ABC 7.30 Report last night aired part two of its three-part population special (click to read my previous comments on part one and part two). I haven’t bothered to download it, but you can watch it for yourself here.
Last night’s episode focussed solely on whether the Coalition’s ‘migrants to the bush’ policy could work but, yet again, did not entertain the option of actually reducing the immigration intake – a direct policy choice.
Basically, all guests largely rubbished the Coalition’s policy as unworkable and not realistic. I received two short quotes, namely:
“Too often politicians say we just need to shift, we just need to decentralise, we just need to shift Australia’s population growth to other regions. Well, Australia has been trying to decentralise for 100 years without much success”…
“I think it’s a bit of a pipe dream to think you can suddenly put up migrant-proof fences and electronic tags and somehow hold migrants to regional areas.”
However, the ABC conveniently left out the other part of my statement that this policy is a smokescreen to hide the fact that Australia’s immigration has been running at triple the historical average and needs to be lowered.
In fact, in my 30-minute interview with the ABC I stated that Australia had hit a population of 25 million 32 years earlier than projected in 2000 precisely because the federal government dramatically ramped-up the immigration intake from the early 2000s, which has since been running at roughly triple the historical average:
I also stated several times throughout the interview that it was a policy choice how big Australia becomes, and that if we simply returned net immigration back to the historical average of 70,000 people a year, Australia’s population would only hit around 32 million people mid-century, not 40 million-plus. Whereas Sydney and Melbourne would only hit 6-6.5 million people, rather than 8 million people.
I then called for a population plebiscite to determine Australia’s future size, the results of which could be used to calibrate the migrant intake.
I also comprehensively debunked the common claims used to defend mass immigration, such solving skills shortages, population ageing, etc.
All the key parts of my interview were left on the cutting room floor, with The ABC instead running a few incidental sound bites.
The overall message from The ABC’s three-part special was that Australia has heaps of room and that population growth is inevitable, so we better get used to it. We don’t have a choice. Mass immigration is also supposedly driving our economic prosperity by skilling the nation and driving exports (myths debunked repeatedly, such as here, here and here).
I was told that this segment was aiming to right the bias in the immigration debate at the ABC, as was shown in the Four Corners ‘Big Australia’ report. However, instead of informing debate and presenting Australians with a choice, it merely reinforced the myths surrounding a ‘Big Australia’.
