How the Modern ALP Went from Representing the Unions to Representing Migrant Workers and International Students
The Shrinking and Sinking Union Revenue Base
To understand what the ALP is moving away from, it helps to understand the scale of what the union movement still represents. Australian trade unions collectively collect somewhere between $1.1 billion and $1.3 billion annually in membership subscription fees. When investment income, property assets, training grants, and commercial services are included, total annual revenue across all registered employee organisations approaches $1.5 billion to $1.6 billion.
These figures come from General Purpose Financial Reports lodged with the Fair Work Commission under the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Act 2009, and they are audited. The United Workers Union, which serves logistics, hospitality, manufacturing, and early childhood education workers, reported membership income of $89.1 million for the financial year ending June 30, 2025, across 143,230 members. That is roughly $622 per member per year.
The concentration of this revenue is stark. The bulk flows through a small number of mega-unions: the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association in retail and fast food; the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, the largest single union by membership; the CFMEU across construction and maritime; the UWU; and the Australian Education Union. These organisations collectively represent the institutional spine of the labour movement and, by extension, the financial architecture through which the ALP has historically been funded and organised.
And yet ABS data shows the union membership rate has collapsed from roughly 40 per cent of the workforce in the mid-1980s to around 12 to 13 per cent today. The absolute membership figure sits at approximately 1.3 to 1.4 million. In a labour force of more than 14 million, that is a movement whose political weight no longer matches its historical self-image.
The Visa Machine: $4.2 Billion and Rising
Set against the union revenue figures, the numbers from the Department of Home Affairs are instructive in a different way. Australian Government federal budget forecasts show total visa application charge revenue at approximately $4.15 to $4.2 billion for FY2024-25, rising to a projected $4.4 billion by FY2026-27.
The student visa figure deserves particular attention. At a $2,000 application fee, the student visa stream alone generated an estimated $735 million in the 2025 period. Notably, approximately $141.8 million of that was collected from student visa applications that were subsequently refused. The government was, in other words, running a revenue-positive rejection regime: charging applicants who would not be admitted, pocketing the fee regardless.
This is not incidental. It reflects a structural relationship between the Australian state and the international student population that is fundamentally extractive rather than reciprocal. The student pays. The institution profits. The government taxes the transaction. The worker who might have held that job without the visa displacement does not appear in any of these ledgers.
The Constituency Inversion
The ALP’s traditional constituency was organised, wage-dependent, and Australian-born or long-resident. Its industrial and political interests were aligned: higher wages, stronger collective bargaining, tighter labour market conditions that prevented employers from undercutting through casualisation or imported labour.
The party’s contemporary policy posture is, in material terms, the opposite. High immigration levels, including large temporary and student visa cohorts, maintain a persistently loose labour market in exactly the sectors where low-wage union membership is concentrated: retail, hospitality, food processing, aged care, logistics, construction labouring. The industries where the SDA, UWU, and CFMEU organise are also the industries most structurally affected by large-scale temporary migration.
| Dimension | ALP Circa 1983 | ALP Circa 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Primary constituency | Unionised industrial working class | Professional urban voters, international student/migrant economy |
| Labour market policy | Tight labour market, centralised wage determination | High migration intake, flexible visa streams, wage suppression through supply |
| Union membership rate | ~40% of workforce | ~12-13% of workforce |
| Revenue relationship | Union-funded, union-directed factions | Union-affiliated but electorally autonomous; government visa revenue dwarfs union dues |
| Immigration posture | Managed intake, labour market protections | Record net overseas migration, $4.2B visa revenue machine |
| Rhetorical register | Class interest, collective solidarity | Inclusion, diversity, multicultural community engagement |
What Representation Actually Means Now
The ALP does not represent migrant workers and international students in the sense that it advances their political interests with vigour. Many of these people cannot vote. Those who can are often newly naturalised and culturally navigating a party system they did not grow up in. What the party represents is the economic infrastructure that depends on their continued supply: the universities, the property developers, the aged care operators, the hospitality sector, and the tertiary education export industry.
This is a constituency with genuine political weight. Universities are powerful institutional actors. Property developers are significant donors. The aged care sector is a major employer in electorates Labor needs to hold. These interests have been well-served by the current policy architecture, and they have provided electoral and financial returns accordingly.
The Australian working class, the people who once filled union halls and voted Labor on the basis of direct economic interest, increasingly feel themselves unrepresented by either major party. Some have drifted to the Greens on housing and cost of living. Others have drifted toward One Nation on precisely the cultural and labour market anxieties that the ALP has chosen not to address. The structural realignment of the Australian right is, in part, a mirror image of the structural abandonment of the Labor base.
The Endgame of This Arithmetic
There is no clean resolution to this story. The ALP cannot return to being a union party in any meaningful industrial sense because the union membership base is too small, too demographically narrow, and too concentrated in public sector employment to serve as the foundation for a parliamentary majority. The party must build coalitions that go well beyond organised labour.
But the current coalition, built substantially around the institutional interests of the migration economy and the professional urban class, carries its own political risks. It has opened space to the right for a populist politics of labour market protection and cultural resentment. It has alienated a segment of the working class that cannot be dismissed as merely culturally reactionary. And it has created a policy posture on immigration and wages that is structurally inconsistent with the party’s stated commitments to workers’ rights and union density.
The $4.2 billion visa revenue figure is not going to shrink. The demand from Australian universities, aged care operators, and the hospitality sector for continued access to temporary migrant labour is not going to diminish. The unions will continue to affiliate and continue to receive less than they give.
The party that once organised wharfies now administers a visa regime that charges international students $141.8 million for the privilege of being refused. The distance between those two things is not merely historical. It is political, structural, and, for a growing number of Australian workers, deeply felt.
