Tony Burke arrived at the National Press Club on Thursday afternoon to outline Labor’s long-awaited immigration reforms.

What stood out, however, was not the substance of his announcement.

It was the fact that this relatively limited package of measures emerged only after six weeks of cabinet infighting, political alarm and public embarrassment.

Before turning to the policy details, Burke took aim at the suggestion Australia is a country defined by mass migration, describing that idea as “absurd”.

He pointed to what he called “one simple fact”: an intergenerational report released before the pandemic projected that Australia’s population in 2030-31 would be 700,000 higher than the current forecast.

Burke appeared pleased with the comparison. Yet population forecasts have a long history of missing the mark.

In 1998, the Australian Bureau of Statistics forecast the national population would reach between 23.5 million and 26.4 million by 2051.

Australia’s population had already risen beyond 28 million by June this year — surpassing that projected range 25 years earlier than expected, and by millions of people.

Why? Because of mass migration. So believe Burke’s smirk if you want to, but forecasting is often wrong and the extent of the ABS’s miscalculation is proof positive that we are a nation of mass migration. 

And in the last quarter of a century it has accelerated the population well beyond the infrastructure capabilities to cope with it. 

To suggest otherwise, as Burke did, is utterly absurd, and makes it harder to trust everything else he had to say today. 

Burke’s plan is essentially a plan to meet the existing plan. 

Labor already forecast that net overseas migration would fall from around 300,000 to 225,000 by 2027-28. 

The measures announced on Thursday are designed to ensure reality finally conforms with that Treasury forecast.

International students will face much tougher restrictions on bringing family members to Australia. 

Visa hopping will be curtailed. Working holiday visas will be tightened. 

Visitor visas will be shortened, bridging visas tightened and foreign students prevented from endlessly switching courses or visa categories to prolong their stay.

The government will also try to ensure that more people leave when their lawful entitlement to remain in Australia expires.

Some of these changes are perfectly sensible. 

Labor should be able to explain why someone is coming, how long they will stay and when they are expected to leave. 

A temporary visa shouldn’t become permanent residency courtesy of administrative exhaustion fighting the original terms in a bid to stay longer.

But this is nothing more than overdue maintenance of a broken immigration system dressed up as a grand national reset.

The permanent migration program remains at 185,000. The humanitarian intake remains at 20,000 (according to sources, Burke wanted to lower it but Prime Minister Albanese overruled him).

International student numbers are largely untouched. And the net overseas migration forecast of 225,000 hasn’t been lowered one little bit.

Burke has merely announced regulatory changes designed to stop Labor overshooting its own target yet again.

Even that ambition comes very late. Net overseas migration peaked at more than half a million after Labor came to office, overwhelming housing, hospitals, schools and transport while helping the government manufacture headline economic growth through population expansion.

Australians were repeatedly told the surge was temporary and the numbers would come back down.

When they remained far higher than forecast, ministers simply produced another forecast that they didn’t meet.

Now we have a plan to make the forecast come true. Don’t bet your house on it, even as property prices collapse off the back of Labor’s broken promise on housing taxes.

The immigration policy’s whole tortured gestation tells us far more about Labor than Burke’s carefully crafted spin at the Press Club.

He was supposed to deliver this address six weeks ago remember. It was cancelled at the last minute because the government couldn’t agree on what its immigration policy actually was. 

Burke’s signature proposal was then repeatedly dragged through cabinet amid tensions with Treasurer Jim Chalmers and nervousness among Labor MPs.

It was an extraordinary embarrassment. National Press Club speeches aren’t casual dinner reservations not requiring a credit card number that ministers can simply cancel because something else comes up. 

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They are organised well in advance, usually after the policy has been settled and the political choreography arranged.

Burke was rolled, there is no point pretending otherwise. He wanted legislation providing stronger control over demand driven visa categories, tighter time limits on asylum claims and fewer opportunities for applicants to use lengthy appeal processes to remain in Australia. 

What emerged today was a narrower version that can largely be implemented through regulations, visa conditions and departmental directions.

Burke says legislation would have been better and he’s right. 

But the government couldn’t settle its internal argument and failed to secure Coalition support, so he has been sent back to the Press Club with the available administrative levers instead.

Albo’s fingerprints are all over this compromise.

The PM is frightened of One Nation’s rise and knows immigration is helping to drive it. But he is also concerned about Labor’s left flank, university interests and multicultural constituencies that regard any reduction as a retreat towards blatant populism.

The result is policy paralysis disguised as some sort of balance. That tension was exposed by the humanitarian intake. 

The May budget assumed it would fall from 20,000 to 13,750, but after a backlash Albo declared that it would remain at 20,000. 

Parliamentary Budget Office analysis puts the additional cost of maintaining the higher intake at around $7 billion over the coming decade.

Just throw that cost on the debt pile I guess.

So much for a carefully managed immigration policy. Labor can’t even maintain a consistent position between the budget papers and the Prime Minister’s text messages to journalists.

The greater failure is that the government already had a serious blueprint for comprehensive reform. Former Treasury secretary Martin Parkinson chaired the expert review of Australia’s migration system, handed to the government back in March of 2023.

It revealed a system that was overly complex, slow, vulnerable to exploitation and poorly aligned with Australia’s economic needs. 

That was three and a half years ago. It recommended long term planning, a redesigned points test, clearer pathways for the skilled migrants Australia actually needs, and a simpler more coherent visa structure.

Had Labor acted on that report, Australia would now be three years into a serious immigration reform program. 

Instead, the government cherry picked measures, allowed migration to surge and waited until One Nation reached 30 per cent in the polls before rediscovering some urgency.

The scale of the wasted opportunity is utterly staggering.

Parkinson now points out that 44 per cent of permanent migrants are working below their skill and qualification levels. 

Australia is supposedly importing skills to fill shortages, yet doctors, engineers and other qualified professionals are driving Ubers or working in jobs that make little use of their expertise because recognition and licensing systems are slow, expensive and completely fragmented.

More than 250,000 permanent migrants with qualifications in regulated professions are estimated to be working beneath their skill levels. Think about that. The economic cost has been put at around $9 billion annually.

This is the absurdity at the heart of Australia’s immigration debate. 

Governments boast about bringing in skilled migrants, then operate a system that prevents many of them from using those skills to fill gaps and enhance productivity.

At the same time, employers insist that they need more migrants because they can’t find qualified workers.

An even vaguely competent government would address both the quantity and quality of migration. 

It would reduce unsustainable numbers while ensuring those invited here are selected for genuine needs and are able to work at their full capacity. 

It would connect immigration to housing and infrastructure planning, rather than pretending population growth occurs in an economic vacuum.

More people increase total GDP, prop up demand and flatter the budget numbers, even when GDP per person and living standards stagnate. 

Which is why governments have talked tough on immigration numbers but happily allowed them to blow out to help disguise budget failures.

But that trickery has now collided with a new political reality. One Nation has surged off the back of legitimate anger about housing shortages, congested infrastructure and falling living standards.

Some of its proposed migration cuts likely go much too far and risk inflicting serious economic damage. But Labor’s response has been to attack Pauline Hanson while slowly adopting parts of the diagnosis it previously dismissed out of hand.

This is what happens when a government waits until political panic sets in before fixing a policy problem. It loses the ability to shape the debate and ends up chasing it.

Burke’s measures might help bring net overseas migration closer to 225,000. They may even close some loopholes and restore a degree of control over temporary visas.

But they are no substitute for the comprehensive reforms Labor commissioned, received and then failed to implement.

After more than four years in office, three and a half years since the Parkinson review and six weeks of cabinet chaos, Labor has finally produced a plan to meet its own plan.

No wonder voters think the country is being run by people who don’t know what they’re doing.

A new study has raised concerns that people using weight loss drugs may, in rare cases, develop Wernicke encephalopathy, a potentially fatal brain disorder.

Wernicke encephalopathy is a neurological condition marked by profound confusion and disorientation that can steadily deteriorate if it is not treated.

The disorder is triggered by a deficiency of thiamine, also known as vitamin B1. The nutrient, found in foods including meat, fish and whole grains, is essential to normal brain function.

In cases not associated with GLP-1 medications, patients are typically middle-aged people with alcohol use disorder, which may impair the body’s ability to absorb nutrients, or those with another illness that affects nutrient absorption in the intestines.

However, Israeli researchers say they identified 15 cases of the condition in people who were taking GLP-1 weight loss drugs.

Eight patients had been taking semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, before receiving their diagnosis. Six were using tirzepatide, found in Zepbound and Mounjaro, while one patient was taking liraglutide, the active ingredient in the older weight loss drug Saxenda.

The patients had an average age of 59 and had used the medications for roughly five months before developing Wernicke encephalopathy. All had also reported symptoms including gastrointestinal problems.

Dr Dana Lev, an internal medicine specialist at Sheba Medical Center and the study’s first author, wrote with colleagues: ‘Wernicke encephalopathy is a potentially rare but severe adverse event of [weight loss drug] treatment.

‘As early detection may prevent [progression], increased clinical awareness is warranted, especially in individuals experiencing severe gastrointestinal symptoms.’

The study only detected an association and does not prove that weight loss drugs cause this potentially deadly brain disorder. 

But it is a potential warning signal for clinicians, who are being urged to be aware that patients could develop the condition.

Most of the reported cases came from the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System, which is used to report potential side effects from medications. 

Reports in this system are unverified because anyone can submit a report. It was set up to act as a crude early warning system for potential drug side effects.

In the study, published in the journal Clinical Nutrition, difficulty walking and confusion were the most common symptoms recorded in patients before diagnosis, with each suffered by seven patients.

Abnormal mental status and paralysis or weakness of the eye muscles were the second most common, each reported in three patients.

Before the patients were diagnosed with the condition, six reported suffering from vomiting, while five suffered from decreased appetite and malnutrition and three suffered from gastroparesis, or paralysis of the stomach. 

Almost all the cases reported in the study occurred during the reporting year 2023 to 2024. One was recorded during the reporting year 2017 to 2018. 

Ten were recorded in the US, while two each were in Europe and Asia and one was reported in South America.

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Of the nine patients with prescription information available, four had been prescribed weight loss drugs for their diabetes, three had been prescribed them for weight loss and two had been prescribed them for both weight loss and diabetes.

Eight of the cases were reported by clinicians, while four were reported by healthcare providers and three by consumer attorneys. 

It was not clear what may have caused the patients to develop the condition, but the researchers said it could be linked to deficiencies.

They wrote: ‘The prominent weight loss associated with [weight loss drug] treatments alongside the relatively frequent gastrointestinal side effects provides a biologically plausible basis for our findings and suggests increased susceptibility to nutritional deficiencies, including thiamine depletion.’

Although vitamin B1 is vital for the body, it cannot make it itself – instead humans rely on animal and plant sources to ensure a sufficient intake. 

Almost everyone gets enough of this vitamin from a standard diet, but weight loss drug users often consume significantly less food than others, putting them at risk of vitamin and mineral deficiencies.

They may also have gastrointestinal problems, which affect nutrient absorption, and vomit regularly, which also reduces the amount of vitamins their body absorbs, raising the risk of deficiencies.

Wernicke encephalopathy has already been linked to patients who undergo bariatric surgery, which can cause malnutrition because a patient cannot eat standard meals for six to eight weeks after the procedure.

Estimates suggest up to 18 percent of bariatric surgery patients develop some degree of vitamin B1 deficiency, raising the risk of suffering from the neurological condition.

Scientists noted, however, that the 15 cases among weight loss drug users were reported out of the millions already taking the medication.

Estimates suggest 30 million Americans have used a weight loss drug at least once to date, equivalent to 11 percent of the population.

Doctors say people with Wernicke encephalopathy have three main symptoms: confusion, inability to coordinate movements and visual changes.

If these symptoms are left untreated, they cause lasting damage to brain and nerve cells, leading to a second condition, Korsakoff syndrome, which causes severe memory loss and the inability to form new memories. 

The condition is fatal because it raises the risk of injury and incapacity, which can be life-threatening. It also leaves an individual unable to look after themselves. 

Studies suggest up to two percent of people worldwide suffer from Wernicke encephalopathy, although it isn’t clear how many people may have the condition in the US.

Doctors can slowly reverse symptoms of the condition by administering vitamin B1 as pill supplements or injections. 

If someone has suffered brain damage already due to the condition, however, they will not be able to completely cure the condition.

Counseling for alcohol use disorder or nutritional support can help to prevent the disease.