Good stuff from The Legend:
Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has opened the door to a potential refugee resettlement deal between Papua New Guinea and New Zealand, acknowledging it is a decision for the two sovereign states that Australia could not block.
But he warned any arrangement would be against Australia’s wishes and would run the risk of souring both countries’ diplomatic relationships with Australia – making it unlikely without Canberra’s blessing.
New Zealand has offered to resettle 150 refugees from Manus Island, where about 370 men are still refusing to leave Australia’s decommissioned regional processing centre.
Wanker. The Coalition should be adopting Ardern’s policies of cutting immigration by one third and accepting more refugees, not carrying on with Howard’s immigration bait and switch.
We all know what’s going on here. The Manus Island refugees must be sacrificed at the border protection alter so that thousands of economic migrants can poor through the front door, hence the announcement in May that the Government would maintain Australia’s permanent migrant intake at record levels (circa 205,000 people a year) in 2017-18:
This is the contemporary policy formulation of former Prime Minister John Howard, who performed a ‘bait-and-switch’ on the Australian people whereby he scapegoated and slammed the door shut on the relatively small number of refugees arriving into Australia by boat all the while stealthily shoving open the door to economic migrants arriving here by plane so that:
- property prices go up
- consumption goes up, and
- wages go down
The ultimate result was a massive lift in Australia’s net migration intake, which surged from the early-2000s and pushed population growth to roughly twice long-run norms. In Howard’s first three years in office, Australia’s annual net overseas migration (NOM) averaged just 86,000 people a year. In his last three years in office, NOM averaged 188,000 people a year, and has remained high ever since (and is projected to remain high indefinitely).
John Howard never articulated to the Australian people that the Government was going to dramatically expand the nation’s immigration intake. Why? Because he knew the electorate would be dead against it. Do-nothing Malcolm is repeating the same trick again – giving the impression that the Government is stemming the inflow by cracking on the tiny amount of refugees, all the while allowing in huge numbers of economic migrants in a bid to inflate aggregate GDP growth, support the housing bubble, and please the Coalition’s large corporate backers, who benefit the most from a growing customer base.
Jacinda Ardern’s approach is infinitely more humane, honest, ethical and addresses the needs of both the needy at home and abroad. We, too, should accept more refugees while cutting the economic migrant intake instead of our dishonest and disgraceful class warfare.
