As I mentioned in â€œYes, Andâ€�, I teach computer science at Montana State University.

In that earlier essay, I say that computer science is probably still a reasonably good area to study, but that you should also expand your skills beyond â€œjustâ€� computer science to help make yourself more employable in the future.

In this essay I want to think more about what AI means for universities in general and computer science programs in particular.

Note: I apologize that this is a longer essay. I have provided a Table of Contents to help you navigate it.

First: Is The University Still Relevant?

An initial question that many people are asking is: in the era of AI, is the University still relevant?

This is not a new question. Many people have pointed to famous software industry figures who dropped out of college as proof that a university education isnâ€™t useful in technology. And most people who have worked in Silicon Valley know at least one excellent engineer who either dropped out or simply never went to college.

So a college degree has never been a hard requirement for a successful career in technology. But, in reality, most software engineers have some sort of college under their belt and many of the best developers have studied computer science in their undergraduate education.

That being said, there is clearly an emerging crisis in Computer Science education that needs to be addressed in order to keep the university relevant in the post-AI world.

Writing Code

Historically, many computer science departments have looked at writing code as a secondary skill, to be picked up by students on their own, while the department focuses more on the theoretical foundations of computer science.

Since I was mature enough to have an opinion on the matter, I have viewed this as wrongheaded: I think you need to learn how to write code in order to appreciate those deeper theoretical foundations of computer science. If you canâ€™t code up a linked list or use a hash table effectively, learning about the big-O behavior of them is much more abstract and difficult to grasp.

Ironically, in the era of AI, many professional environments are also starting to look at raw coding somewhat skeptically, sometimes insisting that their own engineers not write code at all, but rather use agents to generate it.

This approach may work for more experienced seniors, who have already written a lot of code and know what reasonable code looks like, but it puts junior developers in a bind: they donâ€™t have pre-AI experience writing code, and now they are going into environments where no one is writing code.

As I said in â€œYes, Andâ€�, you must write the code if you want to develop the ability to read code.

How is that supposed to happen at companies where nobody is writing the code?

I think this presents an opportunity for Computer Science departments: we can be the places where young software engineers write the code. By refocusing our curriculum on practical, code heavy assignments we can give students a safe environment, free of the time pressures and demands of corporate work, to write the code.

This experience can then put them in position to go into environments that use AI more heavily with the confidence that they know how to code and, because of that, are in a position to read and understand the code necessary for their career.

Signaling Competence in an AI World

Now, of course, students are famously lazy and famously clever in figuring out how to be lazy. So, many students will use AI to complete many of these code-heavy assignments. They will learn very little or nothing, but will get a good grade because, letâ€™s be honest, AI can perform at or above the level required for most reasonable undergraduate projects.

Here another irony of the AI era becomes evident: Universities are now in a position to signal competence in a way that nearly no other institution can. AI has made online testing pointless. I know this because the last semester I offered online tests (which I like to do because it is convenient for my working students) the testing scores were through the roof.

While I feel I am a pretty good teacher, this was clearly a case of AI being used by my students, despite my pleas.

When thinking about what I could do about this I realized that we had all the infrastructure for the perfect answer: in person, on paper testing. Universities have large lecture halls, expensive printers, testing centers for people who need additional help, etc.

Previously, I would have scoffed at this infrastructure as antiquated. But now I see that it puts me in a position to more accurately establish the competence of my students in a way that is difficult to game: I offer in-person quizzes, with one page of handwritten notes and no digital equipment, roughly every three weeks of my courses.

Of course students can still cheat, but the quizzes are proctored and now at least they have to work for it.

This in-person, on-paper testing infrastructure puts universities in a unique position to provide a high signal-to-noise indication of the competence of their students to the outside world.

Towards An AI-accepting CS Curriculum

While I believe that the University CS degree is not only still relevant, but perhaps of more value than it was in the pre-AI era, I do think that significant changes need to be made to adapt to the new state of affairs. In this section I will describe what I have done over the last year with my courses, what I plan to do in the near future & then finish with some more speculative changes that I believe would help increase the usefulness of undergraduate CS degrees.

Current Changes

So I believe that a computer science degree will, somewhat ironically, become more important in the post-AI world, but also that computer science departments will need to change in some fundamental ways to remain effective at communicating knowledge and properly evaluating students.

Below are some changes that I have made to my courses over the last year to deal with this new reality.

Homework Is No Longer A Strong Signal

As with take home quizzes, due to the use of AI, homeworks & projects are no longer a strong signal of the understanding of material. Homeworks must become for the studentâ€™s benefit rather than for evaluating their competency.

This is actually a good thing: homeworks can be more ambitious and the students that want to learn will have more opportunities to write the code. Yes, some (many?) will cheat on assignments, but the good students will have an opportunity to write code in a supportive environment.

To deal with this reality, I have reduced the weight of assignments in my classes from 60-80% (I have always had code-heavy classes) down to 50%, and expect most students will get Aâ€™s on most assignments. I try to strike a balance on how challenging assignments are so that the students that are honestly trying have a sense of accomplishment when they are finished.

Homework Can Be More Ambitious & Realistic

Another homework related change that I have made is that my assignments are now more ambitious and realistic. I donâ€™t mean they are much harder, but I can, with the help of AI, present much larger software systems to my students with better sample data, as a basis for their projects.

This allows students to see software systems that go beyond â€œHello Worldâ€� levels of complexity and develop the ability to read as well as write code in a larger, more complicated context.

AI is a Great TA

Another thing I have found in the post-AI era is that my office hours traffic has dropped precipitously. I have always done my office hours in the computer lab on campus and, particularly for my compilers class, expected large crowds of students to come in asking for help on projects.

I think, unfortunately, this is most likely due to many students using AI to solve their programming problems.

However, there is a more optimistic take here: the students are using AI to better understand the projects and therefore do not need as much one on one help.

While I am ambivalent in many ways towards AI, this is an area where AI can significantly improve the university experience for students: with proper use, AI can be a fantastic TA. It is infinitely patient, has no other students waiting in line and is usually very competent at undergraduate level concepts in computer science.

The danger, of course, is that students simply use AI as a code generator to complete assignments and head off to the bars.

To address this danger, I ship a CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md file in my class repos that directs AI agents to act like a good TA rather than a code generator. Of course students can modify or delete this file, but there is no system so perfect that no one needs to be good.

Stanford University has recently modified this file for one of their own classes, and I encourage other people and departments to do the same: it is public domain.

The Return of Butt-in-chair, Handwritten Tests

As I discussed above, Universities have infrastructure for in-person testing that make them uniquely qualified to assess expertise and competence in the post AI world.

I have switched to all in-person quizzes, roughly every three weeks. The three-week cadence gives enough time to cover a significant amount of material, even if holidays are interspersed in those weeks, while de-escalating each quiz when compared to a traditional midterm/final setup.

I also allow one page of handwritten notes. I do not allow printed notes. The idea here is to force the knowledge through the studentâ€™s eye-brain-hand pathway multiple times to help reinforce it.

My students have grumbled about this process, but also admit that it works in helping them learn the material.

My questions are all written response, never multiple choice. Sometimes I ask for prose, sometimes I ask for pseudocode, sometimes I will provide code and ask students to annotate/explain it, etc. This makes it harder to grade the tests, but also makes it much harder to cheat.

I have found that AI is very good at suggesting questions based on class material for quizzes. I will work with an AI agent based on my class slides (see below) to create appropriate quiz questions and then create a quiz review sheet to help students study for the quiz based on it. Students love the review sheet because it helps them focus their efforts.

I think that, from a learning perspective, the butt-in-chair quizzes have been the single most positive change I have made to my classes. I now make them 50% of a studentâ€™s grade, and my class grading curve has returned to a reasonable shape.

Demos & Visualizations Are Cheap

Another adjustment I have had to make is that demos & visualizations are now very cheap to create with AI.

For a long time I was unhappy with the computer emulators that were available to me to teach my computer systems class. I wanted a 16-bit computer that struck a balance between the simplicity of something like The Scott CPU and the full complexity of something like SPIM.

Two summers ago we spent an entire summer building such a computer, called The Montana Mini Computer that provided strong visualizations of how low level computing works.

Unfortunately, when I got into a class using it, I realized that the architecture I had picked was too exotic (mixing concepts from MIPS & the JVM) and that students would be better off learning an assembly closer to x86. This would be particularly useful later in our security classes.

I was able to work with AI to produce a new MTMC that was much closer to x86 in only a few weeks. It was so successful that I switched to the new version of the MTMC mid-class in fall, and used it exclusively in spring.

Another visualization that I have created with AI is a JVM emulator that shows how stack frames and the operand stack work together to do computation. It is a visualization that I always wanted, but was unable to create not due to lack of skill (I am a reasonably competent programmer) but just lack of time and energy (I am old.)

So I have had to reset my thinking on demos & visualizations: If you can think it and describe it, and if you are a reasonably good programmer, you can probably create it.

Class Content Should Be In Markdown

I have moved all my class slides to Markdown, using a tool called slidev and, generally, embraced Markdown for all my class content: SYLLABUS.md, etc. (Previously I was using Google slides for my lectures.) All content is checked in to my class repository that students get.

Moving all my content to Markdown has been tremendously beneficial:

I can run AI analysis over my slides and look for gaps or inconsistencies
Students can run the content through an AI agent to create a more effective TA
It is much easier to bulk-update my slides if I make a major change to a class

I have always liked Markdown and, with slidev, I have nice syntax highlighting and access to Mermaid for technical diagrams. Or I can use good olâ€™ ASCII art, which is often very effective.

Having everything locally in text/Markdown makes it much easier for AI tools to work effectively in my classes.

Class Analysis & Improvements

Another way I have used AI effectively is in reviewing my classes at a higher level:

I can compare my classes with courses offered at other universities to see if there are topics that I am missing
I can analyze my classes holistically and ensure that there are coherent threads between them (e.g. stack machines)

While this hasnâ€™t revolutionized any of my classes it has been useful in improving them.

Automate Everything

The final way that I have been using AI to improve my classes is in automating everything possible. I have always had a significant number of scripts that I use for the infrastructure in my classes: an autograder.py that runs the autograding for projects in CI, etc.

I have become much more aggressive in what I will automate and optimize now. For example, I am using Tampermonkey to make parts of Canvas LMS easier to work with for my work flows:

I can paste in a youtube URL, and it will automatically create a link for me in Canvas
I can drag and drop files directly from my OS into Canvas

You can see the tampermonkey script here

I have also created command line scripts for scheduling new Youtube streams, parsing our autograder output into Canvas compatible format, etc.

At this point, if there is friction somewhere in my class I try to think how I would remove it if I had the time, then consider if an LLM could generate that solution.

Upcoming Changes

I plan on implementing the following changes in the upcoming semester.

Stronger Pseudocode Standards

With on-paper quizzes becoming the standard, it is clear that I need a strong pseudocode standard for students to use on quizzes.

We are working on an â€œexecutableâ€� pseudocode, Notch, to address this. It is english-like (it is an xTalk variant) and uses standards from Java, so the students should be able to pick it up easily. We will of course be lenient on syntax when it is used as pseudocode.

I intend to provide a pseudo-code guide that students are allowed to bring to quizzes for reference.

We will see how it goes.

AI & Non-AI Tracks

In many of my classes I will have students give end-of-semester presentations and I often offer a reward for the best in show. In the upcoming year I am splitting these presentations into two tracks: AI & non-AI.

This will allow students who do not want to use AI to compete with one another and, I hope, encourage more students to not use AI for their projects.

I will stress that I will review the non-AI winnerâ€™s code base and, if I sniff any AI, they will be heavily penalized.

Open Source Work

AI is disrupting Open Source work significantly. It changes the calculus on build vs buy dramatically in favor of build. This is made more compelling by people recognizing that dependencies are liabilities, especially from a security perspective.

Of course much of the AI model training set consists of open source work and many open source developers are understandably upset about this. Chad Whitacre, an open source advocate who I respect tremendously, has decided to step away from technology entirely due to the situation.

I do not have any good answers of how to prevent AI models from using open source work for training, nor do I have a good answer for financing open source work in general.

However, one possibility that I see is that universities become more explicitly involved in open source work, by forming open source groups. We have done so at Montana State to support tools we use in our classes.

Universities have independent financing that allows them to pursue projects with steady (if unglamorous) levels of financial backing. This also dovetails with the public mission of many universities. Montana State, for example, is a land grant university, founded for â€œthe advancement of agriculture, mechanical arts and military tactics.â€�

Leaving aside military tactics, open source is one way that public universities can contribute to the public good in a meaningful way.

Clearly, Honestly Communicating The Dangers of AI

This upcoming semester I am going to spend more time communicating the dangers of AI to my students. The most obvious short term danger is that they wonâ€™t write the code and, therefore, will not learn the skills needed to read the code.

They may get good grades on assignment, but my quizzes will be difficult and, when they enter the real world, they will not be able to work effectively, either with or without AI.

There are also studies showing that AI is stultifying and homogenizes away creativity.

I have been telling my students for many years now that they face far, far more temptations to behave poorly than any generation before them. That they face more difficult temptations in a week than their grandparents generation faced in years and perhaps decades.

With AI we now have another dimension, automated cheating, along which they will need to exercise even greater virtue than previous generations.

I stress to them that I admire the heroism of their generation in resisting these temptations.

(I think older generations would do well to recognize this fact.)

Speculative Changes

Finally, I want to give a few concepts that I have thought of given an unlimited time & money budget.

The â€œCS+â€� Concept

An idea proposed by MSU professor Laura Stanley is â€œCS+â€�: integrating computer science education plus other majors in a meaningful way. Studies have shown that this increases the appeal of computer science more broadly to the student body.

I think this is a fantastic idea and will be working with our department to help re-orient our minor towards this concept. My hope is that we can refocus the minor and the first two years of our major program towards practical problem-solving with computers.

Perhaps AI will reduce the number of computer scientists needed in the world (I am skeptical of this claim) but it will certainly not reduce the need for technically adept students across the economy, both public and private. I think we can present a strong case to non-CS majors: â€œYou can be a good X, but add CS and you will be among the best!â€�

I think this program can obviously appeal to engineering, science and technical majors such as economics, etc. However, I also think it is an opportunity to expand into liberal arts and social sciences. I can imagine a â€œCS+â€� minor being extremely useful for a sociology major, for example, and hope we can reach out to students in those departments once we have established the shape of our program.

This may not just be a matter of my own preferences (I admit I like this idea conceptually, not just practically): if CS departments do not consider this sort of program they may see falling enrollment as students avoid the CS major due to AI fear.

Network Isolated Computers

I think it would be very forward-thinking for computer science departments to create network isolated computer labs.

These systems could be used to assess student competency while still providing a nice computing environment with IDEs, etc. without the risk of AI-generated solutions.

I can imagine assignments and quizzes that utilize this resource quite effectively. It would be a large investment and require management and upkeep, but could be very valuable if done well and perhaps become a centerpiece of a departmentâ€™s teaching strategy.

Interview-Based Grading

Finally, another way to avoid AI poisoning the evaluation of students is, again, returning to the past: sitting down and having a conversation with a student to determine their grade.

While I do not have experience directly with oral exams, my experience in office hours tells me that I can determine the competence of a given student in roughly five minutes of conversation, guiding the conversation to the level that they are comfortable with, giving hints where necessary, etc. and determine a reasonable grade for them in a manner that would be very hard to game.

Now, many of my classes have 100+ students, and if it took, say, 15 minutes per student interview, that is 25 hours of total interview time. This is not realistic given the current structure of classes (I currently have 3 hours of lecture over 15 weeks, or 45 total hours.)

However, a forward-looking university might restructure finals week (or perhaps two finals weeks) in such a way to allow oral exams, and it would provide a much better final analysis of studentsâ€™ achievement in a class.

(Of course it would be a lot more work for professors, so I view this as unfortunately unlikely.)

Conclusion

So, yes, I think The University is still relevant in the post-AI era and, in fact, may become more relevant due to some structural advantages it has, particularly in signaling studentâ€™s competence to the outside world.

I do think computer science departments will need to adjust to the new realities and consider some somewhat radical changes in order to maximize their value to their students. Most importantly, I think universities should increase their focus on providing hand-coding opportunities to students.

I hope that this essay helps computer science educators improve their course offering so that we can continue to produce competent and confident computer scientists for the foreseeable future.

Note: No AI was used in the writing of this essay. AI was used to correct typos and to produce the table of contents.

The Australian immigration system must exclude dickheads, bullshitters, and bludgers.

This post has been inspired by Joe Walker’s recent set of three exemplary interviews (Martin Parkinson (former Treasury, author of 2023 migration review), Mark Cully (historian), Mike Pezzullo (senior border official 2013-2023)) on the subject of immigration policy. This comes against a backdrop of growing scepticism within the West on current levels of immigration, concerns about integration, cultural compatibility, rising costs of living, straining public services and infrastructure, and the rapidly increasing popularity of hardline anti-immigration political parties who, in some cases, have already won defining majorities within the Western democratic system.

This post complements earlier posts of mine on Australian defense policy, excessive government interference in its economy, economic stagnation, and energy policy.

(As I publish this, protests are occurring in Ireland. I actually held off on publishing this for about a month in the hope I could drop it on an immigration slow news day, but it was not to be. This post is not about any specific recent event.)

My position, as an immigrant, is that I would like immigration systems to be successful and publicly supported at the highest possible sustainable rate. The question I’m here to ask is: what would a crazy awesome immigration policy in Australia look like that could enjoy majority support and work well for everyone?

Some people might argue that the existing system is perfect and ideal as it is and that the missing piece is either a misinformed or inadequately propagandised public. This sentiment is captured well in Bertolt Brecht’s poem:

“Would it not in that case
Be simpler for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?”

Certainly one evolving challenge is that the general population, now exposed to a wide and broadening variety of information through fragmented social media, has developed much stronger mimetic resistance to astroturfed ideas. The standard of rigour and transparency necessary to convince the general public that certain policy measures purportedly enacted in their own best interest are in fact in their best interest is much higher than it ever was.

In order to be successful, a reformed immigration system would need to counter the growing contradictions and challenges of the existing one. If immigration has increased our living standards, why is it that housing, health care, education, and childcare are more unaffordable than ever? If immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than the general population, why is it that the criminal statistics of immigrants in Australia are classified – knowledge about public safety that is literally illegal to know or disseminate? If immigrants are generally hardworking, contributive members of society, why is it that hospitals are breaking beneath the strain of the dependents of immigrants who are brought here late in life with exceedingly complex medical problems?

To put the answer up front: Australia should adopt transparent market-based mechanisms for determining permanent residency, and it should be based on age-calibrated minimum income tax contributions. The market can expose the necessary information on sufficient levels of cultural and economic integration in a way that a bureaucratic judgment system never can.

This is not selling Australian citizenship to the highest bidder. Under this proposal, a 35-year-old single migrant would qualify for permanent residency on a salary below what three-quarters of Australians their age earn. Rather than being elitist, it requires only a clear net positive contribution. This proposal just happens to be one that, for the first time in Australian history, would be capable of mathematically demonstrating that every new migrant adds wealth to Australia from the moment they arrive. Not on average, not after twenty years, but today, individually, verifiably. That is the unique political property of the architecture I describe below.

The current system can’t be patched

In his interview with Joe Walker, Martin Parkinson describes in some depth the complexity of the points-based immigration system. This points system is designed to guide immigration officers in making decisions as to whether particular immigrants can be accepted. The system, however, has not evolved substantially in more than 25 years and it is clear that on the most important metrics the point system is either saturated or is not sufficiently discriminative. Immigrants, both good and bad, understand that it’s a game and the game must be played.

One thing that came through to me in more than two hours of interview is the steadfast refusal of Martin Parkinson to discuss the potential value of a market-based system for resolving this problem, which is an interesting oversight from an economist that ran Treasury for three years. Instead we have endless discussion of wrangling between dozens of stakeholders, including employer bodies who want to increase immigration to push down wages of Australians and increase their margins, versus employee bodies who want to restrict access to labour through licensing and guild agreements to increase the scarcity of their constituents’ skills and drive up their wages. The result is poorly managed chaos that fails Australian-born citizens, poorly filters aspirational immigrants, and betrays the hopes of the more than two million “temporary migrants” who lack certainty about their future status.

Over and over, we are told, Australia suffers from fundamental labour shortages in certain skilled and unskilled trades for jobs that Australians simply can’t or won’t do – and this is despite more than 30% of contemporary Australians being born overseas! I don’t know if I believe this. I think that there are some known difficult, dirty, and dangerous jobs that are seen as socially undesirable, but I grew up in a relatively rural part of the Central Coast in the 1990s when nearly everyone, very few of whom were immigrants, did jobs like that. None of them were rich but pretty much all of them were able to afford housing, a car, health care, and education, often with large families. Employing a socially uncapitalized temporary immigrant underclass to clean toilets, change nappies, and slaughter animals might result in lower prices for those particular services but the economic imbalance just translates into higher prices that compensate in other parts of the economy, along with the moral cost of exploiting people with fewer choices.

The key attribute of market capitalism is that sustained shortages are impossible because prices will adjust to meet supply and demand. Cutting off access to entry-level or low skill jobs for Australians in preference for cheaper foreigners merely accelerates Australia’s path to a plantation economy that exports exclusively low margin commodities and must import, at the seller’s discretion, any other necessity. Australia is currently enduring the folly of this policy in securing access to such necessities as refined petroleum, but the principle holds in general and is unlikely to magically correct itself.

Markets are not perfect and money is not a measure of someone’s worth. However money is the mechanism by which we allocate labor and capital within our economic system because its finite nature forces users to collapse their preferences towards what they actually need rather than their stated preferences. Simply put, money aligns incentives towards mutually acceptable outcomes. We would all like to live in a world where the wealth of Australia was able to bring a high quality of living and modern health care to the billions of people worldwide who would benefit from it, but this is not the reality that we currently live in. As a result we must make choices, and a financial filter is transparent, non-discriminatory, and fair.

There is also a deeper point about what such a filter selects for, which I should make plainly. Sustained high earning in a modern economy requires impulse control, executive function, conscientiousness, the ability to cooperate within institutions, the willingness to defer gratification, the time horizon to make decisions whose payoff is years away. These are the traits Australians most want in fellow residents anyway. They are also traits the electorate is unable to test for explicitly without producing legally indefensible discrimination. A fiscal filter measures the result rather than the trait, and so it guarantees fairness in a way that is blind to nation of origin, race, gender, religion, and other protected characteristics.

The first leg: a fiscal filter: No Bludgers

The first leg of this proposal is that we deftly sidestep the concern or accusation within Western societies that immigrants have a tendency or a perverse incentive to become freeloaders in a system they didn’t build, by simply insisting that all prospective immigrants meet certain minimum taxation thresholds in order to be eligible for permanent residency and the utilisation of public benefits. These thresholds must necessarily exist on a sliding scale, based on age and on the number of prospective dependents to be brought in.

The whole point of this exercise is to maximize opportunities for high-quality immigrants in the most fair and transparent way possible. We are ensuring that we maintain Australia as a destination of preference for extremely talented international migrants. So it follows that a highly qualified 20-something who has many years of high productivity and good health ahead of them to contribute to the Australian system should face a lower set of hurdles than a similarly qualified 60-year-old who has far fewer years of productivity ahead of them, and who also wants to bring in their retired 80-year-old parents, who both happen to need new hips and treatment for cancer.

Younger children should receive a different treatment than retiree dependents as younger children ideally will grow up to become highly productive and contribute to our society in a way that retirees simply cannot. Note that this also creates the correct incentives around immigrants who would then work hard to up-skill in the Australian labour environment to earn the right to bring various family members into Australia. It could become a point of pride to immigrate as a solo migrant to Australia in your 20s and to learn and work and be promoted fast enough to bring your extended family in in your 30s. This mechanism also delegates needs-based triage of access to Australia and its carefully created and curated environment to the migrant families who would understand best who most needs them, instead of requiring immigration department officials to “say no to Nana” forever.

Of course Australia should remain open to migration for non-working people but as they are not paying income taxes, their material contribution to the Australian system would have to be levied at the point of entry in the form of some analogue to the US Gold Card.

In general, if an immigrant meets these minimum viable fiscal contribution thresholds, then their immigration status need not be tied to a particular employer, deleting any possibility of the coercion or exploitation that has become rampant in the US H-1B program.

I’ve included a table here with some numbers calibrated to present Australian GDP, derived from a present-value calculation using Treasury’s own service cost estimates and a 3% real discount rate. These numbers would have to be indexed to inflation, and accumulate for sponsored dependents. The mandatory waiver of Age Pension entitlement by new entrants is built into them. Without that single change, all the thresholds roughly double after age 60, because the pension is a $28,000 per year ongoing entitlement that no working-life tax record can outrun. Ensuring sustainability of the pension for existing citizens and PR holders is a separate conversation largely subsumed by superannuation. New migrants self-fund their retirements. That is the single largest fiscal lever in this proposal and it is the one that makes everything else feasible.

Table 1.

Age at entry	Annual tax for net-positive contribution	Implied gross salary	Percentile of full-time Australians their age
25	$6,000	$47,000	30th
35	$10,200	$61,000	24th
45	$19,200	$89,000	47th
55	$38,800	$147,000	81st
65 (Gold Card upfront)	$200,000 once	—	—
75 (Gold Card upfront)	$360,000 once	—	—

These numbers do not place an arbitrarily high bar. They will enable a rock-solid defence of the proposition that every immigrant to Australia, individually, is a net contributor to the system from the moment they arrive.

There is a general challenge to these fiscal hurdle schemes, which is adverse selection. They exclude prospective migrants who cannot afford the price of entry, but they include people who would still end up extracting more value than they pay on entry. A pay-as-you-go system can avoid this, but I still think it’s relatively straightforward to tally up the net costs of the total pool of migrants in some age cohort and set the price of admission accordingly. This approach also aligns incentives, because in order to expand access to immigration for retirees, Australia would need to enable innovation in the provision of, in particular, healthcare services, in order to improve service and lower costs.

Note also that this system does away with all the problems Parkinson describes around skilled labour, certifications, and points-based systems derived from industry boards complaining about skill shortages. In particular we no longer need public servants to attempt to arbitrate the quality or validity of job qualifications obtained from overseas institutions, nor to worry about the perverse incentives of Australian-based diploma mills that purport to offer a pathway to citizenship. We can admit all the foreign students we want. If they are able to land a job that pays a sufficiently high salary and they meet the tax threshold upon graduation, then great. If they don’t, then they may return to their home country. Universities must be compelled to publish statistics regarding the job market success of their students and curate their admissions and courses to match – once again aligning incentives while promoting fairness and transparency.

Who actually administers this

The most important feature of this proposal is what it doesn’t require. No Department of Salary Fraud Detection needs to be staffed. No new agency administers it. The verification mechanism is the Australian Taxation Office, which has decades of experience cross-matching declared income against observed consumption, and already operates the data infrastructure required. Salary deposits are direct-deposit only, which AUSTRAC already monitors under existing anti-money-laundering thresholds. Consumption audits, which check that a migrant declaring $300,000 in income does not, in fact, live like one declaring $100,000, are something the ATO does routinely for domestic tax fraud cases at this income level.

The fraud surface area in this architecture is microscopic. A wealthy migrant takes the Gold Card because it eliminates the entire ongoing-compliance question. A productive migrant meets the tax threshold genuinely. The salary-inflation kickback scheme that occurs to everyone as a theoretical attack (employer nominally pays $300,000, requires $200,000 cash kickback) requires committing ongoing AUSTRAC-detectable tax fraud against the Commonwealth while the migrant, who owns their visa and can resign at any moment, declines to do so. It is a strictly dominant strategy. Any employer demanding cost claw-back from a migrant, such as visa fees, sponsorship costs, or training bonds, commits a strict-liability criminal offense with personal jail time for named officers, not corporate fines that are just a cost of doing business. The system polices itself by aligning incentives.

What gets deleted is the entire scaffolding of the current architecture. Occupation lists go. The points test goes. Labour Market Testing goes. The Business Innovation and Investment Program (which Treasury’s own modeling shows costs $80,000 per migrant in lifetime fiscal impact) goes. State nomination quotas, Designated Area Migration Agreements, and Labour Agreements go. The Migration Agents Registration Authority and the ~7,000-strong, $1B-plus migration agent industry go. Skills assessments by industry bodies for migration purposes go. Approximately 60-70% of the Department of Home Affairs selection branch goes. Seven hundred pages of migration regulation collapse to one page of thresholds. The only parts that remain are key stakeholders with skin in the game.

The waiver tier

There is one mechanism worth allowing precisely because of the second-order consequences it produces.

Any migrant whose tax record falls below the threshold may elect to remain in Australia by permanently waiving access to Medicare, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, Age Pension, NDIS, and means-tested welfare. In exchange, they hold mandatory catastrophic private insurance and pay cash at point of sale for any health and aged-care services they consume. They continue paying income tax, GST, and indirect taxes the same as everyone else. This is voluntary on both ends, as the alternative is exit.

The first purpose of this tier is to let migrants whose tax contribution is below threshold continue contributing to the economy without consuming public services. It also allows foreigners to access the Australian health care system on fair terms without resorting to impersonation of a resident friend or relative.

The second purpose, more important in the long run, is that a cohort of 50,000 to 200,000 cash-paying Australian residents creates a genuine price-discovery layer in dental, GP visits, elective surgery, aged care, and pharmaceuticals. None of these services currently trade at market prices in Australia, because Medicare and PBS set prices for around 70% of the volume. The waiver cohort produces the first genuine cash-pay healthcare market this country will have had in two generations. Once cash-pay infrastructure exists serving the waiver cohort, the question of whether existing Australian citizens should also be allowed to opt into faster, market-priced care becomes a live political question rather than a hypothetical one. This is how you actually deregulate healthcare in a country with a constitutional commitment to healthcare socialism. It takes 15-25 years and it is the only path that enables a graceful transition to a competitive, innovative healthcare model that has a hope of meeting Australia’s future needs without bankrupting the entire country.

The third purpose of the waiver tier is to encourage less productive migrants to self-deport. The system does not need to forcibly remove anyone. A migrant who cannot meet the tax threshold and does not want to pay cash for services chooses to leave. The architecture is voluntary, self-policing, and produces the right outcome at every margin without enforcement bureaucracy. The difference is that Australia is no longer spending vast quantities of treasure bribing non-contributive migrants to live here and consume services, wealth and opportunities that could be made available to team players. Does this make Australian migration relatively more hostile to prospective migrants who want to sit on their arse and get free money? Yes.

The medical, aged-care, and pharmacy lobbies may choose to fight the waiver tier harder than any other element of the proposal. That intensity is the signal that it’s the right idea – one receives the most flak when one is over the target.

Replace professional gatekeeping with insurance markets: No Bullshitters

Parkinson cites the figure of approximately 250,000 permanent residents admitted as skilled migrants who apparently cannot work in their assessed profession. His framing is that this is pure productivity loss. People we said were qualified who can’t get licensed by the relevant state board. The implied diagnosis is that the licensing bodies are creating bureaucratic obstacles that should be streamlined to bring these desperately needed skills into the workforce.

The true reading is harder. Stage 1 skills assessment is gameable: Engineers Australia’s Competency Demonstration Report for engineers from non-Washington-Accord countries is a self-written essay for which a thriving ghostwriting industry exists in Hyderabad and Lahore, among other places. AMC pass rates for international medical graduates run around 21-28%, compared to 67% for the UK’s equivalent PLAB exam and 68% for Canada’s NAC. AHPRA itself tiers source countries into “comparable” (UK, Ireland, US, Canada, Singapore, NZ) and “non-comparable,” which is an explicit admission that the visa-stage equivalence claim is false. A meaningful fraction of the 250,000 are people whose original credentials were lower-quality than the visa system pretended, and Stage 2 licensing is doing real work catching them.

The problem here is that on one hand, Australian licensing boards are running a protectionist, racist racket excluding genuinely qualified foreign professionals, and on the other hand, Australian licensing boards are protecting consumers from the potentially catastrophic consequences of insufficiently competent foreign practitioners who, if they can’t navigate the bureaucracy of Australian occupational licensing, sure as hell shouldn’t be building bridges, wiring houses, and performing heart transplants. As with many things, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, but how can we expect a political or bureaucratic process to adjudicate this correctly or fairly without real world information?

The right market-based solution is not some kind of bridging program funded by a levy on universities – yet another tax on productive parts of the economy. The right solution is to augment the bureaucratic licensing monopoly with an insurance market. Any foreign-trained doctor, engineer, accountant, or other regulated professional should be permitted to practice in Australia if they can obtain professional indemnity or malpractice insurance from an Australian carrier at a rate equivalent to that paid by an Australian-trained practitioner, then the licensing body must explicitly justify why they should not be allowed to practice. If they cannot obtain insurance without a large risk premium, then the matter speaks for itself.

This is elegant for several reasons. Insurers are in the business of pricing risk and making money. The insurance company has actual money on the line. They pay out when professionals harm their clients. They have actuarial data on outcomes. They have no protectionist incentive, unlike the AMA or the engineering institutions. They will assess each applicant individually, may require an examination or a period of supervised practice, may decline applicants whose credentials don’t actually translate. Most importantly, they have skin in the game in a way that AHPRA, Engineers Australia, and the specialist medical colleges manifestly do not. The market does the safety assessment, with real consequences for getting it wrong, and the protectionist guilds lose their gatekeeping monopoly overnight.

Applied to the 250,000: those whose qualifications and skills genuinely meet Australian standards will pass the insurance market test and begin practicing. Those who cannot, either because their credentials were inflated, because their training was inadequate, or because they are not actually competent at the work, will not be insured and will not practice. If they fail to meet the tax threshold in due course, they will either accept the waiver tier or leave. The system handles this without a single new bureaucratic process and without subsidising people who were never going to deliver the productivity their visa promised.

Holding the universities accountable

Australia is a rule-of-law country and migrants who came in good faith should not be the targets of accountability measures. But universities and their executives are not entitled to derive infinite income by arbitraging the Australian migration process. The international education sector has, for more than 25 years, operated as a migration laundromat with full institutional knowledge of what it was doing. Vice-Chancellor remuneration is explicitly tied to international enrolment growth. Marketing materials feature “pathway to PR” messaging the institutions know is misleading at the rates they are enrolling. The Senate’s 2023 interim report on the international education sector documented the migration-laundromat pattern, as did the Parkinson Review the same year, after a decade of sector lobbying had successfully suppressed similar findings in earlier reviews.

The first priority is to fix the system going forward. The following are some market-based proposals to align incentives between educational institutions and foreign students, who are otherwise ripe for exploitation.

Bonds posted by universities for each new international student, calibrated to the institution’s historical PR conversion rate. High-performing programs post negligible bonds; the diploma-mill segment posts bonds that make its current business model financially nonviable. Refundable to the student if they fail to qualify under the new system within four years of graduation.
Fixing incentives will induce the correct behaviour in university leadership, but in particularly egregious cases, we could explore personal clawback of executive remuneration tied to international enrolment growth metrics over the past decade where institution-level outcomes fell below documented standards. Royal Commission precedent.
Class actions under the Australian Consumer Law for material misrepresentation. Marketing materials of many institutions over the past decade meet the legal definition of material misrepresentation regarding likelihood of PR outcomes. This is purely prospective enforcement of existing law against actors who escaped enforcement through sector lobbying. The damages should flow to the affected students, not to the institutions.

There is no rule-of-law principle that requires the Australian taxpayer to continue indemnifying the universities and executives that built the laundromat.

The data Treasury refuses to publish

Denmark publishes, annually, the per-person net fiscal contribution of immigrants to Denmark broken down by country of origin. The publication is called Indvandreres nettobidrag til de offentlige finanser. It is read carefully by the Danish public, debated openly in parliament, and forms the empirical basis for a Danish migration policy that has shifted decisively over the past decade without producing the collapse in public consent that Australia has experienced.

Australia produces the equivalent data. The Multi-Agency Data Integration Project (MADIP) cross-links ATO records, Centrelink records, Medicare records, and visa records. Treasury’s FIONA model publishes fiscal-impact figures by visa category: Skilled Employer Sponsored at +$291k lifetime, Skilled Independent at +$205k, BIIP (business indication and investment program) at -$80k. Treasury does not publish the equivalent data by country of birth. The 2016 Productivity Commission report did not. The 2021 Treasury FIONA paper did not. The 2023 Parkinson Review did not.

This omission cannot be accidental. Treasury’s stated reason, when pressed, is “social cohesion concerns.” Translation: we believe the public would not handle the data well, and we have decided to protect them from it. This is paternalism dressed as prudence, and it is the proximate cause of the collapse in public trust in Australian migration policy. Voters can tell when they’re being bullshitted, and respond by withdrawing consent entirely.

Publish the data. The single most useful sentence to insert into Australian political discourse is: What does the data say? Followed by: Why isn’t it published?

The second leg: Housing-indexed migration limits

The second leg of the proposed system comes down to ensuring that immigration flows are calibrated to real-world Australian cost-of-living issues. We do this by aligning incentives between policymakers on issues pertaining to supply-side challenges in Australia and policymakers on issues pertaining to the demand side. To keep this conversation of a sensible length, we will constrain our discussion here to housing alone although a discussion around education, healthcare, and childcare is also worthy of consideration.

In any case, it is clear that the above-inflation increase in costs of service and care industries is driven largely by massive relative inflation of costs in housing, which in turn is driven by an imbalance between supply and demand. If all the houses cost more than a million dollars then no nurses, firefighters, police, or teachers can afford to live in a city.

It is no secret that housing prices in Australia have enjoyed, if that’s the right word, an unprecedented period of speculative expansion. The consequence is that younger Australians who are setting out are denied the possibility of home ownership. This in turn affects family formation rates and artificially depresses the birth rate in a way that endangers the long-term viability of Australian culture. Houses are not intrinsically productive and the material costs of houses are not that high. Yet the current Australian economy seems to expect that Australians should be willing to pour the vast bulk of their lifetime GDP into servicing enormous loans on structures that they cannot live without, instead of investing it in children and businesses.

Rough back-of-the-envelope math suggests that returning housing prices to a level that would sustain the ongoing social reproduction of Australian culture would require a doubling of current supply, a radical prescription that underlines the short-sightedness and near-hopelessness of the hole we’ve managed to dig for ourselves. Of course a sufficiently large correction to housing prices would be a severe economic blow to all current holders of equity tied up in the Australian housing market but this is probably the lesser of two evils, if the alternative is the extinction of children born in Australia.

In any case it is insane to admit half a million or a million migrants every year in a country that cannot build enough houses to contain them all. Therefore it is reasonably straightforward to ramp the threshold of admission based on taxation or a large visa fee to cap the total number of migrants per year to a level that is proportional to, and algorithmically determined by, the rate of expansion of housing supply, such that housing prices are on a trajectory to normalisation in an acceptably short time frame.

I suggest that total immigrant numbers be kept below 100,000 in any year in which housing prices increase faster than inflation and expand to a maximum of 500,000 a year in cases where housing prices are actually decreasing.

Table 2.

Year-on-year housing price change	Maximum permanent admissions
Rising > inflation	100,000
Rising at inflation	200,000
Stable in real terms	300,000
Falling 0-3% real	400,000
Falling > 3% real	500,000

This makes immigration policy counter-cyclical rather than the current pro-cyclical pattern, in which we admit the most people exactly when the country is least able to house them. It also creates a direct incentive for state and federal governments to attack housing supply constraints, because doing so unlocks higher migration numbers, which are popular with the business community and the universities. The alignment is in the right direction for the first time in 30 years.

There remains an unskilled labour question that the fiscal mechanism does not directly handle. The seasonal agriculture sector, parts of construction, and aged care all currently rely on migrant labour that would not clear the tax threshold. These sectors are currently exploiting desperate migrant labour as a shadow subsidy to keep prices artificially low. Letting prices rise to market clearing is the right answer. The Productivity Commission has said this for 30 years and been politely ignored every time. For the residual cases that are genuinely temporary, a PALM-equivalent guest-worker program (3-year maximum, no PR pathway, employer bonds against exploitation, mandatory return-home period) handles them transparently without pretending they’re on the path to permanent settlement.

The third leg: integrity and rule of law: No Dickheads

The third leg of the system is around social cohesion, integrity, and rule of law. The Australian immigration process requires every migrant to pledge the Australian Values Statement.

I confirm that I have read, or had explained to me, information provided by the Australian Government on Australian society and values.

I understand that Australian society values:

respect for the freedom and dignity of the individual;
freedom of religion (including the freedom not to follow a particular religion), freedom of speech, and freedom of association;
commitment to the rule of law, which means that all people are subject to the law and should obey it;
parliamentary democracy whereby our laws are determined by parliaments elected by the people, those laws being paramount and overriding any other inconsistent religious or secular “laws”;
equality of opportunity for all people, regardless of their gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, race, or national or ethnic origin;
a ‘fair go’ for all that embraces:
- mutual respect;
- tolerance;
- compassion for those in need;
- equality of opportunity for all;
the English language as the national language, and as an important unifying element of Australian society.
I undertake to conduct myself in accordance with these values of Australian society during my stay in Australia and to obey the laws of Australia.
I undertake to make reasonable efforts to learn the English language, if it is not my native language.
I understand that, if in the future I meet the legal qualifications for becoming an Australian citizen and my application is approved, I will need to pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people.

It is not very complicated, but it’s also equally clear that a minority of migrants to Australia are falsely pledging alignment with these classical liberal values and then aggressively importing ideologies of hate, violence, and extremism from distant lands already cursed by these terrible ideas.

How can it be that every prospective migrant to Australia is screened for adherence to fundamental liberal values, and yet survey work consistently finds a non-trivial minority of certain immigrant communities who, in private, do not in fact share those values? In his interview with Joe Walker, Mike Pezzullo observed that in relative terms the genuinely problematic cohort is very small but in absolute terms it has been large enough to produce repeated “incidents” on Australian soil. Where “incident” is a strange euphemism for repeated outrageous terrorist plots and attacks.

I don’t want to create an Australia that polices thought crime. At the same time we need to be mindful that the system is obviously being gamed and adherence to fundamental Australian values is currently not enforced.

Lying to an immigration officer is fraud. Residency obtained by false representation is voidable when the fraud is discovered. There is no provisional period after which a successful lie becomes safe. A university can rescind a PhD if it later discovers the data was fabricated, even decades later, because the degree was never validly earned in the first place. The same principle applies to permanent residency obtained by misrepresentation. If evidence emerges five, ten, or twenty-five years after admission that an applicant lied about their identity, qualifications, beliefs, history, or intentions, their residency is revoked and they are deported. There is no statute of limitations on fraud against the immigration system. This is not retrospective punishment. It is the recognition that the original grant was conditional on truthful representation and if the condition was never met, the grant is void. Even if they live in a marginal electorate.

Similarly, if an immigrant is admitted to Australia on a refugee visa claiming asylum from a foreign country and is subsequently found to have visited that country, that calls into question the validity of the initial claim. Residency revoked, deportation follows, and capacity is created for people with genuine need.

Criminal conduct fits the same frame. Temporary migrants and permanent residents who serve prison sentences in Australia must be deported on completion of their sentence. The threshold is a single sentence of meaningful length — Section 501 currently uses 12 months as the cutoff but that seems absurdly lenient to me, since it costs $160,000/year to house a prisoner. Migrants should respect and fear the Australian justice system. 95% of current migrants and millions of prospective migrants have no difficulty obeying basic laws. If you cannot stay out of prison in Australia, you are not entitled to permanent residency in Australia. There is no productive discussion to be had about whether prisons in a criminal migrant’s country of origin are worse than Australian prisons. It is not Australia’s responsibility to provide a more luxurious incarceration experience to people who have demonstrated they cannot live as law-abiding members of the community here. Why should we underfund schools and hospitals to house, feed and clothe criminals who came here illegally or under false pretenses and whose behaviour reveals no respect for their new home? We are not going to re-instantiate penal colonies!

To protect the ongoing political health and sustainability of the immigration program, we must hold all immigrants to high standards of personal integrity and contribution to Australian society. The mechanism is the existing Section 501 character test (preserved), the existing Australian Values Statement (strengthened from rhetorical declaration to substantive condition revocable on breach), the existing ASIO referral process for high-risk profiles, and a narrow extreme-position screen modelled on the equivalent US INA §212(a)(3) provisions — designated terrorist organisation membership, public advocacy of violent overthrow of democratic government, documented sectarian violence history. None of this requires racial or religious tests, all of which I would reject as both unjust and unnecessary.

The reason I treat this as a third leg rather than a first one is that the fiscal mechanism is doing most of the work the electorate cares about already. The traits the system selects for via the tax threshold are precisely those that are correlated with civic compatibility, and in a way that is far harder to fake than any declared-belief test. Once the architecture is right, the cohesion issues become a small residual rather than the dominant policy challenge.

What about the 2.3 million?

Approximately 2.3 million people are currently in Australia on temporary visas. The instinctive response of any policy proposal is to grandfather their existing pathway expectations under the old rules. I am not going to do that here. Grandfathering retroactively-failed visa policies onto the people currently caught in the resulting limbo is its own injustice, and running two parallel migration systems for 10-15 years is administratively absurd.

The new system must apply equally to everyone. Every current temporary visa holder is re-evaluated against the new criteria within a defined window, ending at the end of the first full financial year since enactment. If they meet the tax threshold for their age cohort, they receive permanent residency immediately and the bridging-visa machinery that currently traps them dissolves. If they don’t, they can purchase the Gold Card at the applicable price, accept the waiver tier, or leave. Most of the people currently in limbo would welcome the certainty, even those who don’t qualify outright. The existing system already deports people slowly and miserably through bridging-visa expiry; the new system does it quickly with clear, fair, transparent rules and a defined timeline.

A one-time regularisation window is offered to the estimated 60-100,000 undocumented residents on the same terms: meet the new threshold within the financial year and receive permanent residency, or exit.

The 250,000 stuck professionals discussed above are a subset of this population and handled by the same rule. Insurance-based licensing gives them a fair shot at practicing their nominal profession. If they can qualify under that and earn enough to meet the tax threshold, they get permanent residency. If they can’t, they don’t. Some significant fraction of this cohort were never going to be productive at their assessed skill level and the system that admitted them was lying about what their credentials meant. We are not going to spend Australian taxpayer money on trying to back fill an educational credential they purport to have already achieved and which is not available to regular Australian students. They go home, new immigrants get a shot.

This is harder than the grandfathering approach but cleaner, faster, and fairer. The people currently in limbo are paying the cost of the existing policy failure; they should be the first beneficiaries of the new policy clarity, not the last.

Conclusion

I don’t imagine for a second that this proposal will meet with thunderous applause and universal acclaim. Much of what it states is quite radical, if rigorously consequentialist. But opponents who scream the loudest may be found to be the greatest beneficiaries of the current system, which is unfair, unaffordable, and rapidly losing legitimacy.

This is not a system that promises to admit fewer migrants. It is a system that promises to admit better-matched migrants, transparently, on terms that the Australian electorate will recognise as fair, and at quantities calibrated to what the country can actually absorb. It captures for existing Australians the surplus value of access to one of the most desirable countries in the world, rather than leaving that surplus on the table for migration agents, diploma-mill universities, and exploitative employers to extract. It replaces credential-laundering bureaucracies with insurance markets that have actual skin in the game. It applies a single, clean set of rules to new applicants and the existing population alike, so that everyone knows where they stand. It doesn’t ask the taxpayers who have already paid for it once to pay yet again to clean up the mess.

Above all, it produces, for the first time in Australian history, a migration program that can mathematically defend the proposition that every new resident adds wealth to Australia from the moment they arrive. Not on average. Not after twenty years. Today, one by one, verifiably.

Australia is one of the best countries in the world to live in. We have built that, and we maintain it, at considerable cost. We are not obliged to be a sucker about it.

No dickheads. No bullshitters. No bludgers.

A fair go for everyone else.

Evolution and reproductive strategies

The informational power of genetic recombination

Conclusion

Comments

Comments

Related Stories

Comments

Related Stories

Downloads

Nitrogen Dioxide – May 18, 2026 7:05 AM EDT

Nitrogen Dioxide – May 18, 2026 3:05 PM EDT

Ozone – May 18, 2026 5:05 PM EDT

References & Resources

You may also be interested in:

Discover More from NASA Earth Science

Subscribe to Earth Observatory Newsletters

Earth Observatory Image of the Day

Earth Science Data

Comments

Related Stories

Ben Franklin Was a Little off Target

The big model smell

Notable projects (approximate dates)

Using Fable in Claude.ai

Adding features to Datasette Agent and LLM using Claude Code

How much I've spent

And some pelicans

Comments

Related Stories

Comments

Comments

Related Stories

Comments

Related Stories

Please support my work—by taking out a premium subscription for just $6 per month.

The 50 Essential Western Films

The Great Train Robbery (1903)

The current system can’t be patched

Who actually administers this

The waiver tier

Replace professional gatekeeping with insurance markets: No Bullshitters

Holding the universities accountable

The data Treasury refuses to publish

The second leg: Housing-indexed migration limits

The third leg: integrity and rule of law: No Dickheads

What about the 2.3 million?

Conclusion

Comments

Related Stories