Mount Isa tax offset 'won't buy a coffee', immigration tour says

A nationwide campaign against mass immigration has spent recent weeks working its way through regional Queensland, pulling up in towns from Gladstone to Mount Isa with a message that cheap migrant labour schemes are reshaping the regions while locals get little reason to stay.

Scott, a spokesperson for the group Australian Matters, told 4BC Brisbane the tour began with a rally in Brisbane on September 13 before a branded 45-foot semi-trailer carried the campaign to Gladstone, Mackay, Townsville, Cairns and, last weekend, Mount Isa. He said the conversations on the road kept circling back to the same question: why businesses in labour-short regional industries are turning to overseas workers instead of training and paying Australians to do the job.

One encounter in Mount Isa became his central example. He said he met a young driller, Paddy, who earned close to $200,000 last year and paid $84,000 in PAYG tax, yet the remote-area tax offset for living in Mount Isa works out to just $6.50 a week. By comparison, he said a drill bit he bought at the local Bunnings to repair the campaign truck cost $65, against roughly $50 for the same item in Brisbane. The gap, he argued, shows the tax system does little to offset the real cost of living and working in the outback.

That argument sat alongside comments from state MP Robbie Katter, cited on air, about an estimated $800 billion in minerals sitting in the ground across the north-west region. The host noted the contrast: a resource base worth hundreds of billions attached to a weekly tax concession that would not stretch to a cup of coffee.

The campaigner pointed to the Designated Area Migration Agreement, a scheme that lets employers bring in overseas workers on lower skill and English requirements once they can show they tried and failed to recruit locally. He argued the agreement is steadily changing the make-up of towns like Mount Isa, and said Australians deserve an open conversation about what that means for the identity of regional communities reliant on it.

The host pushed back gently, pointing out Mount Isa and much of inland Queensland were built on waves of migrant labour long before this debate, from the earliest settlers who pushed inland from the Brisbane River out through Ipswich and the Darling Downs. Both agreed the harder question is less about whether migrants have always been part of regional Australia, and more about who gets to decide its future shape, and on what terms.

The tour is continuing to press the case in regional centres, arguing that without better incentives for Australians to live and work in resource towns, those jobs and that population growth will keep going to workers brought in under special visa arrangements instead.