Australia has granted citizenship to a steady number of immigrants over the past few years, contrary to social media posts falsely claiming the Labor government naturalised a “record number” of people to shore up support in the upcoming election. Federal data also show migrants make up just one-third of new voters, with the majority consisting of Australians turning the legal voting age of 18.
“Now you know why Albanese granted a record number of Australian citizenships to immigrants at the start of 2025,” says a Facebook post published April 1, 2025 by Simeon Boikov, a pro-Kremlin activist known by his moniker Aussie Cossack whom AFP has previously fact-checked for spreading misinformation (archived link).
“The bastards are literally importing votes via excessive immigration because they know that local Australian voters are leaving the major parties on (sic) droves.”
The post shares a screenshot of an article saying Australia will hold its “biggest election of all time” as “an extra 710,000 voters have signed up with the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC)”.
Screenshot of false post taken April 10, 2025
Australia is set to go to the polls on May 3 with “more voters on the electoral roll than ever before”, according to the AEC (archived here and here).
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is polling neck-and-neck with opposition leader Peter Dutton, a former immigration minister who advocates cutting migration by 25 percent (archived link).
Similar claims have spread across social media, with comments suggesting some users believe new migrants make up the majority of first-time voters.
“Most of them are Albo’s illegal insurgents that have no legal right to vote or have access to any form of welfare,” one user said.
Another said: “That comes as no surprise. Just like Biden did with the open southern border … they should do jail time for that,” alluding to a similar false claim that surfaced ahead of the US presidential election in 2024.
‘Far-fetched’
A spokesperson for the AEC told AFP on April 9 that while new Australian citizens make up approximately 30 percent of growth in the electoral roll, the vast majority “is not caused by migration, but by Australians turning 18 and enrolling to vote for the first time.”
“It is not correct to say that the 710,000 new voters added to the electoral roll since the 2022 federal election are immigrants.”
Tiziana Torresi, a migration expert from the University of Adelaide, also said the conferral of Australian citizenship to migrants is “strictly regulated” and “the idea that such a process could be applied en masse in such a short frame of time is far-fetched” (archived link).
John SAEKIAFP
John SAEKI / AFP
Torresi told AFP on the same day that to be eligible for citizenship, a person must have permanent residency, have lived in Australia for at least four years, and meet strict criteria, including passing an English language test and being physically present in the country for specific periods of time (archived link).
This means that new citizens enrolled to vote in the upcoming election would have arrived in Australia before May 2021 — well before the Albanese government.
Graeme Orr, a law professor at the University of Queensland, pushed back on the idea that the government can manipulate citizenship numbers for political gain (archived link).
“Permanent migrants can choose to apply for citizenship — governments do not impose it,” he told AFP on April 10, noting that Australia’s naturalisation policies have remained unchanged for years.
The latest naturalisation figures show more than 192,000 people became Australian citizens between 2023 and 2024, which Orr said is in line with past trends (archived link).
“Curiously, the number is actually lower than in the year before Covid, under a conservative government,” he added.
He also dismissed the idea that new citizens vote as a bloc, given their diverse background “from liberal democracies, like the UK and New Zealand, and conservative countries in South Asia and the Middle East”.
AFP has fact-checked other misinformation about the Australian election here.
