The mass immigration-addicted Multicult is nothing if not a collective of shameless liars. One of their biggest whoppers is the ‘skilled migration’ baloney. In truth, the barest fraction of the millions of Third Worlders they’ve imported in the last few years come in under the banner of ‘skilled migration’. Of even those, the vast majority are in fact the extended families of that one guy with a fake degree from the University of Poopinstreetistan.
But they do have one skill that matters very, very much to the Albanese government: reliably voting Labor.
Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan greeted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Melbourne Airport with the confidence of a woman who knows where her next electoral firewall is coming from. Some 40,000 Indian-Australians packed Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium the next night. Labor strategist Kos Samaras spelled it out plainly this week.
“Among Australian-born voters, Labor sits on 24 (per cent). Among voters born overseas, it’s 35. That 11-point gap is Labor’s firewall.”
Allan boasts Victoria hosts the largest Indian diaspora in the country, now 370,000 strong. Last year she flew to China to court that community too. This is not subtle. It is the deliberate importation of a client class whose primary economic contribution to the Albanese government is a reliable block of votes.
The economic justification has always been a con. Immigration Minister Tony Burke still trots out the line that ‘we need the skills’. The numbers say otherwise. Of 2.4 million permanent visas issued between 2012 and 2025, just 32 per cent went to skilled migrants. Around half of even that ‘skilled’ intake is made up of spouses, partners and children. The vast bulk of recent arrivals were never selected for any skill beyond choosing the right dependent relatives. Not to mention the right dependent political party.
Job vacancies remain 45 per cent higher than before the pandemic. In healthcare and social assistance they are 90 per cent higher. Fatuous South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas can keep bleating that immigrants are needed to ‘wipe your bum’. Japan’s elderly population manages without importing the Third World to do it.
Former top bureaucrat Martin Parkinson admitted the obvious earlier this year.
“The end result was that you had a lot of people coming in who there was no way you could describe as highly skilled.”
Living standards are falling. The OECD found the economic contribution of immigrants was “persistently small” and could be negative in most countries. Half a dozen European nations now pay some migrants to go home. Yet Australia’s system lumbers on, bloating housing costs, eroding university standards and delivering net drains on taxpayers while big business and the higher education rort profit from endless inflows.
The bureaucrats who make these decisions are as competent as you would expect. Auctioneers sit on the skilled occupation list, but home building trades do not, despite the supposed housing crisis. Only half the skilled migrants were still working in their nominated occupation a year later.
This is not a skills program. It is a political one. Mass immigration changes the electorate. When birthplace becomes one of the sharpest predictors of the Labor vote, the incentive for Labor governments is obvious. Import enough overseas-born voters and the native population’s objections to housing shortages, wage suppression and cultural fragmentation become electorally irrelevant.
Polls show large majorities of Australians want immigration slashed. They feel increasingly like strangers in their own cities while inflation eats their purchasing power. The Albanese government’s response is to keep the pipeline flowing and hope the new arrivals keep delivering that 11-point firewall.
The ‘skilled migration’ myth was never about fixing shortages or boosting productivity. It was always about importing a client voting bloc while pretending the economy demanded it.
