That's interesting. The anti-immigration right in the UK hold your immigration system up as the way forward.
We have a multicultural society in the UK that many are rejecting, with racial tensions at a high.
The difference is that many immigrants are working class. They are scapegoated to great success with the white working class. I disagree with that - I think the real problem is meagre infrastructure investment to support new arrivals but perhaps the Aussie style system works on the other end of the spectrum: focus only on valuable people where value is how much money they would earn.
It's also interesting given the relative immigrant populations:
As of 2011, 26% of the Australian population was not born in Australia.[1] That's around double the UK. The only nations with higher proportions are Luxembourg, Switzerland and Israel.
As the parent pointed out, Melbourne is particularly diverse, with 30% of the population not born in Australia.
I presume they are referring to focussing on skills based migration schemes vs humanitarian. As someone pointed out below, Australia's policies towards political and humanitarian refugees have many critics.
To be honest, the anti-immigration right hold up Australia as a model for an immigration system as a rhetorical tool rather than an explicit model because (i) it's a prosperous liberal democratic country that can't be glibly dismissed and (ii) there's widespread public perception that it's unusually hostile to the idea of accepting immigrants and doesn't let many in.
Of course the reality is that Australia lets in far more migrants per capita than the UK, but that's certainly not the objective. There are people on the anti-immigration right that want to see more skills discrimination in visa awards but are quite happy with the overall numbers arriving every year and are entirely comfortable with the idea of a large percentage of the UK population being born overseas, but they're definitely a minority.
It is not as simple as that. For example the Bangladeshi community in the UK was largely pro-Brexit. They wondered why white Europeans got favourable immigration treatment vs their own people.
We have a multicultural society in the UK that many are rejecting, with racial tensions at a high.
The difference is that many immigrants are working class. They are scapegoated to great success with the white working class. I disagree with that - I think the real problem is meagre infrastructure investment to support new arrivals but perhaps the Aussie style system works on the other end of the spectrum: focus only on valuable people where value is how much money they would earn.