Big business and the federal government are softening Australians up for a quick return to mass immigration once the COVID-19 pandemic passes.
The Morrison Government has already convened an inquiry into Australia’s skilled migration program, which will be headed by the Liberal Party’s Julian Leeser. A key component of this inquiry will look at what adjustments are needed to the migration program to spur the economy’s recovery from COVID-19.
The assistant secretary of the federal government’s Centre for Population, Merrick Peisley, also spruiked the economic benefits from mass immigration:
“We would see no reason Australia is not a really great country for a migrant of choice”…
Mr Peisley said migrants were often young, skilled and more likely to have larger families, helping drag down Australia’s average age.
Various business groups are also talking up a quick immigration reboot.
For example, the head of Australia’s biggest listed home builder, Stockland’s Mark Steinert, noted yesterday that immigration into Australia would likely ramp-up once the COVID-19 pandemic has passed:
“I think Australia looks like paradise, I think people will be going to be queueing up to come in”…
This echoes last week’s pre-Budget submission from the HIA:
In a pre-budget submission, the HIA said the disruption to immigration and drop in population growth would “weigh on demand for housing”…
The HIA… wants the government to remove the cap of 160,000 permanent migrants a year and develop a new population strategy with medium and long-term targets…
Coles chief executive, Steven Cain, also wants immigration rebooted once the vaccine is rolled-out:
Cain is warning there is one forgotten pandemic factor that could deliver a long-term hit to the supermarket sector, and indeed the wider economy – immigration.
He argues that supermarket sales typically climb 3 per cent a year, with immigration accounting for 1 per cent of that. And the longer the pandemic prevents immigration from restarting, the bigger the cumulative impact will be, as two of three years of new customers are lost…
“I think the outlook for immigration doesn’t start to look better until there’s comfort a sufficient number of people have been vaccinated.”
As usual, the negative externalities of expanding the population on ordinary residents is ignored entirely by these boosters.
Mass immigration-driven growth is the ultimate Ponzi scheme, with big business privatising the gains while the costs are socialised on the existing resident population via funding the increasing infrastructure needs (water, power, transport, recreation facilities etc), as well as suffering the downsides via increasing congestion, being crammed into defective high-rise apartments, paying higher housing costs, and lower wages.
Rebooting mass immigration would also hinder Australia’s productivity growth by crush-loading the cities, discouraging businesses from investing in automation and labour saving technologies, and diluting Australia’s capital and resources base.
A Ponzi scheme is no way to apply government policy for the good of the citizenry.
Big business should meet the needs of Australians. Not the other way round.
Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.
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Anyone ever been on the Stockton 4wd beach on a public holiday? Or at the servo where you wash the car off?
No?
Not lately but used to drive on there ..guess it’s crowded
now like all the campgrounds within reach of Sydney
…the Bali crowd have discovered camping ….its now pretty awful
Bali [email protected] with their retro caravans. Insert vomit emoji:))
I would have expected them to get your goat.
Me neither.
Suffice to say it is quite vibrant, ulleh.
Suffice to say it is quite v!brant, ulleh.
Yea suffice to say indeed
He said it, mash’allah
Nothing wrong with some hot middle-eastern Habibi’s 😀
This is a co-ordinated media blitz out of the Edward Bernays playbook. Reason being the dodgy vaccines arriving. Predictable.
Immigration isn’t coming back in the same numbers as before despite the screeching. Won’t stop them trying but it’s a question of what replaces it. Productive economy certainly isn’t on the horizon either because Australians don’t like having to produce anything meaningful, so who the fk knows what will happen.
We could become organ exporters.
Free millennial spleen with every dogbox!
But they don’t have 1..?
Hell, if Bill Gates wants us to eat synthetic beef why not get ahead of the curve and go full soylent?
Plenty of my fellow millennials that can trade themselves in for a deposit on a high rise!
I reckon you nailed it with “Productive economy certainly isn’t on the horizon either because Australians don’t like having to produce anything meaningful”. If you try to have this conversation you get blank stares.
IMO the AFR top 10 richest list (who really run the country) has set the culture – a brief look at them and it’s nearly all landlords, retail and inherited resource wealth. So to me, it’s no surprise that the last 40 years has seen the middle class population demoralised into also becoming rent-seeking landlords and grifters off the back of migrant slave labor and consumerism. Stewie and the EZFKA thesis is entirely correct.
This.
Consider that being traditionally productive requires making a big mess. If you factor in cleanup costs into price then there goes competitiveness further out the window.
Fortunately we dont need to worry about being productive ever again. We have China to make all our stuff, they aren’t held to the same standards when it comes to making a mess, instead we can add carbon tariffs that will obviously fix everything. Then for buying everthing they produce we have nice, clean, debt that is attached to houses to make it grow.
👍
Why won’t it come back in similar numbers ?.
Plenty of punters across the developing world who would see Australia as a desirable location to live for better economic, social, political and safety reasons.
Edward Bernays would be proud of them all. It is one thing to get Peter Scanlon and his Migration Council, pretending to have a public interest when in fact he is lining his own pockets, what really annoys me is the ABC and SBS making me pay for the propaganda.
yup, there’s nothing – its all vapor. hard reset.
16 Feb 2021
Sisi addresses Egypt’s population growth in speech, calling more than two children per family ‘a very big problem’
Not a problem here?
It’s clearly different in Australia.
Yep. Australia is “different”.
Canada is already lowering the requirements for temporary residents to get permanent residency, because Covid of course. Australia better cuts its standards too or it’ll lose the “war” for “skilled” immigrants!
i don’t know if the immigrants could get any worse, the standard of driving in sydney is just unbearable, and every time its a vib rant.
Yep MSM & govt will sell it HARD like post WW1 & WW2 immigration cos Oz population decimated by brawn folk who buys Australian houses going home for a while unlike previous ‘states of energy’ like actual war where men folk get shot, stabbed, bombed and like actually die. Population can’t grow cos men folk dead. Up Up & Away:)
Everyone is still pretending that COVID vaccines stop you getting and transmitting the virus such that we will be able to open the borders. They dont. And the Pandemic has a way to go. A third wave is incoming from the more infectious mutant strains.
Corrupt bizness and government fvkrs are jerking themselves with the sh*t.
Just get more vaccinated. Duh.
Spot on.
This.
Have said this before, but IMO lockdowns are now being weaponised by the corporates to crush small business and by the state to demoralise people into accepting upcoming legislation ie covid passports. We’re being set up for social credit scores but tell that to normie normanson and you get screeching about killing grandma and public safety etc.
With the original ‘flatten the curve’ policy we acknowledged and tolerated the notion that there would be deaths.
Now government and the public won’t tolerate any covid related deaths.
What’s changed?
The pollies were far more successful than they imagined was possible. And have now painted themselves into a corner with all their self-congratulatory praise of their success.
Agree.
Nobody is pretending the vaccines are perfect. They seem to reduce the rate of serious illness including hospitalisations and death. That is all.
Given we are going to have to live with this virus or a variant thereof it is better than no vaccine at all.
Keep the thing out of the country and we don’t have to ‘live with the virus’.
That is a bullsh*t line.
It’s already in the country. Do you really think we can keep it out forever? At what cost?
Go long regional bolt holes. Exodus.
I’m doing just that
Gonna share?
Once I sign a contract. Hopefully any day now
Best of luck!
Yeah I have been wanting to do this since before the pandemic, now every idiot is out there competing with me. Grrrr.
Next: ATV and dirt bikes going round-and-round 15 hours a day …
worst? You own your place, they do too, and neither want to move.
I agree and support your criticism of this PONZI MIGRANT AUS ECONOMY.
However I feel that all of us may be overlooking one key factor, that is, where just not reproducing “more babies” are needed, it’s that simple. And the fact of low reproduction, is one large topic, that’s bigger than economics (in my opinion – anyway who cares about my opinion, democratic capitalism production line of opinions, next opinion please).
Ultimately it’s a reflection of POOR CULTURE, no pride or self worth as a nation (unless its for the rainbow colour flag waving warriors – where my colour isn’t represented), Australiana is hollow, where the people who inherit this country will be Asians, Easy Come Easy Go.
EZFKA. There is a war on young people wanting to start households. There is a war on young women having children. There is a war on workers earning and paying tax. There is a war on savers. There is a financial war against people taking risks and building businesses. The culture that built this country is under constant attack often by publicly funded propagandists who support a Chinese takeover in the name of identity politics and self loathing racism.
I wouldn’t regard the Coles and Stockland CEOs as publically funded.
In reality, both sides of Australian politics are waging the same war on behalf of vested interests who benefit from a hollowed out, atomised society.
Couldn’t agree more. I referred to Peter Scanlon above. The sponsors of the Liberals are the drivers of this. Its just that I have to pay for the Publicly funded ones.
I can’t wait until I’m retired, I’m going to be one of those crackpots sending rude emails to all these obvious shills.
The fools will ruin everything.
Wage theft will prevent the system from being able to be fixed by crushing wage inflation and preventing CPI. CPI is the key to wage inflation and perpetual debt.
We will end up back where we were in 2019 instead of 2007, the economy in a total shambles, businesses going bust everywhere, completely unfixable despite the best efforts of our leaders, and no excuse to create and spend the tens of trillions of stimulus dollars to be able to fix it with.
Hold off on the cheap migrant slaves until after we know whether the latest attempt at kicking off perpetual debt – controlled and globally synchronised debt hyperinflation, is going to work.
Just wait until the US stimulus goes through and starts getting leveraged into debt, please?
But that doesn’t make the 0.1% richer. Why would they do that?
But it does. Who makes and sells the debt that will be used to power the global economy to infinity and beyond?
Wage theft is really economic poison. It’s very short-terminist.
Sure, the 0.1% might feel rich and superior to their migrant slaves, but they will hit the hard limit, like what happened around 2015. There’s only so long they can hide overall wage declines and economic deflation, even if their own wages are plumped by theivery.
More Covid then.
Interesting.
Im waiting for an announcement that the vaccine is a bust.
Could be due to any reason, most likely mutations.
Won’t deter the blackhole unempathetic bloke that is PM from opening the floodgates? Wage pslavery and asset price bubbles are his only core promises. Charming.
Another sensible article Leith . Is anyone listening?
Mass immigration ! Go full Soylent
Lol lol, Soylent green yum 🤮
None of the people quoted in the abovementioned article would likely be seen dead in the company of many of the warm bodies they’re so keen to have come to Straya, to stoke the housing price, share price and wage slavery bubbles.