Former Coalition Prime Minister John Howard used a ‘bait-and-switch’ on the Australian public, scapegoating and closing the door on the very few refugees arriving by boat while throwing the door wide open to economic migrants arriving by air.
The ultimate result was a significant increase in Australia’s net overseas migration (NOM), which surged from the mid-2000s and propelled population growth to nearly double long-run averages.
During Howard’s first three years in government, Australia’s net overseas migration (NOM) averaged 86,000 per year. NOM averaged 188,000 people per year during his final three years in government, and was higher thereafter.
John Howard never notified Australians that the government intended to increase the country’s immigration intake dramatically. Why? Because he knew the electorate to be overwhelmingly opposed to it.
Instead, Howard gave the impression that the government was reducing the inflow by cracking down on the small number of refugees arriving by boat, while allowing massive numbers of economic migrants to inflate aggregate GDP growth, support the housing market, boost Treasury coffers, and please the Coalition’s large corporate backers, who benefit the most from a growing customer and worker base.
Fast forward to today, and the ‘bait and switch’ has returned. The Albanese Labor government has overseen the largest migration boom in the nation’s history, with an extraordinary 1,227,800 net migrants arriving in just 33 months.
Australia’s pool of temporary migrants has also ballooned by 750,000 since Labor was elected to a record 2.46 million:
There are a record 370,000 people on bridging visas:
Included in this bridging visa figure are a record 100,000 people either awaiting a decision on their asylum seeker claim or refused asylum but yet to be deported:
Despite the record migrant volumes, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told ABC Insiders on Sunday that Labor has taken control of Australia’s borders by ‘stopping the boats’:
“The truth is that around the world… including in Australia, people want borders to be controlled. They want control over their migration system”, Albanese said.
“That’s a way that you build support for migration as well. It’s why my government has been concerned about that. It’s why we’ve continued operation sovereign borders”.
“It’s why no one who has arrived by boat or attempted to arrive by boat since I’ve been Prime Minister has been permitted to stay in Australia”, Albanese claimed.
This isn’t the first immigration ‘bait and switch’ pulled on the Australian people by Anthony Albanese.
Anthony Albanese indicated in January 2022 – four months before the 2022 federal election—that his government would run a lower immigration policy if elected:
However, once elected, the Labor Party used the hand-picked Jobs & Skills Summit as a Trojan horse to gain a false consensus to lift immigration to its highest-ever level.
Labor then spent $42 million to hire 600 workers to rubber-stamp visa applications under the contrived ‘visa backlogs’, as well as opened up new migration pathways for Indians to secure permanent high levels of immigration.
The Albanese government is now gaslighting Australians into believing that current historically high levels of NOM, which never existed in Australia before Labor came to office in June 2022, are “normal”.
Crispin Hull explained the ‘bait-and-switch’ being deployed by Labor on voters:
“Normal immigration is the level before Howard ramped it up from a then post-war average of around 70,000 to 200,000 plus”…
“Voters must get this right: 70,000 is normal; 250,000 is a mad squandering of the living standards of all but a tiny elite of Australians”…
The current annual figure of 316,000, therefore, is utter madness.
The net result of this “Big Australia” policy is a decline in living standards as the economy, housing, and infrastructure are overburdened; workers face increased competition for jobs (with poor real wage growth); productivity suffers via capital shallowing; and the country’s natural resource base is diluted among more people.
Australia desperately needs a genuine and honest national debate on population policy, with a focus on whether large-scale immigration enhances the living standards of existing citizens.
What we don’t need is our political leaders’ dishonest’ smoke and mirrors’ approach, which purposely conflates immigration intake with boat arrivals and privatises the benefits of mass immigration for their corporate backers while socialising the costs for everyone else.
Give Australians a plebiscite on Australia’s future population at the next federal election, the results of which can be used to calibrate migration settings to achieve the desired population target.
Let direct democracy determine Australia’s future size.
