As the Babylon Bee so aptly summarised it: ‘man on boat drifting left wonders why the people on shore are drifting to the right’. This is the lesson the political elite and chattering taste makers refuse to ever learn: the more you try and shut down the centre, the more you push the centre to the extremes.
Nowhere is this more true in the modern West than regarding immigration. Even former Labor PM Bob Hawke admitted that immigration policy “had effectively been a conspiracy by the political establishment against the Australian public… an implicit pact between the major parties to implement broad policies on immigration that they know are not generally endorsed by the electorate”.
That was in 1994. Just over 30 years later, the conspiracy against the Australian public has only got worse.
Why is immigration the one subject Australians are not allowed to discuss or debate when almost nothing is more significant for the long-term future of the country? And when the presumed political influence of recent diaspora communities in Australia is driving changes in our foreign policy towards China and Palestine?
Australians know that immigration at record levels is changing our country and not necessarily for the better. During the Howard era, net immigration averaged just more than 100,000 a year. It averaged more than 200,000 a year in the decade before the pandemic.
Over the past three years, under the Albanese government, it’s been averaging close to 500,000 a year.
Australia has one of the highest relative rates of immigration in the OECD, second only to tiny Luxembourg. Australia’s immigration rate is double that of the US, where immigration was one of the biggest election issues, and where deportation is the Trump administration’s most universally popular policy. Australians should be so lucky.
When some 50,000 Australians took to the streets last weekend to show their concerns, they were roundly denounced by government ministers as right-wing nut jobs and neo-Nazis – even though the handful of extremists was plainly outnumbered by everyday Australians worried about where our country is headed.
The extremists would likely not have been there in even the tiny numbers they were had the elites not so assiduously silenced any discussion of immigration for decades. The political class are literally driving ordinary Australians into the arms of extremists.
When mainstream leaders refuse to take seriously the big issues that worry voters, they end up empowering the populists and even the extremists they claim to deplore. Nigel Farage has far more poll support than either the British Labour government or the opposition Conservatives because he’s the only one who has consistently spoken out against out-of-control immigration and the insanity of putting reducing emissions ahead of affordable and reliable electricity. Britons who are neither instinctive racists nor environmental vandals have finally lost patience with political parties that have long implied they are.
Make no mistake, the protests were just the surface of a nation overwhelmingly fed up with out-of-control mass immigration.
The fact so many turned out for protests that weren’t sponsored by anyone in obvious authority and weren’t supported by anyone especially well known – apart from Pauline Hanson, who addressed the Canberra rally – suggests a groundswell of people fed up with social developments they don’t like and governments that don’t listen.
Partly, these “reclaim Australia” protests were a spontaneous response to repeated protests about Palestine. And partly they were a function of sustained frustration with governments that are much better at striking a pose than making a difference. Especially from Labor governments, there’s been a palpable double standard in the treatment of people’s right to protest. Police who’ve facilitated numerous pro-Palestine marches seemed much readier to intervene and make arrests on the weekend when the only flags being waved were Australian […]
From both sides of politics, there’s been an attempt to de-legitimise discussion about immigration as divisive, extremist and potentially, if not actually, racist. Is it any wonder that people who are starting to feel like strangers in their own country are losing faith in the system if their concerns can’t even be ventilated?
There’s a well-known principle in psychology: if you tell a person they’re something often enough, they’ll believe you. The great ignominy of this elite conspiracy of silence on immigration coupled with their constant name calling is that, unchecked, it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. When ordinary Australians are constantly screamed at that they’re ‘racists’, and that the only people talking sense on immigration are ‘Nazis’, eventually they’ll just shrug and say, ‘Well, so be it’.
There are three facts about immigration that should be acknowledged in any honest and mature discussion. Firstly, the statistics are being deliberately manipulated: ‘permanent migration’ is not the same as ‘net overseas migration’, because the vast majority of migrants do not come here as ‘migrants’. Two-thirds game the system by coming here as ‘temporary’ students and workers – and never leaving again.
Secondly, that ‘skilled migration’ is a lie. The percentage of genuinely skilled migrants is dwarfed by what is nothing more than cheap, unskilled labourers, who are placed at a premium by greedy employers, not least because they are paid significant bonuses and subsidies by the government if they hire migrant labour.
Thirdly, the ‘economic boost’ argument is a con. While migration gives an artificial boost to GDP growth, each Australian’s share of that boost is vanishingly small: less than a few hundred dollars a year and rapidly dwindling. On the other hand, the real-world costs, in collapsing infrastructure, overcrowding, ever-growing waiting lists for healthcare, grotesquely outsized rates of violent crime from some immigrant communities and rapidly-eroding social cohesion far outweigh the on-paper ‘benefits’.
If people are shamed into silence, this debate won’t disappear, it will fester, and, as Europe is showing, only become uglier the longer it’s delayed.
This is the great stupidity, even criminal negligence, of the elite: the more they panic about the possibility of race riots, the more they are doing to make them inevitable.
