Survey after survey, poll after poll, shows that the majority of Australians want to see the country’s immigration drastically curtailed. The only difference between the polls is the size of the majority.
No matter what the left-elite may sniff, this is not “racism”: Australians continue to support migration in itself. What they object to is the sheer scale of immigration.
Before the pandemic, Australia’s population was growing at around 1.5 per cent to 1.6 per cent a year. This put us at the top of all other developed countries.
Net overseas migration was contributing about two-thirds of this growth in population, at 200,000 to 250,000 a year. The largest single group of migrants to arrive and stay at least 16 months was international students.
This has been both a dramatic increase on Australia’s traditional migration rate – more than double, in fact – and a bipartisan policy. When it comes to immigration, none of the major political parties is paying the least attention to what the vast majority of Australians actually want.
This bipartisan paternalism at least makes a very few but very powerful groups happy.
During these years of high immigration, employers were happy to have a ready source of labour, skilled and unskilled; universities were happy to have unconstrained growth in international student numbers; and the property industry was happy with the strong demand for accommodation. But there is no doubt that there are many costs as well as benefits associated with such high immigration rates, a point federal and state governments have not been prepared to concede.
That’s because politicians, CEOs and Vice-Chancellors don’t live in the sort of suburbs where migrants end up. As Mark Steyn has said, they reap all benefits – cheap labour, fee-paying students and chic restaurants – without paying any of the costs, like falling wages, hours-long commutes on jammed freeways, weeks-long waiting to see a doctor, or schools full to bursting with kids who can’t speak English.
The Wuhan pandemic has at least given long-suffering Australians a brief respite. But the CEOs and Vice-Chancellors are desperate to get their serfs and cash-cows back.
After just a few years, Treasury is expecting net overseas migration to return to its pre-pandemic levels, averaging about 240,000 a year.
We have some further insight into the government’s thinking on future migrant intakes from the equally defective draft report released by the Joint Standing Committee on Migration on Australia’s skilled migration program. To say the recommendations are a disgrace is to be kind.
They are a sop to demanding employer groups and employers who prefer not to find local workers or invest in their training. They involve streamlining migrant entry, removing the need for labour market testing, absolving employers from contributing to a training fund and expanding the list of Priority Migration Skilled Occupations.
It even recommends that the government reserve places on flights and in quarantine for skilled migrants, and that all employer-sponsored visa holders be given a clearer path to permanent residency.
Meanwhile, Australian citizens caught overseas when the pandemic struck are waiting years to access their basic human right of going home.
At this stage it’s clear what the government is planning — to learn nothing from the COVID experience, to ignore the wishes of most Australians and to resume high rates of immigration as soon as possible using the veil of meeting skill needs and benefiting the economy.
The Australian
To be sure, Labor issued a dissenting report. But that’s from the safety of opposition. It was Hawke and Keating who kicked off the decades of mass immigration – especially betting on the hope that migrants traditionally tend to vote Labor. You can be sure that in office, Labor would fall right back in line.
And the clearly-expressed wish of the Australian public will be blithely ignored, yet again.
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