SBS News has taken a closer look at what Senator Fraser Anning said during his divisive maiden speech in the Senate on Tuesday. Here's what the stats say.
"Australia currently has the highest per capita immigration rate in the world": Senator Anning.
True or false?
Overseas migration accounts for an estimated 62 per cent of population growth in Australia, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
ABS data shows Australia's net immigration rose 27 per cent in the year to June 30, 2017, compared with the previous year. Migration grew by 31 per cent in New South Wales and 23 per cent in Victoria.
The newest overseas migrants are most likely to be from China, which accounts for around 16 per cent of new arrivals, and now 2.2 per cent of Australia's population. Its proportion of Indians and Filipinos is also on the up (the percentage of those born in the UK and New Zealand, by contrast, is decreasing).
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Australia has the fastest population growth pace of any developed nation with an annual growth pace of 1.6 per cent.
That is more than double the annual population growth pace of the United States (0.7 per cent) and the U.K. (0.6 per cent), and above the expansion rate of The Philippines and Singapore (1.5 per cent).
According to Jock Collins, Professor of Social Economics at the UTS Business School - who has being doing work on Australian immigration for four decades - the claim by Senator Anning is false, but not too far from the truth.
"It's pretty close to it, I think New Zealand takes more than us just at the very moment, so New Zealand in fact [has] overtaken Australia in that regard," Professor Collins told SBS News on Wednesday.
"But it is true that certainly in the western world, we have one of highest relative immigration rates and in fact, if you look at immigrants as a proportion of the population there are only two countries in the OECD with a higher immigrant population and that's Switzerland and Luxembourg."
"Muslims in New South Wales and Victoria are three times more likely than other groups to be convicted of crimes": Senator Anning.
True or false?
There is no "reliable" data to support this claim by Senator Anning.
"The criminology data just doesn't support that nor has it supported that for a long time. The ethnic crime argument, let alone the Muslim crime argument just doesn't stack up in terms of the data," Professor Collins said.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Australian Institute of Criminology and NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOSCAR) all told SBS News they did not have data on the religious or cultural affiliations of offenders, only country of birth.
According to The Corrective Services NSW Offender Census, 21.4 per cent of full-time custody inmates were born overseas, 76.7 were Australian-born.
"457 visas, which simply steal jobs from Australians": Senator Anning
True or false?
This is factually inaccurate because the 457 visa no longer exists.
The 457 visa was a common visa for Australian or overseas employers to sponsor skilled overseas workers to work temporarily in Australia but in April 2017 the Turnbull government announced that the Temporary Work (Skilled) visa (subclass 457 visa) would be abolished and replaced with the completely new Temporary Skill Shortage (TSS) visa in March 2018.
Professor Collins says the TSS is a "demand-driven" visa that employers access because they can't find local workers.
"It is true that there has been some exploitation of that system by employers and indeed there have been a number of cases where temporary migrant workers under the 457 have been exploited and haven't been paid adequate wages, so there is some evidence of that particular program having compliance issues, so that's true," Professor Collins said.
"But the issue of taking jobs from Australians, that's one that's much harder to substantiate in the evidence, because a lot of the jobs say in regional and rural Australia, no one is doing those jobs; basically if the farmers don't get the temporary migrant workers they're not getting the jobs done, there's no Australian workers who want those jobs," he said.
"In fact, you can argue there is good data that shows immigration generate more jobs for other people."
Some migrants in Australia are still working on the 457 visa though, if granted before the March 2018 change.
"A majority of Muslims in Australia of working age do not work and live on welfare": Senator Anning.
True or false?
ABS data released in 2017 showed Middle Eastern migrants were having more trouble finding jobs than other immigrants, but it was not broken down by religion.
Among Middle Eastern migrants, the unemployment rate was at 17.5 per cent. This compares to 3.6 per cent for southeast Asian migrants, and 1.9 per cent for those from southern and eastern Europe.
"There is some evidence that countries with high Muslim populations can have a higher unemployment rate than average, [but] even if you concede that, the question is, why is that the case?"
ABS chart of migrant unemployment in Australia between 2009 and 2011.(ABS) Source: Supplied
According to Professor Collins, it is false to assume that many Muslim Australians are "dole bludgers".
"The Muslim refugee families that I have talked to a lot recently, the men are dying to work, they hate sitting around, they want to contribute to the country, they hate being on welfare. The fact that they can't find a job distresses them greatly," he said.
"So in a sense, you can have a high rate of Muslim unemployment without accepting the argument they're 'bludgers', they really want to work."
The data shows the rate of unemployment among refugees is much higher than average.
