On Thursday night, I appeared on The Bolt Report where I debunked Scott Morrison’s lie that reducing immigration would cost the budget $4 billion to $5 billion over four years, noting that:
- Morrison ignored the negative impact on State Budgets, which carry the cost of infrastructure and services to support population growth (think roads, public transport, schools and hospitals);
- Morrison ignored the cost on households, who have to pay more as new expensive infrastructure projects are built in response to population growth (e.g. desalination plants, toll road tunnels, etc), as well as pay more as states sell-off public assets to private monopolies to raise funds for new infrastructure.
Yesterday, former Treasury Secretary John Stone entered the fray, also debunking Scott Morrison’s immigration lies. From The Australian:
The reaction to Abbott’s speech from his Liberal Party colleagues was deplorable — ad hominem, illogical and in many respects untruthful, a response that would discredit a secondary school debating team.
Yet even that deplorable response focused on one part only of Abbott’s remarks, which dealt not merely with our excessive immigration rate but also with stagnant wages growth, housing prices, jobs — particularly for young Australians — infrastructure backlogs, demands on our welfare bill and harmful effects on our already badly strained cultural harmony. All these, Abbott said, are being adversely affected by today’s immigration rate.
Contrary to many of his critics’ subsequent misrepresentations, Abbott did not assert that his proposal to cut the permanent immigration program from its present 190,000 a year to the 110,000 it averaged under the Howard government would solve all this. What he did claim, correctly, was that reducing immigrant inflow would contribute usefully to doing so.
Among several competitors, the most shameful response came from Scott Morrison. He relied on faulty analysis and, far worse, erroneous claims…
[What] should we make of Morrison’s claim that cutting the permanent immigration program would cost the budget $4 billion-$5 billion over four years?
These figures are thoroughly misleading. For starters, they are up to 10 times higher per migrant place than comparable figures published by Treasury in the May 2009 budget would suggest. But even if you accept them as the commonwealth’s budgetary cost (which, for several reasons, I don’t), they neglect entirely the costs to which the greatly increased immigrant intake has subjected state budgets and local authorities. Think more schools, additional hospital beds, more police, more roads, footpaths, kerbing and guttering, and the list goes on. NSW and Victoria, in particular, where the immigrant increase has been concentrated, are groaning under these pressures.
In any case, ask yourself this question: If Abbott’s proposed immigration cut could raise lower-income workers’ wages by even (say) a few per cent, if it could produce even (say) a 5 per cent fall in the average cost of Sydney and Melbourne housing, if even (say) 20,000 more young Australians could get jobs now being taken by immigrants, wouldn’t you think that even a commonwealth budgetary cost of just $1 billion a year would be well worth paying?
Well said. Scott Morrison caught out again peddling lies.
