Just take Peter Hartcher’s advice:
Donald Trump has created a mess with his immigration hit list. A great outcry of Australian voices is demanding that Malcolm Turnbull denounce the US President’s move.
…Rather than outrage, Australia should pursue advantage. America’s mess is Australia’s opportunity.
The US has been the global talent magnet for a century. It has reaped the best and brightest of the planet’s scientists, entrepreneurs, sportspeople, professors, artists, chefs, traders and technicians. It has drawn many of Australia’s best, too.
This has been a source of incalculable strength to America. From Silicon Valley to Wall Street to Hollywood, every one of America’s great generators of wealth and influence is powered by considerable numbers of talented foreigners.
This is rather missing the point of what’s going on. Donald Trump has not created a mess. He’s lit a burning platform. Which he will use to enact change.
Moreover, our Peter’s clever notion reeks of the very insider thinking that will today get any leader carted off to the guillotine. The billionaire’s of Silicon Valley are not the answer to today’s problem, they are today’s problem. We’ve entered an era of policy-making that either seeks genuinely to lift the lot of those poor sods that lick at the paltry drip of trickle down economics, or seek to manipulate them into thinking so.
We all know what even more immigration into Australia will do. We don’t attract top talent. We attract lazy, sun-loving types who buy cheap degrees and expensive houses. Like-minded folks. That’s all opening the immigration floodgates will do, more of the same, as well as continuing to disenfranchise millennial Australians via overheated property and congesting all infrastructure, raising the already boiling Australian anger level and pushing One Nation to the Top of the Pops.
Australia has already played the immigration card to escape doing the hard work of reform to support prosperity. Let’s get on with the latter instead.
