Your ABC is home to Australia’s biggest mass immigration shills

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For years, the ABC has been the go to platform for biased pro-immigration reporting. It regularly provides space to contributors pushing the ‘Big Australia’ agenda, like Liz Allen and Abul Rizvi, while rarely (if ever) giving space to those seeking lower, sustainable levels of immigration.

Another classic example of the ABC’s pro-immigration bias has arrived with the ABC providing a key lobbyist – Dr Shane Geha – a free platform to spread mass immigration propaganda without investigating his claims or engaging any opposing view, nor disclosing his clear conflict of interest.

Because when it comes to ‘Big Australia’ shills, you would be hard-pressed to find a bigger rent-seeker than Geha. He is managing director of EG – “a leading real estate investment fund manager” – whose business profits directly from mass immigration. According to their website:

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As founding Managing Director of EG’s Urban Planning business, Shane bears overall responsibility for all EG’s rezoning projects. Shane has extensive rezoning experience and brings a combination of practical know-how and value creation skills to projects he is involved in.

He was previously a director of a private company managing over AU$200 million in property development in NSW and the ACT.

Geha’s LinkedIn profile also tells us that he’s up to his neck in the ‘rezoning’ business:

His focus is working closely with clients on property uplift strategy and implementation and has worked on multiple rezoning projects including some of the largest land use changes in both size and value in Sydney and New South Wales.

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Geha’s vested interest has been exposed previously by MB (here, here, here and here).

Last year, Geha ridiculously claimed that more immigration was required to “bust congestion”, even though Blind Freddy can see that piling tens of thousands of migrants into our cities is the key driver of said congestion.

As I noted at the time:

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You don’t solve alcoholism by drinking more. You don’t solve diabetes by upping your sugar intake. And you certainly don’t solve congestion by raising demand via importing more people.

Now Geha is back talking his book yet again, this time using the ABC to push the line that more immigration is required to avoid recession, to solve an ageing population, and to improve liveability:

…our greatest resource is not our significant mineral wealth or our world-class agricultural produce. It is our people.

And we are a migrant nation… we are also an ageing country, with our largest demographic now approaching retirement and fewer people in the 20-60 demographic — the age group that produces the clear majority of tax revenue…

Since the beginning of the year, we have lost almost two years of population growth in just three months… More than 300,000 tourists, students and itinerant workers have fled our shores…

This severely impacts our country’s productive tax-generating capacity.

In times of crisis when public spending is at fever pitch, we need to be thinking about how we are going to foot the bill, to help expediate our recovery and get the economy working hard for us again…

How do we turn it around?… we can simply import more people in the productive cohort.

A young migrant who goes to school here for four years, then does the HSC, studies at our universities, gets a part time job, starts paying tax, then goes on to full employment some and stays in the tax base for over 40 years, is an ideal candidate… it is indeed our best remedy to increase our intake of foreign students, agricultural, nursing and hospitality workers…

Each of these categories are vital to fill for our recovery and continued economic success…

And with the new infrastructure boom that will hopefully ensue following COVID-19, we will also need new migrant skills to assist our small but resourceful workforce in creating new economic growth, so vital in re-igniting our economy.

Australia has run a mass immigration program for more than 15 years with disastrous results. Per capita GDP growth had plunged even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic:

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As had real per capita household disposable income:

Wage growth was also running near record lows, whereas the labour underutilisation rate was stuck near 14%, indicating a massive oversupply of workers:

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All of these indicators will unambiguously worsen following the COVID-19 lockdown.

Ramping up immigration now would obviously add to the massive overcapacity across the labour market and drag wages and per capita growth even lower.

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Geha’s claim that Australia needs to import people in order to replace the tax revenue generated by the working majority aged between 20 and 60 is also pure ponzi-economics. It takes no account of the extra costs created (e.g. infrastructure, public services, liveability and environment) and ignores the fact that these migrants will also grow old, thus requiring an ever increasing immigration intake.

Nor does Geha mention the many costs that come from growing Australia’s population so quickly.

The fact of the matter is that Australia has run a turbo-charged migrant intake for more than 15 years with obvious results: roads, public transport, schools and hospitals have all become over-crowded despite record infrastructure investment. People have also been shoe-horned into smaller and more expensive housing. Upping the migrant intake even further, and expecting livability to magically improve, is the very definition of insanity.

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Infrastructure Australia’s modelling for Sydney and Melbourne unambiguously disproves Geha’s propaganda. As shown below, traffic congestion, commute times, and access to jobs, schools, hospitals and green space are all projected to worsen as Sydney’s and Melbourne’s populations balloon to 7.4 million and 7.3 million people respectively by 2046:

All of which reminds me of Upton Sinclair’s famous quote:

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“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

The fact that “Your ABC” lets pro-immigration shills like Geha run this drivel unchallenged shows its true colours.

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.