Alan Kohler has dropped some truth bombs about Australia’s immigration system on the Buyers Buyers podcast (listen from about 18.30):
“The Coalition is more inclined to have high levels of immigration than the Labor Party for labour relation or industrial relations purposes.
“The Coalition doubled Australia’s immigration in 2006 from roughly 100,000 a year to 200,000 a year at the time and it was in my view largely an industrial strategy designed to suppress wages and to protect the project they had to crush unions. And it worked. Wages growth has been extremely sluggish ever since then and the unions have got virtually no power.
“So I think it was a very effective strategy to use immigration in that way.
“The Coalition has always been very strong on borders and refugees – ‘stop the boats’ and that kind of thing. And I think that was part of the design to disguise the high level of immigration.
“Obviously that all came to an end with the pandemic. Immigration stopped. And there’s now a reset to take place. And the question is, if the Coalition wins will they go back to high levels of immigration as before? I suspect not and I think the Labor Party definitely won’t.
“Because it’s now become conventional wisdom across the economic world is that the biggest problem for the Australian economy is slow wages growth.
“The high levels of immigration has contributed to the slow wages growth, which is now seen as the biggest problem.
“So, I think there’s going to be a lot of economic pressure from various quarters and the Reserve Bank on the Coalition and Labor Party not to go back to very, very high levels of immigration. So I think we’ll return to 100,000 to 150,000 a year people. Maybe 1% population growth rather than 1.5%”.
I sincerely hope Alan Kohler is right and immigration reboots at a lower level. But the Intergenerational Report and Budget projects 235,000 net overseas migration ad infinitum:
Big Australia here we come!
Sadly, the Muppets at the Australian Treasury, big business, the property lobby, the edu-migration lobby, and various business-backed think tanks are all pushing hard for mass immigration. And the federal government always bends the knee to these parties, rather than representing the Australian public, which is firmly opposed to mass immigration.
