Racism Rob pens credibility suicide note

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“Racism” Rob Burgess has departed the New Daily (replaced it seems by the Pascometer). His departing missive shows he has learned little in his tenure:

Australia has navigated the post-GFC era better than just about any other nation.

While we still have a private credit bubble to deal with, fragile new export industries to nurture, and a backlog of infrastructure to build, our GDP-per-capita has nonetheless grown 37 per cent in the past 10 years, compared with 24 per cent in the US and 9 per cent globally.

That feat that should not be simplified as just the dumb luck of a high iron ore price, the rushed but effective bank rescues, the ‘wasteful’ but successful stimulus programs of the Rudd-Gillard governments, or the current deluge of publicly funded infrastructure jobs.

…After 23 years of journalism, eight years of writing politics and economics from inside and outside the Canberra Press Gallery, and seven years juggling all that with the demands of solo parenthood, it’s time to disappear for a few months of sabbatical.

Let’s hope it’s a little longer. We really don’t know where Burgess’ claim comes from that Australia’s “GDP-per-capita has nonetheless grown 37 per cent in the past 10 years” when the ABS’ national accounts shows that in trend terms Australian:

  • real GDP has grown by 28% since December 2007;
  • real GDP per capita has grown by 9% since December 2007; and
  • GDP per capita at current prices (aka nominal which nobody who knows what they are doing would ever use) has grown by 33% since December 2007.
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Whatever the case, Burgess is horribly wrong and Australia’s growth performance has been calamitously short of his claims. Here’s what GDP per capita actually looks like in trend:

Very obviously it has been plunging for a decade. Burgess’ refusal to engage with this simple fact renders his time as an economic commentator a public failure. When he should have been querying why Australia’s luck was circling the drain, he was busy labeling as “racist” those that did look into it, because it involves asking questions about the role of historically high immigration in a time of huge labour oversupply.

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Dr Katharine Betts from The Australian Population Research Institute (TAPRI) recently published a new report entitled “Immigration and public opinion in Australia: how public concerns about high migration are suppressed”, which explains beautifully the failure of Burgess.

Below is the Executive Summary, along with the key graphics from this report:

Australia’s remarkable population growth over the last decade is mainly being driven by high levels of immigration. The survey taken by the Australian Population Research Institute (Tapri) in August 2017 found that 54 per cent of voters wanted these levels reduced. But there is some division here. Sixty-one per cent of voters who are not university graduates wanted a reduction but only 41 per cent of graduates agreed.

Data from the 2016 Australian Election Study (AES) collected after the July 2016 federal election show that 72 per cent of people working in arts and media actually wanted a further increase in immigration, as did 49 per cent of teachers and academics. In contrast, those business managers who are not graduates were the keenest on a reduction.

The AES data also reveals an even more striking finding. Sixty per cent of the candidates standing for election in 2016 wanted an increase in migration and only four per cent wanted a decrease.

This position was especially marked for Labor and Greens candidates.

At that time 67 per cent of Labor candidates wanted an increase compared to only 31 per cent of Labor voters. Labor candidates were much closer to Greens candidates and to Greens voters than they were to their own supporters.

On the immigration question politicians live in an attitudinal world remote from the average voter.

Over a year later in 2017 Tapri found that 74 per cent of voters thought Australia did not need more people and that 54 per cent wanted a reduction in immigration. But adverse public opinion has had little impact on policy. There are two reasons for this: political pressures on policy makers applied by the growth lobby, Treasury and the Reserve Bank, and social pressures generated by cultural progressives (most of them university graduates). It is they who promote, and monitor, the doctrine that opposition to high migration is racist.

The Tapri survey documents this, finding that nearly two thirds of voters think that people who question high migration are sometimes thought of as racists. Thirty-one per cent of this group say that this is because such sceptics usually are racists (an opinion endorsed by 41 per cent of graduates). Sixty-nine per cent of this sub-group say that the accusation is unfair ‘because very few of them are racists’, a proportion rising to 75 per cent among non-graduates.

These results are used to construct a free-speech-on-immigration variable. This consists of four categories: the ‘guardians against racism’ (those who said sceptics usually were racist); the ‘threatened’ (those who said the accusation was unfair); the ‘fearless’ (those who said sceptics were not ‘sometimes thought of as racist’); and the ‘confused’ (those who said ‘don’t know’).

Graduates predominate among the guardians. Twenty-six per cent of graduates took the strong moral position that questioning high migration was usually a manifestation of racism. Not surprisingly, graduates who are guardians against racism are much more likely to want an increase in migration than are the threatened or indeed the sample as a whole.

A further question found that people who were threatened by possible accusations of racism were less likely to speak out about immigration, especially if they were graduates. As for the confused, 45 per cent said they didn’t know enough about immigration to discuss it.

Many voters are either silenced by the threat posed by the guardians or too confused to take an active part in public debate. If the two categories of threatened (45 per cent) and confused (10 per cent) are added, 55 per cent of voters may be deterred from entering into any debate on immigration.

The guardians are right to take a strong stand against racism but wrong to see it where none exists. The problem lies in the moral reflex that equates discontent about high migration with racism. The silence this promotes does more than inhibit democratic reform, it gives comfort to the growth lobby. This profits from immigration while leaving the silenced majority to pay the costs.

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Burgess is clearly a card carrying member of the “guardians against racism (those who said sceptics usually were racist)” clique. He has liberally abused as “racist” anyone (including MB) who raised immigration as an issue without a shred of evidence for the label, simply to silence debate.

The irony of it is that Burgess claims to be “Left” and to oppose high house prices, yet it is the mass immigration growth model that has in large part crushed working class wages and marginalised youth from housing (not to mention killing Burgess’ own favoured measure of GDP per capita).

We wish you all the best, Mr Burgess, but don’t hurry back!

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About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.