As expected, Australia’s business lobby and wealthy elite are growing more vocal demanding the federal government open Australia’s international border to migrants.
These groups like mass immigration for three main reasons:
- It provides a bigger pool of available workers to recruit, thereby increasing competition in the labour market, lowering worker bargaining power, and holding down wage costs;
- It expands Australia’s consumer base, providing businesses with more opportunities to sell their goods and services; and
- It places upward pressure on land values and property prices, making the owners of capital richer.
Yesterday, we reported that Suncorp Group chair Christine McLoughlin has called on the federal government to bring back migrants, claiming that businesses are suffering from the ban on international arrivals and that a strong migration program is needed to bolster the economy and slow the ageing of the population.
Later on, the CEO of the Property Council of Australia (PCA), Ken Morrison, joined the chorus demanding the federal government “restart net overseas migration”:
Property Council of Australia chief executive Ken Morrison said the industry was concerned Treasury forecasts outlining the resumption of overseas migration could fall short and trigger a long-running impact on the sector’s prospects…
[He wants] action now to ensure migration levels resumed as early as possible…
Mr Morrison said the Reserve Bank of Australia had singled out population growth as one of the nation’s “big economic engines”, which meant restarting net overseas migration “must now be a priority”.
The Housing Industry Association made similar demands last month.
The property lobby is clearly scared that the huge pipeline of homes under construction may lay dormant. The below forecasts from the National Housing Finance & Investment Corporation (NHFIC) illustrates the situation, predicting a huge oversupply of homes in 2021 and 2022:
Obviously, the only way to fill these surplus homes is by importing hundreds of thousands of warm immigrant bodies.
As always, the negative externalities of expanding the population are ignored entirely by these self-interested parasites.
Mass immigration led growth and development is the ultimate Ponzi scheme, with the business/property lobby privatising the gains while the costs are borne by existing residents via having to fund the increasing infrastructure needs (water, power, transport, recreation facilities etc), in addition to suffering the downsides from increasing congestion, being crammed into tiny defective high-rise apartments, paying higher housing costs (both prices and rents), and lower wages.
A Ponzi scheme is no way to apply government policy for the good of the people.
The prior 15 years of mass immigration was an unmitigated failure of public policy, delivering crush-loaded infrastructure and living standards, sluggish productivity growth, and stagnating wages. We must not return to this model and instead take a leaf out of the Nordic countries, which have delivered strong, happy and productive economies with ultra high living standards without resorting to population-led growth.
Sadly, in the property Narco state of Australia, the lobbyists pull the strings. Thus, the population ponziteers will likely get their way and we’ll return to the dumb ‘Big Australia’ policy, rubber stamped by all sides of politics.
