The Front Door

The current points system has not evolved substantially in 25 years, and everyone – good migrants and bad – knows it's a game to be played. Occupation lists, Labour Market Testing, state nomination quotas, a $1B migration-agent industry, diploma mills selling "pathway to PR": each is a bureaucratic patch on the last patch. Casey's alternative fits in one sentence. Permanent residency goes to anyone who meets an age-calibrated minimum annual tax contribution, derived from a present-value calculation of what a person that age will cost the Commonwealth over the rest of their life. Pay your way from day one and you're in. A 35-year-old qualifies on a salary below what three-quarters of Australians their age earn – this is a filter for net contribution, and nothing else. It is blind to nation of origin, race, religion, and everything else a bureaucrat might be tempted to weigh, because the ATO already measures the only thing that matters and has decades of practice catching people who lie about it.

These are the essay's thresholds — the minimum annual tax for permanent residency, by age at entry, with the Age Pension waiver already built in. Without that single waiver, every threshold past 60 roughly doubles: the pension is a $31,000-a-year entitlement at the current single rate (the essay's $28,000 was the 2023 figure) that no working-life tax record can outrun. Non-working entrants pay once, up front, Gold Card style.

Notice what the filter selects for. Sustained high earning in a modern economy requires impulse control, conscientiousness, the ability to cooperate within institutions, and a time horizon measured in years. These are the traits Australians most want in fellow residents anyway, and the ones no questionnaire can test for without producing legally indefensible discrimination. The fiscal filter measures the result rather than the trait. It also deletes the machinery: occupation lists go, the points test goes, skills assessments go, 60-70% of the Home Affairs selection branch goes. The verification mechanism is the ATO, which already exists, already cross-matches declared income against observed consumption, and already catches people at exactly this income level.

Migrants below the threshold get a second door: stay, keep working, keep paying GST and income tax — and permanently waive Medicare, the PBS, the pension, the NDIS, and means-tested welfare, carrying catastrophic private insurance instead. Casey's sleeper argument is that a cohort of 50,000-200,000 cash-paying residents creates the first genuine price-discovery layer Australian healthcare has had in two generations. Medicare and the PBS set prices for roughly 70% of the volume today; nobody knows what a GP visit or a hip actually costs. A real cash market, even a small one, is how you eventually deregulate healthcare in a country with a constitutional commitment to healthcare socialism. The waiver tier's third function is quieter: a migrant who can't meet the threshold and won't pay cash chooses to leave. No enforcement bureaucracy required.

The essay's second target is credential laundering. Casey quotes Parkinson's figure of roughly 250,000 permanent residents admitted as skilled migrants who cannot work in their assessed profession; the review's own published statistic is broader and worse – 621,000 permanent skilled migrants, 44% of the cohort, working below their assessed skill level. The standard framing is that licensing boards are obstructing desperately needed skills. The harder reading: the visa-stage skills assessment is gameable — Engineers Australia's competency report is a self-written essay with a thriving ghostwriting industry behind it — and Stage 2 licensing is doing real work catching inflated credentials. Exam pass rates for international medical graduates run 21-28% here against 67% for the UK's equivalent and 68% for Canada's. Casey's fix is an insurance market: any foreign-trained professional who can obtain indemnity insurance at the same rate as an Australian-trained one gets to practice, and the licensing body must justify any refusal. Insurers price risk with their own money and have no protectionist incentive. The guilds lose their gatekeeping monopoly overnight.

Then there is the data. Denmark publishes, annually, the net fiscal contribution of immigrants by country of origin, and Danish migration policy has shifted for a decade without a collapse in public consent. Australia produces the equivalent data — Treasury's FIONA model publishes lifetime fiscal impact by visa class, and the MADIP project cross-links tax, welfare, Medicare and visa records — but refuses to publish it by country of birth, citing "social cohesion concerns". Casey's translation: we believe the public would not handle the data well, and we have decided to protect them from it. Voters can tell when they're being bullshitted, and respond by withdrawing consent entirely. Publish the data.

The integrity leg is short. Residency obtained by fraud is void whenever the fraud is discovered — a university can rescind a PhD decades later, and the same principle applies. A prison sentence of meaningful length ends in deportation, since it costs $160,000 a year to house a prisoner and 95% of migrants have no difficulty obeying the law. And the 2.3 million people currently on temporary visas get no grandfathering: everyone is re-evaluated under the new rules within one financial year. Meet the threshold and PR arrives immediately; otherwise it's the Gold Card, the waiver tier, or home. The people trapped in bridging-visa limbo are paying the cost of the current policy failure — they should be the first beneficiaries of clarity, not the last.

This is a system that promises to admit better-matched migrants, transparently, at quantities calibrated to what the country can actually absorb — and it can defend, migrant by migrant, the proposition that every new resident adds wealth to Australia from the day they arrive. Not on average. Not after twenty years. Today, one by one, verifiably.

No dickheads. No bullshitters. No bludgers. A fair go for everyone else.