Satirical Twitter news account, EZFKA recently posted the headline, History made as Australian Financial Review goes one full day without shilling for mass migration. Out of the mouths of satirical Tweeters oft comes wisdom. The Fin Review, mouth-organ of big business, has indeed been constantly agitating for more and more and more mass migration.
It’s telling that the obsession with mass migration in the West is entirely confined to the elite classes: politicians and big business and the Establishment left. Ordinary folk, who survey data show are pretty fed up with importing a quarter of a million people every year, don’t get a look-in.
Especially not if they live in the country.
Australia’s migration program should be redesigned to double the number of migrants settling in the regions to help fill significant job shortages, buffer some areas from population decline and build resilience in regional communities.
Sure, that’s just what we need. I mean, it’s not as if housing prices and aren’t already spiralling infrastructure groaning under the successive influence of Boomer tree-changers and the Laptop-Class. Just dump hundreds of thousands more in country towns, every year.
Naturally, this absurd proposal comes from Big Business club.
The Regional Australia Institute’s submission to the federal government’s migration review also proposes new policies to create opportunities for migrants who first settle in the capitals to move into regional areas […]
RAI chief executive Liz Ritchie said this financial year would see less than 17 per cent of overseas migrants heading to regions, while the government should be setting a target of 40 per cent.
So, with their annual targets of 220,000 migrants, that would mean 88,000 new people flooding into regions. That’s more than the entire migrant growth in regions in the last decade, every year. Does anyone who isn’t an elite really imagine that regions can cope with such a population explosion, materially, environmentally, or socially?
This is not to say there should be no migration, either to the cities or the regions, but there’s an exponential difference between controlled, targeted migration and mass-migration-without-end. Arguing that “migration boosted the country in the past, so mass migration can only boost it more”, is like arguing that, hey, a couple of paracetamol fixed the headache, so why not swallow the whole bottle?
“Migrants can bring the skills and labour that regional Australia desperately needs, while living the good life in their new country,” she said.
So would investing in training young Australians — and it won’t be the good life much longer, when every country town has metastasized into Melbourne or Sydney.
Business is looking for an increase in the permanent migration intake from the current 195,000 to 220,000 for the next two years, and for ongoing increases tied directly to population growth.
The Australian
Well, they can’t “blackbird” Kanakas any more, so big business has to get their cheap labour somehow.
