Migrants already sign on to Australian values, so what exactly is Angus Taylor proposing?

February 22, 2026 — 5:00am

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The question of how to surveille values is an interesting one, but before you get to it, you surely must ask yourself a preliminary question: what kind of values are we espousing when we propose to surveille values?

The political week was saturated with discussion of “Australian values”, courtesy of the media push by Opposition Leader Angus Taylor to define his leadership around the lightning-rod issue of immigration, based on “core values” and “Australian values”. The issue was given greater cogency by reports that a group of ISIS-linked women and their children are trying to leave the Al Roj detention camp in north-eastern Syria and return home. They have been treated with bipartisan pitilessness.

In his inaugural press conference as Liberal leader, Taylor said that his party would “put Australian values at the centre of that [immigration] policy”.

“If someone doesn’t subscribe to our core beliefs, the door must be shut,” he said.

In his subsequent media blitz, the line was oft-repeated. He told The Daily Telegraph in a video interview: “If you don’t believe in our core values, then you shouldn’t be coming to this country”.

He told the Sunrise program: “We believe in democracy, we believe that you need to obey the law, we believe in basic freedoms of speech and religion, and if people don’t accept those things they shouldn’t come to our country, the door should be shut”.

In an extended interview with 7.30’s Sarah Ferguson last Friday, just after he won the leadership ballot, Taylor recited his line again: “We need to make sure we shut the door on people who don’t adopt our core values and beliefs”.

The vast majority of Australians would surely agree with him, and with the broader principle that the country welcoming migrants is entitled to set requirements and standards as a condition of entry.

Another line Taylor kept repeating was that, until now, the numbers of immigrants have been too high, and the “standards too low”.

The latter assertion is quite the sideswipe to the millions of immigrants and their descendants already in the country (I suspect he’s not referring to those of us with colonial convict heritage).

What Taylor failed to mention, and what many interviewers failed to interrogate, was that migrants already sign an “Australian values statement” when they apply for any kind of visa, and aspirant citizens have to pass a citizenship test as well.

The Australian values statement was introduced in 2007 by the late-stage Howard government before it was ousted by the Kevin07 juggernaut in November that year. It includes the principles of respect for the freedom and dignity of the individual, freedom of religion, commitment to the rule of law, parliamentary democracy and equality of opportunity. It also includes the concept of the “fair go”, which is defined as encompassing mutual respect, tolerance, compassion for those in need and (again) equality of opportunity for all.

Lastly, it says that English is the national language, as “an important unifying element of Australian society”.

These government-issued values align with the ones Taylor spoke of in his interviews. But if sign-on to these values is already part of the visa application process, then it follows that the problem is not that the values are not accepted – every migrant in Australia has already agreed to them, as a condition of their entry.

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The problem must be that the values are not embodied or respected by certain migrants once they have succeeded in getting here. They sign up to the values but disrespect them later. If this is the case, what is the remedy?

The leaked Coalition immigration policy document published this week by The Age/Sydney Morning Herald proposed deporting migrants who contravene Australian values. Taylor and his frontbench, including the relevant shadow ministers, claim ignorance of that leaked migration policy, which was the work of former leader Sussan Ley, they say.

But still, when asked about deportations, Taylor told Ferguson: “If someone is not a citizen, and they’re temporarily here in this country, and it’s clear they don’t adopt those core values, they should go. I don’t think that’s particularly controversial”.

Ferguson asked how this would be achieved in practice. Was Taylor proposing more “checking” – for example, social media checks?

“The intelligence agencies need to be looking at this very, very closely,” he said. “Frankly, we need to tighten up on this … our intelligence agencies clearly need to be at the heart of that.”

Taylor said that people from “higher risk regions” would need more scrutiny.

”The work … needs to be ramped up,” he said. “We need to get serious about this.”

Later in the exchange, Ferguson asked again if he was in favour of “more checking”.

“Absolutely,” Taylor said.

“We need to make sure our intelligence agencies are keeping an eye on whether people are acting in a way that is consistent with the beliefs I’ve described.”

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Taylor emphasised that the full details would be in the official Coalition immigration policy, to be unveiled soon. But what he seemed to be proposing was the policing, by intelligence agencies, not of threats to security as is their traditional role but of any contravention of “Australian values”.

That would presumably include surveillance of speech and expression, in all its forms, in a similar vein to the Trump administration’s approach to immigration, where migrants’ social media is scoured, for example.

This would be an extraordinary step-change in the role of our intelligence services, not to mention incredibly resource-intensive, though Taylor intimated that efforts would be focused on migrants from “parts of the world where we are more likely to see people who are going to bring hate and violence to our country”.

The opposition leader ended the interview by noting that we have had a terrorist act on our soil and “it’s absolutely right and proper that now is the time to say to our intelligence agencies that we have to get this right”.

It was the closest anyone from the conservative side of politics has come to suggesting that the Bondi massacre was partly the result of a failure of intelligence. But it was misleading in the context – one of the perpetrators of the Bondi killings was Australian-born, and therefore presumably exempt from any heightened test for Australian values that the Coalition might propose. The other was an Indian migrant, who (as far as we know) showed no outward sign of rejecting Australian values, and whose country of origin is not a terror hotspot.

Let’s see what the Coalition proposes when it releases its immigration policy-proper in a few weeks’ time.

But it is worth noting the irony of policing the values of freedom and tolerance. Plenty of migrants to Australia could tell us how that played out in the home countries they left.

Jacqueline Maley is a senior writer, author and columnist.

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