Australia is having its loudest immigration debate in years. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke used his National Press Club address, on 17 September, to set out how the government plans to bring net overseas migration down from about 300,000 to 225,000 by 2028. One Nation wants 130,000. The Coalition is still settling on its figure. The whole contest comes down to one question. How many people do we let in?
What about the Australians who are already ours and want to come back?
Most of the current debate is not really about people like this. It is about volume, and about the frontline shortages that fill the headlines: nurses, aged-care workers, and the electricians the energy transition depends on. That is a real, pressing, and different conversation. The Australians I mean sit at the senior end, and their problem is not a shortage of visas. It is our failure to value capability we already own when it wants to come home.
Around one million Australians live and work overseas. Global Australians, the network that connects the country's diaspora, reports that more than 90 per cent of them want to return home at some point, yet only 15 per cent see a clear pathway to do it. Seventy-five per cent say they want to give back to the country that raised them. These are not arrivals to be counted at the border. They are citizens with careers built in London, Singapore, New York, and Dubai, waiting for a reason to bring that experience home.
Here is the part that should give hiring leaders pause. When they do come home, we tend to mark their experience down rather than up.
Research by Indeed and Advance, now Global Australians, in their report They Still Call Australia Home, found that 83 per cent of recruiters were cautious about recommending a returned expat, and 85 per cent of returnees struggled to find work. Two in three had considered leaving again to find the right role. The pattern is not uniquely Australian. A Philippines audit study, published on the World Bank's Development Impact blog, found that CVs carrying foreign work experience received about 12 per cent fewer callbacks than otherwise identical local ones. That, unfortunately, is a human decision. A candidate with a current local network reads as lower risk. A candidate whose last three years sat offshore reads as a question mark.
Given our productivity challenges, and the opportunity to hire someone who has worked in markets where competition is vast and often more complex, I think there is a pool of talent that should be included on a shortlist.
The immigration debate is framed as a policy problem, and in part it is. Governments set the migration number. But Canberra doesn't set the callback rate. It is set in our rooms. Every shortlist that screens out a returning Australian for want of a current local reference is a decision made by a recruiter or a hiring manager, not a minister. Policy decides the number that dominates the news. We decide whether our own people can come home to work.
Other countries have noticed. Singapore, Ireland, Canada, and New Zealand treat offshore talent as a national asset, and build programs to keep those people connected and bring them back. Global Australians is careful to say this is not an argument for higher migration. It argues for valuing the talent we already have, wherever it currently sits.
None of this asks a board or a leadership team to lower its bar. It asks something more useful. Read the foreign chapter on a CV as an opportunity to explore, not as a gap. The Australian who ran a business through a European downturn, or scaled a team across three Asian markets, is not a risk to be managed back down to a local baseline. That is the capability the productivity conversation keeps telling us we lack.
So while the country argues about how tightly to hold the front door, a million Australians are standing outside it, knocking, with exactly the experience we claim to lack.
When a returning Australian reaches the final stage of your process, and the only mark against them is a network gone quiet, it is worth asking one thing. Is that a reason not to hire, or just the easiest one to write down?