Immigration is killing the Australian working classes as wages are eviscerated (from Leith’s must read piece today):
No doubt Australian wage growth would be slowing whatever policy settings were in place today. There are global forces at work plus the collapsing terms of trade is driving down national income.
However, the wages price deck is being weighed down by one policy in particular: very high immigration. As foreign labour floods the jobs market with supply, wages fall, especially at the lower end where migrant workers preponderate.
Indeed, the red per capita line is the representation of this impact and the gap between it and blue line is a pure immigration class war.
The per capita discount is not new, sure. It was economically justifiable and politically manageable during the pre-2012 high wage growth period to prevent inflation. But, since the mining bust began in 2012, when wage deflation took hold, immigration has made Australian workers much worse off than they would otherwise have been. Especially so when you consider that the same immigration has driven up asset prices and crush-loaded public services over the period and prevented the currency from falling instead.
This is bald-faced class warfare by the political class. It is deliberately foisting a disproportionate burden of the post-mining boom adjustment onto labour while protecting itself from the fallout with broader but more shallow demand.
For the Coalition it is par for the course for it to defend capital in this way. The more interesting question is how Australia’s Fake Left and its media apologists – Labor, The Greens, Peter Martin, Rob Burgess etc – justify it?
For anyone with an ounce of class awareness, the Fake Left’s wowserishness, identity politics and immigration extremism is a horrible betrayal of its working flock.
