Here is how Peter Martin lies about the impacts of immigration on the labour market to great cheers at the ABC:
It is tempting to say what has happened with unemployment is the result of closed borders and slower population growth during COVID (more jobs per worker than there would have been). But the banks making those bold forecasts know the borders have been reopened.
New Zealand has enjoyed faster (although still slowed) population growth than Australia over a year in which its unemployment rate has slid to 3.2 per cent.
What New Zealand, Australia and the other nations now enjoying unusually low unemployment have in common is out-sized government spending and record low interest rates during COVID to keep the economy afloat.
Spending and ultra low rates create jobs. If we keep them in place right up to the point where we create worrying inflation, we will be able to get even more Australians into jobs and, all being well, keep them there.
It’s the most important thing to grasp from what’s happened. More important than the exact rate of unemployment.
The borders have been open for a few months. It would barely have impacted the labour market yet, let alone the lagging data. Citing that is transparently stupid.
Worse, it is very easy to disprove the Peter Martin lie about stimulus. Jobs growth is still well below the pre-COVID trend:
Yet labour underutilisation has collapsed:
Why? Foreign worker outflows:
All stimulus did was stop the economy from collapsing, even though it couldn’t keep jobs growth on the previous trend.
Collapsed immigration then delivered the best labour market in 50 years.
Basically, Australia has run the perfect study of the impacts of mass immigration on the labour market. Forget the modelling and academic navel-gazing that dominated the debate pre-COVID. We now have conclusive evidence from the world’s largest-ever empirical research.
Those results say just one thing: too much immigration lifts underemployment and squashes wages and if you want to look after local workers then immigration levels must be modulated to economic conditions.
Why does the lefty economic commentariat – parts of the ABC, Greg Jericho, Peter Martin, so on and so forth – hate Australian workers so much that they lie constantly in denial of these PROVEN FACTS.
We can only conclude that they are a sub-species of the Great Australian Cringer.
