people living longer is a bad thing. But the numbers are in. In the next three years, just the next three years, the number of Australians over the age of seventy is going to go from 3.5 million, to more than 4 million. And from 2030 onwards, that pace of growth only accelerates. In less than ten years, the number of over-65s will outnumber under-15s for the first time in the history of our nation.

This is a problem. Because if the number of people leaving our workforce exceeds the number of people coming into it, our expenses grow, our income falls – we have less and less capacity to generate the resources we need to pay for the things we want. You only have to look to Japan for a real-life example of this. But they’re not alone.

OECD modelling predicts that across its member countries, population ageing will cause GDP per capita growth to slow down by an approximate 40 per cent by the year 2060. That’s not just a problem for treasuries and treasurers – that’s a problem for every taxpayer in the country. Which takes me to point two, the national budget, and every subnational budget, is under pressure.

Here’s the beauty – skilled migrants arrive job ready, now – at a relatively low cost. In 2021 Federal Treasury estimated the average Australian-born resident has a lifetime net cost to public budgets of $85,000. Net cost. Whereas the average skilled migrant delivers a net $198,000 benefit to public budgets over a lifetime in Australia. For a single, primary-skilled migrant, that lifetime surplus rises to $415,000.

On the one hand I find these numbers staggering. But when you think it through, they make perfect sense. Skilled visa recipients arrive in their prime working age, immediately able to support themselves in well-paid work. While a child born in Australia relies on public investment in education and training for decades before she reaches working age.

Not only is migration not a drain on our public services: migration is part of the reason governments can afford to provide those services. Skilled migrants are big net taxpayers. Which brings us to number three. Productivity is growing too slowly. You all well understand this.

Australia is experiencing its worst productivity performance in 60 years. Over the past six decades, labour productivity growth has averaged around 1.6 per cent per annum. In the decade from 2015 to 2025, that collapsed to just 0.3 per cent. And over the most recent five years, whole-economy labour productivity growth has been negative.

Now Government can’t do everything; productivity isn’t some kind of gift government chooses to hand over to, or withhold from, business. But: governments do have levers, and it’s time we acknowledged that one of them is migration.

Research by the Federal Treasury’s Centre for Population, in conjunction with the OECD, shows there is actually a positive link between migration and increased productivity in the local workforce. Back in 2015 a study by a former Productivity Commission research director estimated that between 1995 and 2008, migration accounted for 7 per cent of total labour productivity growth.

Consider that the Centre for Population also found that migration boosts innovation: a single percentage point increase in the regional employment share of higher educated migrants leads to an almost 5 per cent rise in medium-term patent applications. The spillovers from innovation mean that smallish numbers of clever people can make a very big difference over time.

Another critical driver of innovation – and in turn productivity – is R and D. One of the single biggest contributors to R and D in this country is universities. Public funding and HECS pay for our universities to teach Australians. For better or worse, it’s fees from international students that pay for universities to do research. Any cut to international student numbers is an automatic cut to Australian research funding.

Understand this: R and D as a percentage of GDP in Israel is 6.8 per cent. In the US it’s closer to 4. In the whole EU it’s 2.1. In Australia? 1.6. Cutting funding further is almost a deliberate act of self-sabotage on a powerful contributor to productivity.

In 2024-25Australia’s international education was our fourth biggest export at $53.6 billion. International student cuts amount to an export restriction. Imagine if we did this to the mining industry or the agricultural sector. There would be an ad on every television station and mobile phone screen about how we’re killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Yet we’re now seriously facing this prospect as a country. It is crazy.

So, the economic argument for strong and well-calibrated migration is powerful. We are a country whose working age population is shrinking as a share of the whole – with productivity growth slowing for twenty years – and needing international students to fund our research effort. More than this, Australians know that migrants have plenty of get up and go – or they wouldn’t have got up and got here.

Migrants get the best out of themselves – and the best out of the rest of us. Migrants are independent, they pay tax, they innovate, and they work. This has always been the rule, rather than the exception. And it has been true to a greater or lesser degree throughout our post-settlement economic history.

I submit to you there could be no greater act of national economic self-harm at this time – than to slash migration numbers for political purposes. That’s the argument that cutting migration is a threat to our economy. What this argument neglects is the truth of the opportunity cost of an insufficient migration program.

I see this in my day job. It’s on my desk every day, because South Australia is at the centre of this Australian moment. South Australia is at the beginning of what could be the greatest period of economic potential in my state’s history. Think about how much of our country’s wealth has been underpinned by mineral extraction.

Then there’s data centres and the use-case of artificial intelligence. South Australia is pump primed to land this opportunity through renewable energy, and in developing the use-case by being home to the Southern Hemisphere’s most advanced AI institute. And then of course, there’s high-end manufacturing in the space industry, the defence industry and most significantly in building the most complex machine ever built in the history of our federation: the SSN-AUKUS.

Whether it be copper’s new wealth, AI’s sovereign capability to compete or the defence industry’s blanket of security for our country: South Australia’s opportunity is now the nation’s necessity. And all of it will be lost – if we don’t have enough people to do the work.

Now if other politicians want to look their constituents in the eye and tell them what they want to hear – that’s their prerogative. But I have a responsibility to be honest with the people of my state at this most important moment: we need the workers.

Of course, it’s true Australian kids should be the first to get the opportunity, which is why supercharging training and skills has to be the priority. State and Federal Governments are genuinely working together to give this more than a nudge. In South Australia we can build technical colleges back into high schools. And we are.

We can revitalise TAFE. And we are. We can even deliver the biggest university amalgamation in world history. And we have. But it’s a numbers game. And no matter how much training we do, it won’t be enough, soon enough.

Across the country, one third of all occupations surveyed by Jobs and Skills Australia are already in shortage – and my state leads the table for shortages. Across the country, we are essentially at full employment – and South Australia has the lowest unemployment rate in the nation. The workers already here are already at work.

And so, I say this to the rest of the country: when you needed the workers, you had the international migration program to be able to get the work done. Why shouldn’t we when it’s our turn? But beyond the state-based parochialism, the national economic cost of slashing migration and the opportunity cost of an insufficient workforce is almost obvious.

When you think it through, it’s not hard to deduce. It’s somewhat clear. What’s less clear to me is how democratically elected leaders, persuaded by these arguments, should best respond to the political dilemma of the day.

Anti-immigration sentiment is clearly rising in our community. Populist parties are cashing in. One important rule about any social phenomena is that things have many causes. But on this one, my starting point is this.

Immigration has not become such a flashpoint this year because Australia is a racist country. There are bigots in any society, in any century. But that doesn’t explain what’s changed in politics and polls so dramatically over the last nine months. Instead, our people are rightly worried about their economic future. They want their kids to enjoy a better standard of living than what they did and right now for a lot of people they are worried that aspiration is not going to become their children’s reality.

That’s not prejudice. It’s a perfectly understandable response to a challenging economic environment. And, in exploiting this, the populists do have at least one advantage in their anti-migration campaign: They’ve got a simple story. Can’t buy a house? Cut immigration. Stuck in traffic? Cut immigration. Hospital ED too full? Piece of cake! Cut immigration. Neighbour’s dog barking too much? Cut immigration. Probably couldn’t make it worse.

This anti-immigration story cuts through because it is simple and easy to remember. But as American satirist HL Mencken perfectly put it – “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem: neat, plausible and wrong”.

So, where people are anti-immigration, it is overwhelmingly because they think immigration hurts them economically. And often, that is because they have never been given a better explanation. And this is where so many advocates so often get it so wrong. Giving people a better explanation is not lecturing people about bigotry. You won’t convince a racist to stop, by calling them a racist.

In any event, for the vast majority of fair-minded Australians, just anxious about house prices and inflation, calling them racist – explicitly or implicitly – is just plain daft. In my view, people on the far left who are understandably horrified about the extraordinary rise of far right politics in Australia would do well to engage in a moment of self-reflection.

Maybe, just maybe, the intense self-righteousness, sanctimony, and piety that underpinned the “great awokening” may have tilled the soil for the inevitable countercultural movement on the far right. Now of course, those counter-cultural anti-woke warriors have become no less belligerent or self-defeating as those of the far-left. All the culture war crusaders miss the challenge entirely, and in time, I’m convinced most Australians will wish they’d just give it a rest.

Australians who are worried about the cost of living and housing, and about a better standard of living for their kids, deserve more than being lied to by the far right – or constantly being told to apologise by the far left. They also deserve better than parties of government embarking on a political strategy of appeasement.

Any cut to migration driven by politics rather than economics will only exacerbate the economic pressures that everyday people are feeling, which then reinforces the very economic anxieties that feed the populist campaigns.

So then, where do leaders turn? Having already conceded that immigration is the root cause of the problem, and that cutting to an arbitrary number is supposed to help – the pressure only grows to cut further and faster. It’s an auction you can’t win. And One Nation is never, ever, going to say to a Labor or Coalition Government – “well done, you’ve got the balance right on migration.” Because then their very reason for being, will cease to exist.

So, you can concede to the populists, appease the polls and drastically slash the numbers. But know this: get it wrong and you will tank the economy, divide your democracy and unleash a vicious cycle of economic and political decline. Cutting migration in this way doesn’t mitigate risk, it exacerbates it.

So, what to do? When trying to look ahead, a too-often applied and simple analysis seeks to overlay Trump’s America, Farage’s Britain, Meloni’s Italy or Le Pen’s France to the Australian context. On the one hand, that makes sense. Anti-immigration sentiment here is a relation of theirs – but only like cousins. Related, yet strikingly different.

I say this for one simple and critical reason: we already have control of borders. In Europe and the US, land borders and labour markets often result in large, long-term, undocumented migrant populations. Here in Australia, no such chance. If you’re here on our island-continent, it’s because the Federal Government has permitted you to be. And this is what gives me hope.

No sensible person is arguing for reckless, undocumented, unregulated open-door migration, least of all me. No one is arguing for unlimited numbers of arrivals – no one says our migrants shouldn’t share the values of our democracy. But what gives me cause for concern is that no one is arguing for the migration program that has served our country so well post-World War Two!

The targeted, calibrated, balanced, skills-based, and humanitarian, risk-managed system we’ve developed over eight decades. Our point of difference as a nation is that, because of controlled borders, we can actually do it. In fact – we already do! In other parts of the world, that’s an aspiration at best.

It’s our massive geopolitical advantage – we have the ability to determine our migration policy on the basis of our national interest, economic and social – but only if we have the courage to overcome political expediency. But we have to make the argument.

Want more affordable and available housing? How about some more sparkies, tilers, roofers, concreters and brickies? Want your Mum and Dad to be able to get an aged care bed? How about more ready-to-go, fully trained care workers? Enjoy public education and Medicare, but worried about debt? Well, migrant workers paying taxes helps pay for it. It’s simple. And it’s true. But no argument has ever been won without commitment. And right now, if you’re sympathetic to this cause, it’s time to enlist.

I imagine many people here have their differences or frustrations with the trade union movement or civil society from time to time. But they have been a rock when it comes to supporting strong migration into this country. Business and industry, many of you here tonight, also have a huge influence and vital role to play in this debate – and your voice really needs to be heard. And frankly I’m not asking you to be involved. I’m asking you to be committed. Do you know the difference?

Martina Navratilova summed it up best: “The difference between involvement and commitment is like ham and eggs. The chicken is involved; the pig is committed.” And just imagine if we do make this argument and win more than we lose. Think about what we will have preserved and what that will achieve.

From the moment Captain Phillip and his convicts arrived, just down the road here, we’ve been an immigrant nation. And over time since then, as our fortunes as a country have consistently improved, we’ve had the ability to become a lot more selective about who comes and who stays. It started off with criminal convicts and ended up with a lot of proud patriots. Patriotic, not through misplaced nationalism, but patriotic because of the awesome power of the hope and opportunity this country affords every soul within it. Millions of lives changed. Families recast.

And there is nothing but eternal gratitude from those who wear the legacy of a compassionate, confident, outward looking country that was willing to give them a chance. Our nation at its best has always understood that when you give someone a chance – that doesn’t mean you take it away from someone else.

It means you create an opportunity. And when you take an opportunity – it creates.