Herald Sun Business Columnist Terry McCrann is one of the few commentators that ‘gets it’. McCrann has told Sky News’ Peta Credlin that Australia needs to abandon its “population ponzi” policy of mass immigration in favour of productivity driven growth:
“I hope that we actually get a refocus coming out of this virus, coming out of this recession, and indeed in a sense coming out of this budget… That we actually get a focus on the Ps that matter: productivity. That’s the fundamental thing that we should be seeking to drive the economy going through the 2020s. And if we are ever going to get on top of the budget red ink, we have to be focused on actually generating more out of what we can produce”.
“The population ponzi should be a yesterday’s story. Just bringing in more people, building more property, building more infrastructure, just chasing our tails across the spectrum: education, healthcare, everything. We need to focus on a real value added economy going forward that emulates what’s happened to our north in Asia where you actually produce more, produce more productivity”.
McCrann was backed up by Andrew Stone – former Treasury and RBA economist, and Chief Economist and senior policy advisor to the Tony Abbott:
“Politically it provides the perfect opportunity for a serious debate about this and a serious reset. During the Hawke, Keating and Howard governments, we had a migration program that was already the fastest of any major country in the OECD in per capita terms. But then later on in the Howard Government, and then through subsequent governments, we doubled that and that had seriously damaging economic and social impacts. But it was also a very lazy way to try and produce growth, and very counter productive.
The fact that tragically we have very high unemployment… provides the prefect opportunity to say let’s set that [immigration] to a much more sensible – can still be quite generous – but a much more sensible level, and then focus on the really important thing: to improve our productivity to get more from the inputs that we put in”.
Fantastic stuff. If only more commentators in the mainstream media shared such sensible views.
