Golden boy of the Australian left, David Marr, yesterday pounced upon a new Scanlon Foundation survey at The Guardian:
Australia has not lost faith in immigration. The political narrative has darkened but not the fundamental view of ourselves as an immigrant nation. Most of us remain convinced that we are in so many ways better off for newcomers of all races and creeds who have come in large numbers to our shores.
That is the verdict of the Scanlon Foundation’s 2018 Mapping Social Cohesion Report published on Tuesday. The mission of the foundation is to measure how this migrant nation hangs together. Over the last decade 48,000 of us have been polled to fathom the panics that sweep this country and the steady underlying views Australians have of immigration.
“Immigration is a growing concern,” says the author of the report Professor Andrew Markus of Monash University. “But for media commentators and some politicians it has become an obsession. They are in the business of creating heightened concern, of crisis. But what the survey shows is rather a picture of stability.”
And on it went, an uncritical disgorging of every detail of the survey.
One wonders why The Guardian rolled out a lefty titan to do such a menial journalistic job. I guess because it wanted to underline just how credible the results are.
The problem is, they are not. And David Marr has done himself no favours by representing them. Indeed, he has just joined the growing ranks of Australia’s “useful idiots”, the doyens of the left who, owing to their fixation with racism, have climbed into bed with Australia’s most blood-sucking capitalist rent seekers to exploit workers.
Where was David Marr’s acknowledgment that the Scanlon Foundation methodology is questionable when compared against the other surveys, as explained by the Australian Population Research Institute (APRI) last year:
- The TAPRI survey was completed online by a random sample of 2057 voters, (with quotas set with a 10% leeway, in line with ABS distributions for age, gender and location). The sample was drawn from a panel of 300,000. Thus, TAPRI used the same methodology as is now employed by Newspoll and by Essential Media.
- The Scanlon poll was based on a telephone sample of 1,500 Australian residents drawn from the entire population of residents. It therefore included many respondents who are not citizens and therefore not eligible to vote.
- There are significant issues concerning the reliability of telephone interviews when probing sensitive issues. As the highly credible Pew Research polling organisation has indicated, respondents may be more likely to provide socially undesirable responses in the relative anonymity of the internet.
- Scanlon found a much larger share of respondents favoured a reduction in immigration numbers in a different online survey that it funded which used methodology similar to that used by TAPRI. In the telephone survey 37% said that immigration was too high. In contrast, 50% of this online sample agreed that the immigration intake was too high, rising to 53% when the findings were limited to those who were Australian citizens. This result is almost identical to the TAPRI finding.
So, Scanlon’s survey captures the views of migrant non-citizens that are ineligible to vote. It is also conducted via telephone, where honest answers are less likely because of fears of being labelled as ‘racist’ or ‘xenophobic’.
Professor Markus has also been involved in past controversy for failing to divulge his financial links to the Scanlon Foundation when spruiking the survey and attacking others in the Conversation.
Moreover, where was Marr’s acknowledgement that Peter Scanlon is a key leader of Australia’s ‘growth lobby’. He is a major real estate developer and has a clear vested interest in mass immigration, as explained by John Masanauskas previously:
MAJOR investor and former Elders executive Peter Scanlon hardly blinks when asked if his conspicuous support for a bigger population is also good for business.
Mr Scanlon, whose family wealth is estimated to be more than $600 million, has set up a foundation with the aim to create a larger and socially cohesive Australia.
It also happens that Mr Scanlon has extensive property development interests, which clearly benefit from immigration-fuelled high population growth.
“My primary driver in (setting up the foundation) is if we don’t have growth we are going to lose all our youth because the world is looking to train people around the world,” he explains. “Instead of having stagnant growth, we’re going to have a serious decline.”
Mr Scanlon believes that governments aren’t doing enough to sell the benefits of a bigger population so he has put his money where his mouth is…
Mr Scanlon must be rolling around on the floor laughing that his pro-immigration ‘research’ has so deeply penetrated not the business media but the left wing press. He now has a jingling troupe of lefties dancing to his tune for inflated property, passing the costs of infrastructure crush-loading to tax payers and smashing the wages of workers.
That has to go down as one of the great business propaganda coups of all time.
