WastedPotential

Just chatting with a 16 year old who said “I only just learned that it used to be called Ayers Rock”. Mission is being accomplished quicker than expected. ✅

Mike Pezzullo ran Australia's immigration apparatus for nearly a decade. We discuss how Australia actually selects and integrates migrants. This is the final episode in my immigration series. Mike oversaw Operation Sovereign Borders from 2013-2014. He then ran the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (which became Home Affairs) from 2014 to 2023. Across these roles, he was responsible for how Australia selects migrants, screens for risk, and thinks about social cohesion. Someone with so much institutional knowledge would rarely be both recently retired and willing to speak in great depth about how the system really works. We discuss: - How the broad spread of source countries among Australia's overseas-born population (a key to our success with acculturating migrants) is a happy accident, not the result of deliberate policy -- a remarkable fact about modern Australia which is not well understood. - What the migrant selection process looks like at a concrete level, and whether AI will favour the gamers or the gatekeepers. - Australia hasn't gotten worse at acculturating migrants. As Pezzullo puts it: "we are incredibly successful at blending together different demographies, ethnicities, religions, and cultures." (With one exception, which we discuss.) - The two groups that Pezzullo thinks present the greatest extremist-threat. - Australia vs France as a case study: why we've been much more successful at integrating migrants than France, and what that has to do with the history of France's style of imperialism (different to British imperialism). - Even with today's federated digital screening and the benefit of hindsight, Pezzullo doubts the father of the Bondi attackers would have been refused a student visa in 1998. - A never-aired constitutional fix to Australia's "permanent temporaries" problem -- which Pezzullo calls "the Pezzullo special": close off the High Court's original jurisdiction over non-citizens, and replace it with a single 30-day review. - What a 2027 China-Taiwan blockade would mean for the Australian migration system in real time, and how Pezzullo would manage it operationally. - The case for "populate or perish" returning as strategic policy: speaking "as a military strategist and a military defence planner," Pezzullo (who is also a former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Defence and wrote the 2009 White Paper that reputedly displeased Beijing) wants Australia at 40 million people by 2050, rather than the projected 35 million. - And much more. Watch below, or on YouTube, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Timestamps: (0:00:00) – Introduction. (0:02:19) – How Australia selects migrants. (0:37:01) – Australia's broad distribution of source countries is a happy accident. (1:05:03) – Acculturation services. (1:48:50) – The temporary migration dilemma. (2:07:56) – Social cohesion and the politics of immigration. (2:40:22) – Radical Islamism and the limits of selection. (3:03:35) – What if China blockades Taiwan tomorrow? (3:14:13) – Should 'populate or perish' make a comeback?

budget makes clear: - only 5% of Australians will be affected (95% don't get discretionary trust income) - disability trusts, deceased estates, charitable trusts, income from farms won't be affected, nor will fixed trusts - people are using these trusts to avoid tax

Australia’s new tax changes are a joke. $250k income + $50k capital gain = $106k in tax here. Same earnings in USA = $51k tax. I made an app to show you where all your tax goes.