Yesterday, an SBS camera crew came over to my house to film a quick interview on Tony Abbott’s call yesterday to reduce Australia’s permanent non-humanitarian migrant intake to 110,000 (2003 levels) from the record 190,000 currently:
The discussion was presented in two parts by SBS News. It was also very disappointing, with the segments heavily pro-mass immigration (and anti Tony Abbott’s comments) and me receiving only a few seconds of airtime to prosecute the alternative case:
The first video features your token demographer claiming that Australia needs mass immigration to prevent the population ageing – even though this has been debunked over an over again by the Productivity Commission and elsewhere (because migrants also age).
Labor MP Peter Khali admits the immigration deluge into Sydney and Melbourne is a problem, but argues that Australia should simply disperse them more equally across the country. This is obviously an unrealistic pipe dream – Australia has been trying (and failing) to decentralise for a century, and yet immigration has become more concentrated than ever into the major cities. Isn’t doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result the very definition of insanity?
Apart from a brief bit from yours truly, the second segment features a unionist arguing that immigration has no impact on wages – a view debunked by the Productivity Commission’s modelling in 2006 and 2016, as well as elsewhere. He instead uses the opportunity to whack Abbott over his industrial relations stance while in government.
The rest of the segment features various multicultural groups spruiking the cultural benefits of immigration, as well as the usual warning of racism from the Race Discrimination Commissioner, Tim Southphommasane.
Curiously, there was almost no discussion on the fundamental issues of housing affordability, infrastructure strains, and the environmental degredation, which are central to living standards and key casualties of mass immigration.
