By Stephen Saunders
While Anthony Albanese crush-loads ethnic immigration at unprecedented levels to help Labor win, the Budget has highlighted Samaras as a crucial analyst of this faux democracy.
Greek-origin commentator George Megalogenis has made a vocation of Australia’s “cultural diversity” obsession, doing victory-laps as we hit 30% overseas born, 50% “migrant origin”.
Only Middle East oil-autocracies – now strafed by Iran – really top that.
Move over, George. Greek-origin soothsayer Kos Samaris, former election strategist for Dan Andrews and his chronically indebted immigration state, has gone next level.
Post-Budget, he posits, the only viable pathway to win federal government “runs through” the most heavily migrant-origin urban electorates, both their citizen voters and their non-citizen migrants.
Albanese takes immigration intakes to the next level
Post-Budget, it must be repeated. It’s Labor not the Coalition that’s dialled (non-citizen) immigration up to 11.
By a very wide margin, Labor owns the top-five net-migration tallies since federation – 534,000, 429,000, estimates of 305,000, 295,000, and 300,000.
The first four figures are the Albanese-Chalmers ambush of 2022-26. The fifth is Kevin Rudd. Pace Liberal Senator McLachlan, this is mass migration.
In the Budget itself, the Treasurer never mentions the mass migration (population-growth target of 1.25%, yet another underestimate) primarily propping up the GDP growth (estimate 1.75%).
With media, however, he luxuriates in familiar immigration porkies. He had “cut” immigration 45% from a Coalition “surge”. Net migration was returning to “normal” with a little volatility in the “forecasts”.
They’re not “forecasts”, Jim, nor do migrants fall like rain. It’s deliberate. You said yourself it “reflects more temporary migrants staying longer”. You’ve doubled to nearly two million the number of temporary visas camped here, closer to three million counting NZ. Then throw in over a million non-citizen permanent residents. The senior Bondi terrorist was one.
The whole world knows now; pick up a student or other visa, come on down, and Labor’s unlikely to send you back. Labor can easily keep net migration at 250,000 – or well above.
After WWII until about 2005, normal net migration averaged about 90,000, then it shot past 200,000. Albanese immigration of 300,000-500,000 is a more radical reengineering.
Wealthy powers in the global north aren’t buying our South Seas multicultural nirvana.
In the UK, net migration has cratered to well under 200,000, about 0.2% of their 70 million population. Canada’s gone negative population growth, relieving their painful rental crisis. Resource-rich Australia lingers as the only wealthy nation pursuing indiscriminate mass migration – over 1% of the population annually – as a defective economic strategy.
Other wealthy nations won’t lean our way, in the 21st century’s strife-ridden AI-intensive world of job and energy shocks. Productivity growth has been increasingly elusive since the 2000s, even the 1970s. When a 100-year story of innovation, industrialisation, and productivity tapered off.
Australia’s world immigration anomaly isn’t discussed in our buzzy beehive of politicians, mandarins, media, and “stakeholders”. A retro socioeconomic shift is intensifying – with giddy support from the upper classes – and uncertain pushback from conservative politics.
Samaras takes immigration soothsaying to the next level
As the Australian Population Research Institute argues, the majority of voters are still conservative or patriotic at heart, but a strong and sizeable minority are what might be termed open Australians. They’re more in sync with the neoliberal agenda, open borders, and Labor’s nominally “progressive” cultural values.
In that sense, the failure of The Voice referendum is less surprising. Despite being sledged as racist by federal acronyms (ABC, SBS, HREOC) and the educated left, voters rejected the proposal 60-40. It lost every state and the NT, carrying only the ACT.
Drilling down to federal electorates reveals a different story. Privileged inner-city enclaves very much wanted The Voice versus the struggling burbs and regional Australia. It’s this kind of division that Samaras taps into.
It matters not if voters overall are fed up with mass migration. Not when the Coalition only holds “9 of 88” metro seats or “2 of 50” of the “most diverse”, in the slanted Kos-sense of the most heavily migrant-origin.
In which case, observes Kos, with 150 seats in total, the only path back to government “runs through” these key city seats. Liberals can only reclaim them, he implies, by endorsing explosive immigration, like doubling the Indian population in a decade.
Claimed Kos: 85% of Indian Australians voted Labor at the last election. Later conceding, 60-65% might be more credible.
Seemingly enlightened urban-Labor voters, he also claims, are “fundamentally unreceptive” to factual immigration-housing linkages. Conveniently, they “understand” housing scarcity in terms of “investment structures” and “supply constraints”.
Whereas the “threatened” personalities of revanchist Coalition voters are vulnerable to “simplified” causal narratives linking immigration and housing.
When Angus Taylor proposed an Australian-values test for migrants, Kos remonstrated; he risked losing “diverse” urban voters who’d “already shifted” to Labor and independents:
Indian-Australian and Chinese-Australian voters have played a decisive role in metropolitan seats that shifted away from the Coalition in recent elections.
Too right. Why bother gerrymandering electoral boundaries, as they still do in the US states, when you can look to gerrymander the national electorate. Labor makes no secret of stacking migrant Chinese and Indian electorates into Sydney and Melbourne. Nobody blinks.
Then recall, Albanese struck uniquely discriminatory qualifications-recognition and student-migration deals in favour of Modi’s India. Nobody blinked – that too would be “racist”.
When Taylor’s budget-reply pitched for non-citizens to lose key welfare-benefits, a nostalgically-Greek Kos went into overdrive.
“Roughly 4.5 to 5 million” (one in six!) Australian residents are non-citizens, he advertised. At the household level, migrant citizens vote “very deliberately” for their family’s non-citizens. If Kos might be so bold, this “dooms” the Liberals. After the 2028 election, “someone else” (read bad old One Nation) would be doing budget replies.
I don’t know if Ancient Greece would ratify this expansively non-citizen “democracy”. In a tactical revision, Kos claimed Taylor could motivate half a million non-citizens to take the pledge.
Either way, he’s got a good point. Why lead with complicated immigration changes, automatically drawing racism charges from Albo’s partisan Race Commissioner? Plus cliches of “scapegoating migrants” or “White Australia” from the Guardian and SMH chorus.
Taylor’s budget speech, just like Chalmers, had ducked actual net migration figures.
Quizzed by ABC, he punted for net migration “below 200,000”. That’s not much lower than Labor’s never-never (nominally 2027-28) target figure of 225,000.
Albanese will keep chugging on at much higher levels. Forget about any 90,000 – and even that would still be a very sizeable 0.3% of population – or zero in net terms.
Are there any ways around Kos’s Theory?
Albanese’s UN Labor Party doesn’t preselect MPs who would (publicly) query open-borders net zero doctrine. Liberals, as Kos underlines, are more divided, or is that more eclectic?
Taylor is more willing than Sussan Ley (remember her) to push back on mass migration. Yet also his “Liberals” include prominent immigration-gospellers like Senator McLachlan, journalist Niki Savva or (remember him) Malcolm Turnbull.
After five budgets, Chalmers “net zero economy” still can’t climb out of chronic over-migration, predictably low productivity growth, severe rental and housing unaffordability, stagnant real wages with stubborn bracket-creep, lushly funded private schools, and costlier energy tariffs.
His CGT and negative gearing changes aren’t really any big reform Budget. On the left, they want to blame bad-old Murdoch for unfairly attacking it. They’re still parsing the continuing voter-pain as “incremental reform”. But can the political right ever budge Kos Theory immigration-overload?
After Bondi, pro-Palestine Albanese pivoted to guns and antisemitism; never you mind the indiscriminate immigration. Soon enough, his Home Affairs Minister was doing that gauche midnight parade of defecting Iranian footballers. Come on down, ISIS brides.
Before 2031, I’m not sure any “democratic” process can derail our dogmatic leader from inflicting his radical immigration intentions.
As Bob Hawke signalled decades ago, Down Under multicultural mass migration derives from a LibLab pact, not any democratic deal with voters.
Now Kos gets me thinking: this Big Australia will never be unstitched unless there’s a similar top-down (or LibLab) political fix. Defying migrant-stacked electorates for the greater good.
Won’t happen – with Albanese in charge. LibLabGreenTeal will bloviate, rather than seriously engaging with ON policy of 130,000 migrant visas annually, implying negative net migration.
The analogy here is same-sex marriage. Overruling the nominally “diverse” migrant electorates, voters nationally wanted it, over 60 to 40. But it took an unusual Turnbull-Shorten leadership confluence to get there, with bad old Peter Dutton plugging the postal-vote circuit breaker.
So, is a reverse-Albanese a chance? Our fake “progressive patriot” won power in 2022, promising moderate migration and affordable housing whilst stealthily doing quite the opposite. In the 2026 media beat-up over “broken” tax promises, few mention his original betrayals.
Imagine if a genuine patriot (of whatever party) gained power. Intending voter relief by exiting the debilitating, divisive (and economically obsolete) Big Australia treadmill.