Former editor of the Canberra Times, Crispin Hull, has delivered another pinpoint dissection of Australia’s immigration system:
Immigration is now a win-win for wealthy elites and the Coalition. The election has shown that not only does high immigration provide cheap labour and new consumers for big business it also provides the resentment that bolsters One Nation’s vote which dribbles through to the Coalition on preferences…
High immigration is causing suppressed wages; housing stress; congestion; and stress on infrastructure, health and education. That is what should cause resentment and should cause people to vote against the political parties that support the cause and those that do the least to fix the results…
The Coalition has very artfully drawn attention away from high immigration and high population growth by doubling down on refugees… the Coalition needs Manus and Nauru as a propaganda distraction… Please ignore the real cause of your wages stagnation and long health and education queues.”
The real cause, of course, is high population growth – put by the Australian Bureau of Statistics at 404,800 in the past year, 61 per cent of which was from net immigration. Even without any immigration the population would still grow.
Australia’s annual growth rate of 1.6 per cent is close to three times the OECD average of 0.6 per cent.
But the Coalition will do nothing about it because those immigrants provide consumers and cheap labour to its supporters who make their money turning farming land into shopping malls and housing, and turning wilderness into marginal agricultural land.
Another result emerges from the vilification of refugees. People who want more humanity shown to refugees are made to feel that they must support all people coming to this country and therefore support high immigration.
It means, for example, that any debate about population on the ABC or SBS, or most other places, for that matter, is shut down for fear of those pointing out the adverse effects of high population being branded racist… Getting a sensible debate on population in Australia is very difficult.
It may be clever or it may be inadvertent, but the net effect of refugee vilification and the prisons on Manus and Nauru is that high immigration can continue to deliver wealth for the very few and votes, via One Nation to the Coalition.
A truer word has never been written. Under this Coalition Government, net overseas migration (NOM) soared to 263,000 people a year – a level that has only been exceeded once before in Australia’s history:
So, for all its bluster over cutting the permanent migrant intake by a pithy 20,000, the Coalition has opened the floodgates to temporary migration, whose visas on issue soared to an all-time high 2.3 million in the year to March 2019, up by around 500,000 since the Coalition was first elected in 2013:
Included in the above are bridging visas – awarded to migrants awaiting substantive applications for permanent residency – whose numbers have roughly doubled over the Coalition’s term in Government:
The April Federal Budget also exposed the Coalition’s fake immigration cuts, projecting NOM to be much higher over the forward estimates than the latest 248,500 figure reported by the ABS:
What we are effectively seeing is a re-run of John Howard’s immigration ‘bait-and-switch’, whereby the tiny numbers of boat people are being vilified while the floodgates are jammed opened to migrants arriving to Australia by plane.
Sadly, the fake left media, the Australian Labor Party and the Greens are each failing to hold the government to account. Instead of representing the interests of ordinary Australians, whose wages and living standards are being crushed by the never-ending migrant flood, they have instead called for an even larger migrant intake.
To them, virtue signalling to the inner city elites is much more important than the tedious chore of actually representing their constituents and winning elections.
The end result is that the Australian people have been left with two dastardly choices: vote for high immigration (Coalition) or extreme immigration (Labor / Greens).
Voters chose the least worst option. And Scott Morrison and Co are laughing all the way to the bank as the useful idiots of the fake left shoot themselves in the foot.
