Crispin Hull laments Australia’s “immigration madness”
Over the past year, Crispin Hull has emerged as Fairfax’s star columnist, demonstrating that unlike his colleagues Peter Martin, Jessica Irvine and Michael Pascoe, he actually understands the key issue afflicting Australia: mass immigration destroying incumbent residents’ living standards.
Back in January 2017, Hull argued that the main solution to making housing more affordable rests with winding-back Australia’s mass immigration program:
The principal cause of housing unaffordability is population growth and the principal cause of that is high immigration. Immigration quotas are set by the federal government. The great majority of immigrants go to Sydney and Melbourne where the highest dwelling prices are to be found.
Yet premiers rarely if ever tell the feds to rein in the immigration quotas so they can have some hope of keeping up with demand for housing, schools, roads, hospitals and so on…
So let’s first go to our property developer, the founder of Meriton, Australia’s most prolific apartment developer, Harry Triguboff.
He was quoted in the Australian Financial Review late last year as dismissing concerns there might be an over-supply of apartments.
Triguboff was asked, “But might rents fall in Sydney and Brisbane when all the new apartments are completed in the next two years?”
He responded, “Then I will bring in more migrants.”Whoops, I must have got in wrong when I said above that the federal government sets the migrant quotas. Apparently, property developers set migrant targets in Australia. Or at least federal politicians are so beholden to them and their donations that, in effect, they determine migration quotas.
In April 2017, Hull penned a great piece explaining why Australia’s near record run of uninterrupted economic growth is largely a mirage. Hull explained in detail the flaws inherent in GDP as a measure of welfare, namely:
- It does not account for population growth;
- It does not account for worsening inequality;
- It does not account for Australia’s ballooning household debt;
- It does not account for environmental destruction or the repair bill from natural disasters;
- It does not account for financialisation – i.e. the growing share of non-productive financial flows across the economy;
- In Australia’s case, it does not capture the falling real national income and wages since 2012.
Hull’s first point about population growth was particularly apt:
In the Netherlands’ boom of 1982 to 2008, its population increased by just 13 per cent. In the Australian boom from 1991 to 2017, on the other hand, the population rose an astonishing 42 per cent. So we may have had an ever-increasing size of the cake, but there were so many more mouths to feed it to that often many people were not getting any more cake than they had in the past.
Indeed, when you adjust for that factor alone, Australia has not had 103 quarters without a recession. On a per head basis, Australia had recessions (two or more consecutive quarters of GDP contraction per head) in 2000, 2006 and 2008.
In those years people, on average, went backwards.
In October 2017, Hull questioned why the Productivity Commission’s (PC) latest report, entitled Shifting the Dial: 5 year productivity review, failed to address Australia’s mass immigration settings:
This week’s Productivity Commission report… delves into seemingly intractable problems of congestion, urban sprawl, development entanglements, renewing and adding to infrastructure, and so on, suggesting all sorts of better processes, incentives and disincentives.
Don’t get me wrong. The suggestions are well-thought-out and try to weed out the worst sort of rent-seeking and political machinations. But they are all curative of problems without mentioning one of the main underlying causes: rapid population growth.
It is astonishing that one of the most-respected economic institutions in the country can do a five-year review of productivity without some detailed discussion of population policy and what effect the ramping-up of immigration since the Howard years, including Kevin Rudd’s “big Australia”, has had and will have in the future…
Australia needs to build the equivalent of a city like Canberra every year to accommodate this growth.
So what’s the point of delivering an immensely detailed five-year review if all its recommendations are compromised by a population non-policy, under which, every year, the government plucks a figure from the air with precious little concern about long-term economic effects.
It is completely negligent for those such as the Productivity Commission, nearly every federal and state politician, and a raft of greedy special-interest lobbyists to couch the issue as “What do we do to accommodate this population growth?” instead of “How can we reduce the population growth?”.
For example, the commission says we should impose road-use charges, the equivalent of a congestion tax, to deal with traffic congestion and its huge economic costs. And state governments should build more expensive roads in a futile attempt to catch up. This Band-Aid, treat-the-symptoms approach is not just negligent, it is outright dangerous.
The danger lies in opportunist political figures like Pauline Hanson linking the ills of overpopulation (congestion, hospital waiting times, housing prices, stalled wages growth and the like) to Muslim immigration. The more that people who profit from high population growth and do not suffer the consequences (business, lobbyists and the politicians they fund) blithely ignore the infrastructure and other stresses it causes, the more chances there will be for opportunists…
In Australia, we should celebrate the wonderful things immigration has done for our economy and society in the past. But we should not put that in jeopardy with too much immigration now…
The important thing now is for the main parties to forget the wishes of their donors and concentrate on the wishes of voters – before One Nation, the Australian Conservatives and others exploit the discontent in an ugly way.
And key parts of the bureaucracy should not take high population growth as a given and advise only on how to cope with it, but also advise on its downside and how it can be checked.
And last month, Hull pinned the blame for One Nation’s rise squarely on the federal governments mass immigration program:
The real question should be: why is One Nation getting so much support now? Are there any parallels, albeit on a much smaller scale, with 1930s Europe?
Well, to some extent, yes. After a couple of decades of neoliberal economics, privatisations, social-security cuts, austerity, stagnant wage growth, cuts to working conditions, outsourcing, factory closures, economic disruption and so on, there is obviously the same sense of alienation, anger and disaffection felt in Germany for the same reasons in the 1930s…
In Australia, this is compounded by extremely high immigration and a sense (indeed, a reality) that employers are permitted to import cheap labour at the cost of existing residents. And this is compounded by the accusation that “Australians are not willing to do these jobs” when in fact they are, but not at the wage-slave rates on offer.
This is perhaps the greatest unnoticed irony in Australia. John Howard said he needed to be tough on refugees so people would stomach and not rebel against his mega-high immigration program, which benefited the Coalition’s well-heeled donors to the detriment of most Australians.
The truth is the reverse. We should have been more circumspect on economic immigration, with all its unseen attendant costs, so that we would be in a better position to improve to our humanitarian and refugee intake…
And now national-socialist Pauline Hanson riles against being swamped by Muslims, when the real cause of the disaffection and alienation of her supporters – even if they don’t recognise it – is being economically swamped by British, New Zealand, Indian and Chinese immigrants who impose an unsustainable burden on infrastructure provision and drive up housing costs.
But anytime anyone mentions that, they get accused of xenophobia, so they don’t mention it – a xenophobiaphobia (to borrow Clive Hamilton’s phrase). It’s very convenient for the very few people who benefit from high immigration.
So to overcome the ghastly swing to One Nation, the Coalition must address the sources of alienation: reduce economic immigration; stop the downward pressure on wages through unfair labour laws (which in any event are harming, not helping, business by shrinking demand); and bring big corporations and public-utility monopolies into line.
Malcolm Turnbull said: “A vote for One Nation is a vote of Labor.” Well, yes, but only because he made it so…
Over the weekend, Hull lamented Australia’s “immigration madness”, whereby the federal government is blindly growing the nation’s population by the equivalent of a Canberra every year, crush-loading living standards:
The biggest circumstantial change in Australia in the past few decades has been population. In 1945, Australia had a population policy. It was populate or perish. Here was a wide open country that would welcome as many Europeans who wanted to come.
In the 1980s, we still had a population policy of sorts. Guilt-ridden over the madness of our participation in the Vietnam War, the Fraser government gave almost open slather to people fleeing the communist regime. Even in the late 1980s, we had a population policy of sorts that said we would accept Chinese (particularly students) in jeopardy because of the events in Tiananmen Square.
Since then, there has been no coherent policy on why we take people, why we take them from where they are, why we take the numbers we take and, more importantly, what is the optimum size of Australia’s population.
Logically, if Australia’s population grows at the rate it has grown for the past 20 years, in, say, 1000 years, there will not be enough room on the Australian land mass for the people to stand in. So, logically, at some point, we must say enough. The land cannot take any more.
In fact, we’ve gone well past that point already.
The good things in Australia are under threat. Nearly all of our ills come down to overpopulation. We can’t keep up with infrastructure demands: congestion, hospital queues, crowded classrooms, stressed infrastructure everywhere.
The federal government just signs off on a migrant intake that has no basis in economic reality and certainly doesn’t reflect the states’ capacity to provide infrastructure for them.
It is cruel and heartless to refugees for the sole purpose of ensuring that voters don’t turn against the industry-supported high immigration begun in the Howard years, when the annual intake rose from about 70,000 to more than 200,000 every year. With natural increase added, this means Australia must build the equivalent of a city Canberra’s size every year, and growing.
There is no sense of direction about it. It seems as though the people who make money from more people – the housing and retail industry – urge the government on, and the government obeys. It seems we have high immigration because we’ve always had immigration, without questioning its basis afresh. Few realise that if all immigration stopped tomorrow Australia’s population would still grow through natural increase.
There is also a moral imperative to limit economic immigration. At present, a large number of our economic migrants come from countries where their skills are more desperately needed than in Australia. We are depriving source countries of skills.
The people profoundly affected by high population growth – those in congested traffic or waiting for a hospital bed – don’t get a say.
A population increase of 2 per cent a year seems small. But it is catastrophically large if you consider the real burden. Most infrastructure lasts an average of 50 years (a bridge, a road surface, a hospital, a school). So just to keep up, you need to replace 2 per cent of it every year.
But if you increase the population by 2 per cent, you need to provide 2 per cent more infrastructure for them. In effect, a 2 per cent population growth means you must double your infrastructure effort.
We are quite mad in Australia to allow such high population growth.
The answer to Australia’s infrastructure shortfall is not to spend more on supplying infrastructure, but to lower the demand by reducing immigration.
Housing estates are gobbling agricultural land. Water resources are stressed. And, of course, electricity networks are stressed.
Brilliantly said. Well done Crispin Hull for going against the grain at Fairfax and fighting the good fight.
