Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers are trying to claim that the upcoming election will be a ‘referendum on Medicare’. Which is blatant gaslighting: no one else has said anything about Medicare in the lead up to the election. Nobody except Labor, that is.
That’s because they’re desperate not to have to fight the election on anything that voters are really worried about. Cost of living, electricity prices, ‘Net Zero’ – these are all poisonous topics for the government. So, it simply refuses to talk about them, instead shouting, ‘Look! Over there! Medicare!’
But the biggest chunk of kryptonite hanging over their heads this election is immigration. Voters are white-hot furious that successive governments have simply ridden roughshod over public opinion and imported millions of foreigners. Rubbing salt into the wound is that the elites who are so addicted to mass immigration never have to live with the consequences of their addiction. The rest of us do.
An Australian father appearing on ABC television’s Q+A recently became a viral sensation when he asked the following question: “I recently got a rent increase notice for an additional $180 a week, which works out to be about $10,000 a year … I tried to find a cheaper place and there just aren’t any. What little is available, there’s dozens of people lined up. Lots of them are immigrants and they have plenty more money than I can possibly get.
“I’m already working two jobs. One more rent increase and my family, my one-year-old baby, we’re facing homelessness and we’ve got nowhere to go. My family has already been forced out of Sydney for the same reasons. I want to know, is the government going to cut immigration to match housing availability or are we just going to keep going until every regular working Australian is homeless?”
The smug lefty pollies on the panel – there’s never anyone of any other persuasion on Q+A – duly prattled their usual prolix bullshit, airily dismissing the problem as ‘complex’.
But the situation is not complex at all. According to Australian Institute of Health and Welfare figures, across the past two years, under the current government, the number of working people who have become homeless has risen by 66 per cent.
Labor, the so-called ‘party of the worker’, is brutally hammering working people and creating an underclass of working-homeless Australians. Not by accident or inattention: from pure, venal, greed.
In 2022 Anthony Albanese, along with Jim Chalmers, attended a Jobs and Skills Summit in Canberra with business and university leaders who lobbied the government to lift the permanent migration ceiling and relax working restrictions on international students. The prime minister and the treasurer complied.
In February, 201,490 international students flooded the country, a figure that is 15 per cent higher than the corresponding month in 2024. When the population equivalent of the city of Hobart is landing in Australia in the space of a month, we shouldn’t be surprised when Australian citizens find it hard to secure a rental.
Spare me the blatherskite about mass immigration ‘boosting the economy’. I’ve done the maths: the boost to GDP works out to around $150 per Australian per year. Not exactly a bargain when you consider the downsides.
But is immigration really the economic wonder drug it’s sold as? How much do we really need those millions of foreigners?
Higher migrant intakes enlarge the size of the economy but do not necessarily increase per capita output, at least in the short term. Higher intakes lead to an immediate capital shallowing and lower productivity, at least until capital formation can catch up. This can take as long as 20 years. The more skilled and younger are migrants, the greater the economic gains. But these gains largely accrue to migrants themselves rather than to the population at large. Most migrants, particularly those entering under temporary visas, are not skilled.
Or those ‘skills’ are greatly overstated. Too often, we’re not getting the ‘best and brightest’, we’re getting the bottom feeders who couldn’t crack it at home. Take this supposed poster boy:
Singh’s decision to study in Australia was based on several factors including that he was aware of skill shortages in engineering here, and also difficulty in qualifying for the highly regarded Indian institutes of technology, which attract about 1.5 million applications a year.
That ‘difficulty in qualifying’ is, in fact, that he wasn’t up to scratch and failed the pass mark. So, he went where grades run a distant second to lining the greedy, unconscionable university’s already gold-plated pockets. Foreign students are so lucrative that, during Covid, universities paid them to take a few weeks’ overseas holidays in third-party countries, in order to bypass travel restrictions. Those million-dollar vice-chancellor salaries don’t pay themselves.
In return, local students complain, courses are increasingly dumbed-down to accommodate foreign second- and third-raters with often marginal English.
The foreign student scam is basically functioning as a backdoor immigration programme. More and more often, foreign students simply never leave, leveraging the system. Dubbed ‘visa hoppers’, they most often come from low-income, low-skilled countries like Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
Then, of course, they use the Family Reunion scheme to import even more mendicants. Young, ‘skilled’, migrants make up a tiny proportion of the total income. In some European countries, migrants account for more than half of welfare costs, despite being less than one-fifth of the population. Australia is heading down the same path.
Then there are the social consequences. Not just the housing crisis, but the entirely foreseeable outcome of importing millions of young men from countries where the attitudes to women can generously be described as ‘Neanderthal’. And that is possibly an insult to Neanderthals. One only has to read of the experiences of Western women travelling alone in such places and ask, do we really think they’re going to magically change their attitudes the moment they land in Sydney?
