Karen Middleton
speaker
632 appearances
14 recordings
6 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 5d ago
Karen Middleton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 14 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 5.
Appearances
But on the whole, there's a new emphasis or an even greater emphasis on skilled migrants, on highly educated migrants.
and on people already here in Australia.
So they're kind of pulling the drawbridge up a little bit on new migrants.
And you've got to assume that that's at least in part a response to the sort of political climate we're seeing that delivered Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party a seat in the electorate of Farrar on the weekend.
And that is becoming a big issue around Australia today.
with the connection between the number of migrants since the COVID lockdowns and border closures and the economic pressures people are facing, whether or not those connections are fair, that's certainly something that people are feeling.
And the government is making a point of emphasising a tightening of the migration system in this budget.
And it seems to be looking to those sort of sentiments.
I think it's, I mean, I think it is certainly moving in that direction.
And as we've been saying, there'll be debate about whether it goes far enough.
Certainly there are some in the community that will point to what is still being spent on things like the AUKUS submarine deal and things that weren't done, like the decision not to tax the gas industry in a more onerous manner and say, well,
why are you sort of doing these things and not doing those things?
And there are places you could be saving money.
But I think they have made some pretty hard decisions here that will probably ultimately be beneficial for the economy and fairer for the economy, but they're going to be hard to manage in the short term.
It's interesting, going back to the point we discussed about the feedback they're getting from Australians about
the desperation and the desire for them to do something to change the system.
You know, I've got a piece in the Monthly this month looking at the levels of anxiety in the community and the sorts of sentiment that is delivering support to Pauline Hanson's One Nation and talked to some pollsters and social researchers about that.
And one of the messages that came through there from people, which I thought was really fascinating, was the sentiment that
If you've got two houses, the tax system helps you more than if you've got two jobs.
And that is the sentiment, really, that we've heard from Jim Chalmers in the delivery of his budget.
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