‘Big Australia’ propagandists double down on debunked lies

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By Leith van Onselen

It’s been another weekend of spin and obfuscation from Australia’s ‘Big Australia’ mass immigration spruikers.

Hot on the heels of the RBA’s propaganda late last week, we witnessed Australia’s go-to ‘demographer’, Dr Liz Allen, desperately attempt to gaslight the population in The SMH:

“There’s a thing called the ‘ovarian lottery’,” she says. “All of us who were born in Australia or were able to move here won the ovarian lottery”…

“In Australia we like to look to the past and reminisce about the good old days, the 1950s and how great they were for Australia. We don’t bet on ourselves and say we aspire to be New York or we aspire to be Tokyo”..

“Matters of population and migration feed our deepest and most fundamental fears and concerns about whether we’re getting a fair go. And when you tap into those fears, people build on it with their own experiences, they think: ‘I’m stuck in this traffic, nothing’s working, my health is failing because I’ve got no time to relax and spend time with my kids.’ These are things we all feel. It hits at a nerve”…

So, because Australians have won “the ‘ovarian lottery’” we should run an open borders migration program and destroy our own living standards? Way to look after the incumbent population, Liz.

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Moreover, Allen’s claim that Australians “aspire to be New York or… Tokyo” is hilarious given she lives in Canberra – the least densely populated capital city in Australia. She also fails to acknowledge that Australians overwhelmingly do not want a high-density lifestyle, as evidenced by all recent opinion polls calling for lower immigration/population growth:

  • Australian Population Research Institute: 54% want lower immigration;
  • Newspoll: 56% want lower immigration;
  • Essential: 54% believe Australia’s population is growing too fast and 64% believe immigration is too high;
  • Lowy: 54% of people think the total number of migrants coming to Australia each year is too high;
  • Newspoll: 74% of voters support the Turnbull government’s cut of more than 10% to the annual permanent migrant intake to 163,000 last financial year;
  • Galaxy: two-thirds of Victorians believe Melbourne’s population is growing too fast; and
  • Herald: 63% of voters support restricting migrant numbers while 50% opposed more development in Sydney to accommodate population growth.

Blind Freddy can see that the main reason why immigration has become a toxic issue is because the federal government massively increased the intake in the early-2000s without consulting the community and without due regard for the consequences:

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If immigration had remained at historical norms, it would not have become and issue and we would not be having this conversation now. The answer, therefore, lies in reducing immigration.

Next we got HSBC chief economist, Paul Bloxham, also delivering a pathetically weak defence of mass immigration on shallow economic grounds in The SMH:

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“I’m telling you that it would be a mistake to slow our population growth,” says HSBC Australia’s chief economist, Paul Bloxham. “Population growth has been a fundamental driver of Australia’s economic success in recent times. Let’s not kill the golden goose… if you slow population growth down, you will also slow economic growth down and that will slow jobs growth down”…

According to Bloxham and other economists, the answer to the pressures created by a growing population is not to turn off the taps, but to build the critical infrastructure needed: high-density housing, better roads and public transport, hospitals and schools…

Bloxham agrees Australia’s federal system is a major impediment to better planning and is in need of reform, including tax reform. “The federal government gets to decide the migration intake, but the states are the ones that have to provide all the infrastructure and health services they will need,” he says.

Australia’s mass immigration program has been so successful that it has driven Australia’s per capita GDP growth down to near recessionary levels:

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Moreover, Paul Bloxham says we just need to build more infrastructure, but then concedes that Australia’s federal system is broken, thus preventing the necessary infrastructure from being built.

Surely, then, the logical approach is to reduce immigration back to historical norms until the federal system is fixed? Otherwise, mass immigration will only make the problems worse – as has been the case over the past 15-years, and as is projected by Infrastructure Australia:

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We got similar drivel from Age columnist, Steven Lewis, who claimed Melbourne can thrive as a city of 8-million:

A bigger but still soulful Melbourne is a Melbourne reimagined… Melbourne and Sydney are among the lowest density cities in the world. Melbourne occupies more land than Mexico City and London. It has vast low-rise, low-density suburbs…

So how might Melbourne make 8 million work? One broad approach is re-engineering. Spend billions on rail, tunnels, and roads, and hope to keep up with the demand (it never works)… Alternatively, pursue a combination of hard and soft innovation. Perhaps the most important would be to put a hard cap on Melbourne’s footprint – no more annexation and greenfield development. That would force densification…

So basically, the famed quality of life that Australian residents have enjoyed for generations must be jettisoned for high-rise living, just so we can maintain a ‘Big Australia’ mass immigration program to feed the ‘growth lobby’, which the majority of Australians do not want.

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Having comprehensively lost the immigration debate, ‘Big Australia’ propagandists are trying desperately to hold back the growing community angst with lies and diversions that have become increasingly convoluted and desperate. What is darkly amusing about this effort is that despite having captured the national press and the ABC for many years, denuding the Australian people of the slightest say in their own population debate, fifteen years of the empirical evidence of declining living standards has driven the polity heavily against ‘Big Australia’ anyway.

When the dam breaks and the cuts come the propagandists will still be lecturing themselves in the mirror.

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About the author
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness. Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.