The President of Sustainable Australia, Willaim Bourke, yesterday gave another excellent interview 3AW’s Neil Mitchell program discussing the immigration issue in the wake of the Australian Population Research Institute‘s latest survey examining Australian voters’ attitudes towards immigration.
Below are some key quotes:
William Bourke: “It’s really about numbers. It’s got nothing to do with people’s ethnicity or race or religion. And I think this is why the One Nation’s… they’ve taken this into the racial, religion, ethnicity area, and that’s why the debate is always shut down by the major parties. So it’s actually been really counter-productive to talk about people’s background. It’s really about numbers and that’s really what Sustainable Australia wants to focus on”…
“Over the 20th century – a very successful period of immigration for Australia – we had about 70,000 permanent migrants a year. That’s the long-term average. That worked really well. People integrated into our society really well with those numbers. Around the time of John Howard – just after the Sydney Olympics – it shot up to around 200,000 people per year… That became the real problem for our roads, our hospitals, our schools [which] became overwhelmed, the infrastructure wasn’t built, and that’s where we’ve seen a decline in our quality of life”.
Later in the day, William Bourke also gave an interview with 2GB’s Ben Fordham:
You can view Sustainable Australia’s policies here.
Disclosure: I am a paid-up member of the party.
