Michael Pascoe has launched a scathing attack on Ross Gittins and his questioning of Australia’s mass immigration ‘Big Australia’ agenda as civil war breaks out at Domainfax.
The attack has come via a video posted on the Domainfax site, which you can watch here. But if you can’t be bothered watching, below is the transcript:
“There’s increasing questioning of our population growth, especially the immigration component.
Despite the demonstrable success of our migration story, newcomers are being blamed for everything from Sydney housing prices, to low wages growth, and environmental degradation. And that’s just in polite society.
The ugly ratbag fringe. The intolerant mental pygmies with their racial and sectarian scapegoating would have you believe that a strong multi-cultural mix is un-Australian. Well, it’s actually very Australian indeed. Some 28% of us were born overseas.
The simplistic negative view of our migration program concentrates on the challenges of population growth and downplays the rich rewards of our economy and culture being re-invigorated.
Those who would prefer to live under aspic only see migrants as competition for jobs not realising that their contribution makes more jobs possible. That one plus one can in fact add up to more than two. That Australia’s potential is not a zero sum game.
At a time when the dog whistles are out in federal parliament, when there are echoes of the appalling Trump on both sides of politics, population milestones should be a chance to embrace optimism about this nation. For political leaders to actually show some leadership. To educate and to take pride in our story instead of cringing to court the lowest common denominator. Of bowing to the narrow, the ignorant, and the intolerant. That’s the cohort that’s un-Australian”.
In his article attached to the video, Pascoe also pins the surge in net overseas migration on international student visas, conveniently downplaying the fact that Australia’s permanent migrant intake – currently set at a record 200,000 people a year – is the long-term driver of a ‘Big Australia’ since temporary migrants are by definition temporary, and must eventually leave.
We think it quite unfair of the Pascometer to describe the venerable Ross Gittins as an “un-Australian”, “intolerant mental pygmy” so here we offer him space in riposte:
As well as letting Gittins explain to Pascoe why “using migration to boost growth isn’t smart”:
Economists aren’t supposed to believe in growth for its own sake. Their sales pitch is that economic growth is good because it raises our material standard of living.
But this is true only if the economy grows faster than the population, producing an increase in income per person (and even this ignores the extent to which some people’s incomes grow a lot faster than others).
This simple truth is obscured by economists’ practice of measuring growth in the economy without allowing for population growth.
Take the national accounts we got for the June quarter last week. We were told the economy grew by 0.8 per cent during the quarter and by 1.8 per cent over the year to June.
Allow for population growth, however, and that drops to 0.4 per cent and a mere 0.2 per cent. So, improvement in living standards over the past financial year was negligible.
Over the past 10 years, more than two-thirds of the growth in real gross domestic product of 28 per cent was accounted for by population growth, with real growth per person of just 9 per cent.
It’s a small fact to bear in mind when we compare our economic growth rate with other developed countries’.
We usually do well in that comparison, but rarely admit to ourselves that our population growth is a lot higher than almost all the others.
Our population grew by 1.6 per cent in 2016, and by the same average rate over the five years to June 2016. This was slower than the annual rate of 1.8 per cent over the previous five years, but well up on the 20-year average rate of 1.4 per cent…
Almost all our business people, politicians and economists support rapid population growth through high migration. With that much conventional wisdom behind it, who needs evidence?
It’s certainly rational for business people to support high migration. Their concern is to maximise their own living standards, not those of the rest of us, and what easier way to increase your sales and profits and salary package than to sell in a market that keeps expanding?
I oppose “bizonomics” – the doctrine that the economy should be run primarily for the benefit of business, rather than the people who live and work in it – and the older I get the more sceptical I get about the easy assumption that population growth is good for all of us.
For a start, I don’t trust economists enough to accept their airy dismissal of environmentalists’ worries that we may have exceeded our fragile ecosystem’s “carrying capacity”.
But even before you get to such minor matters as stuffing up the planet, there are narrowly economic reasons for doubting the happy assumption that a more populous economy is better for everyone.
The big one is that the more we add to the population, the more we have to divert our accumulation of scarce physical capital – housing, business equipment and public infrastructure of roads, public transport, schools, hospitals and 100 other things – from “capital deepening”, so as to improve our productivity, to “capital widening”, so as to stop our average productivity actually worsening.
In passing we note as well that the Pascometer has a history of horrible flip-flopping on this issue, which leads us to ask who is the “mental pygmy” in this debate?
As an aside, Domainfax did not open comments to Pascoe’s article. No doubt editors are timid in the face of the fire hose of napalm aimed at Pascoe’s face by readers. The above article from Ross Gittins, published on 9 September, received 284 comments, 95% of which were strongly in agreement with the “un-Australian, mental pygmy”.
