The uniparty and the elite establishment are once again resorting to their boiler-plate arguments to try and defend mass immigration. What they haven’t realised, though, is that, outside their little echo-chambers, nobody cares any more.
No one, outside the dinner-parties and weekly protest meetings of the elite, wants to hear the ‘but the economy!’ script any more. Not only do we know perfectly well that it’s a load of old bollocks, it completely misses the point. Australians are tired of being treated as economic units. They know perfectly well they live in a country, a nation: not a globalist economic zone. As polls show, a great many are entirely prepared to forego a couple of hundred dollars a year in per-capita GDP and get their country back.
Appealing to the poor ickle universities isn’t going to win them over, either.
Australians have seen what the university sector is doing to the country, and would quite happily see the whole lot go bust, if it means damming the endless river of indoctrinated teachers, and students who can’t think, can’t even tell what a woman is, but can scream communist and antisemitic slogans, week in, week out.
So, by all means, uniparty bootlickers: keep going. You’ve only reminded millions of Australians why they hate you.
One Nation has now put numbers on the table the majors still won’t. Slash more than 750,000 temporary visas over three years, drive net overseas migration negative for a reset, then cap it at 130,000: well under Labor’s 225,000 target. International students take the heaviest hit. Graduate stay-on visas collapse. Families of temporary skilled workers don’t come. Overstayers get three months, then the door. Hanson calls the campuses what they have become: visa factories.
Cue the ritual howl.
Barnaby Joyce, now One Nation’s treasury spokesman, treated the economic priesthood with the contempt it has earned.
“I think the Australian people are sort of tired of the fact that you have to go to an economist to come up with public policy, to go to the Parliamentary Budget Office, and, to be quite frank, I have been around this game for a while and I have never seen a forward estimates in any budgetary paper be even close to the mark.”
Remember: according to forward estimates, the NDIS was “fully costed”. How’d that work out? Treasury and the Parliamentary Budget Office have spent a decade forecasting migration, housing and budget outcomes that arrived late, bloated and wrong. Voters noticed the rental queue, the jammed GP clinic and the school that suddenly needed extra English classes. They couldn’t give two hoots about a Treasury wonk’s spreadsheet.
Joyce’s defence of the reset is devastatingly simple.
“We’re going back to 2017 level. So I don’t think that 2017 was a disastrous year for Australia. For students it’s back to 2015 levels. So if you’re modeling it, I suppose you’d use a retrospective view of how it was going at that period of time,” he told News24.
“Focus on actual people in actual towns, he said, “and the macro will start to take care of themselves”. No exemptions for the wives and kids of uber drivers either. If the skill is scarce enough, the worker can come. The extended family can wait.
Then the universities chimed in, with the million-dollar-a-year vice chancellors clutching their pearls so hard they cracked.
Universities Australia CEO Luke Sheehy told ABC News […] “If numbers actually materialised as One Nation proposed … you would see university campuses shut down.”
Problem?
Then they said the quiet part out loud.
Director at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for the Study of Higher Education, Professor Chris Ziguras, said international student fees amounted to more than a quarter of the sector’s total revenue.
He says that like it’s a good thing. Well, it might be good for his salary, but it’s been a disaster for the country: flooding the nation with Indian students who never even complete their courses but demand permanent visas anyway, and laying us wide open to China’s Silent Invasion, to use the title of Clive Hamilton’s book.
Phil Honeywood, who has been feuding with Hanson since most of today’s undergraduates were in nappies, reached for the oldest smear in the drawer: 30 years of attacking Asians, Muslims and now “young people that just want to come to Australia and get a world-class qualification”. From an Australian university? What they’re really coming for is a visa.
This is what none of them want to admit: the arrangement that actually exists. Universities sold themselves as an export industry and a migration mill at the same time. Some campuses drifted toward half-foreign lecture theatres. Bridging-visa hoppers and ‘students’ who never quite study turned the student visa into a queue jump. Housing, hospitals and wages copped the overflow. The sector pocketed the fees, Treasury pocketed the GDP print and anyone who noticed was a bigot.
Australians have watched this foreign infiltration production line for years. They have decided they would rather have a country that resembles something like they used to know and love. Joyce’s line is the one that matters: if you don’t do something dramatic, you are not fixing the problem Labor and the coalition spent decades growing.
