To be honest, I had never given more than a moment’s thought to Dominic Perrottet.
He got the Premier’s position in NSW after Mad Gladys had imported Covid and thought it might be an idea to depart stage left.
But the news of the week is that Perrottet has come out with a pretty clear statement of the observable truth: Australia runs a ‘Population Ponzi’ and it is “lazy economics”.
That is a clear, succinct statement of what Macrobusiness has been pointing to for more than a decade.
Well said!
And it gets even better according to the SMH, because another Macrobusiness line he picks up is housing affordability. And he relates the two phenomena
In his first public appearance since losing the March election last year, Perrottet also said the Commonwealth should help NSW and Victoria cover the cost of infrastructure for new arrivals, given it was the federal government that benefited from the lazy economic “Ponzi scheme” of immigration.
and
Perrottet also called on the federal government to contribute more to state infrastructure, saying NSW and Victoria took the bulk of immigrants but had to foot the bill for the services they needed, such as hospitals, transport and roads.
Sydney would struggle to house the big numbers of immigrants expected over the next 10 years, “let alone Australians. We can’t have an Australia that can’t house its children”.
Call it ‘quantitative peopling’ as MB’s DL-S did. Or the ‘Population Ponzi’ as MB’s LVO did. In the years since MacroBusiness started to mention immigration volumes as an economic factor, the discussion has slowly come around.
At the start, there were suggestions of racism, and then it passed through a ‘we need to pay for the pensions of tomorrow’ phase.
Of course, the Liz Allen end of the spectrum continues to run a line of ‘All immigration is an unalloyed good and questioning it is ungrateful’ line focused on the rights of immigrants to come here without question.
Universities and education sector participants can be relied upon to note the demand for Australian education as a lucrative ticket clip, and the entire immigration lobby – from Innes Willox to Abul Rizvi – maintain a position of stout denial on any suggestion that too much is anything other than barely enough.
But, slowly and surely, people are starting to notice. The population ponzi suppresses incomes, kills productivity, crush loads infrastructure, and adds to housing problems baked in by other policy idiocy.
Back to Mr Perottet, he has some pretty good ideas on Negative Gearing, and with seven kids you would think he does have an interest in Australia getting its economic policy act together.
Well done for speaking out, though it is in the classic Aussie tradition of only doing so once out of power.
We can but hope that Australia’s politicians start speaking publicly about not just immigration but about tax and what sort of economy we want to hand on to our future.
In the lead-up to the next election, policy discussion on this and other issues is long overdue.
But it won’t happen if the LNP does not make it so while still in the halls of power.