"we still maintain a high immigration intake but governments spend very little time or energy nowadays talking to us about that program, why it's there, what it entails ... the politics that emerge out of that is that people are really kept in the dark" said Gwenda Tavan, Latrobe University lecturer in politics and author of The Long, Slow Death of White Australia in a recent interview with The Age.

This December marks 70 years since Australia appointed its first immigration minister, Arthur Calwell, who was tasked to ‘sell’ immigration to Australians. The Age says that on his appointment as the immigration minister in 1944, Arthur Calwell made "the speech that changed Australia" when he told parliament:

"If Australians have learned one lesson from the Pacific War it is surely that we cannot continue to hold our island continent for ourselves and our descendants unless we greatly increase our numbers. We are about 7 million people and we hold 3 million square miles [7.7 million square kilometres] of this Earth surface ... much development and settlement have yet to be undertaken. Our need to undertake it is urgent and imperative if we are to survive"

Dr Tavan notes that, "It was only when Calwell got involved in very late 1944 that he realised if we're going to do this, it's going to be big, and we're going to really have to engage the Australian people. Selling a message to the Australian people would be fundamental. …We view [the selling] of it cynically but it did help that process of helping the people understand why this program was necessary.”

Other observers note that both the media and politics have failed the public by skewing the debate to the issue of refugees and playing on the fear/rorting of the foreign workers/457 program:

Dr Jock Collins has noted in the article, ‘The changing face of Australian immigration’   that,  “It seems that the disproportionate anxiety about “boat people”, driven in part by the bi-partisan political opportunism to be gained when playing the “foreign worker” card (as prime minister Julia Gillard did infamously at her Rooty Hill speech earlier this year), has stolen the oxygen from the guest workers immigration debate.”

Immigration has brought investments and skills into Australia over the decades and continues to support its growth significantly. Given Australia's permanent migrant target of 190,000 annually, the quelling of the 457 debate with the recent review and the governments recent senate success in reintroducing the temporary visa for refugees, the time looks right for the Coalition to spend some energy on creating a better public understanding of the broader immigration program and help it gain better support from Australians.