There’s not too many silver linings to be found in a global pandemic, even one as ridiculously over-hyped by doom-mongering “experts” as the Wuhan flu. But, just as even the Black Death had the surviving side-effect of providing a boost to the rights and wages of low-status workers, the Wuhan virus is delivering a couple of unexpected fillips to ordinary Australians.
The first, of course, is that the virus and especially its exploitation by the Chinese communist government has brutally awakened even many of the elite to the reality of China’s silent invasion of Australia (and the rest of the West). But while the second might dismay the elites, it’s being welcomed by average Aussies.
COVID-19 is an asteroid strike on Australia’s rampant population growth and a moment of truth for the nation’s business model.
Contrary to the histrionics of the left-elite, Australians don’t have an intrinsic beef with immigration. Many of us are the children of first-generation migrants, after all.
What Australians really have a problem with is the elite-driven model of record-high mass immigration.
The closing of the border to tourists and foreign students, and the flight of temporary visa holders to home countries will lead to the first migration outflows since the end of World War II.
Economists, journalists and the latte-elite might be reaching for the smelling-salts, but many Australians are heaving a sigh of relief. They’re the ones, after all, who’ve had to endure steadily-more-congested cities, choked infrastructure and failing services. Meanwhile, the alleged economic benefits turned out to be mostly a chimaera.
Analysis by Inquirer shows that in the five years before the pandemic hit Australia, GDP increased by a cumulative 12.4 per cent but GDP per person rose by only 4.6 per cent.
COVID-19 has wiped away all per capita gains.
Big Australia, the express train of world-leading 1.5 per cent-a-year population growth, is in the yards for maintenance[…]This opens the field for a reset on population policy, which has de facto been immigration policy. A more open and intense debate looms.
For decades, the “debate” has been a strictly one-sided shouting match: the instant anyone so much as murmured that maybe flooding the country with more and more new arrivals might not be such a grand idea, they were shouted down as “racist”. Almost without exception, the shouters-down are wealthy, Greens-voting whites whose only contact with immigrants is when some pleasingly ethnic type serves them at their favourite inner-city cafe.
Such elites are, as Mark Steyn puts it, the types who get the full deal globalist deal, “an increasing share of the wealth, with the cultural benefits of great restaurants and cheap nannies”, with none of its downsides. After all, migrants aren’t flooding into the good suburbs, they’re bursting the seams of the hard-scrabble, working-class urban fringe, whose residents come home from a two-hour commute only to find that the community centre’s been burned down again and the skate park is yet another no-go zone.
According to Gary Banks, former chairman of the Productivity Commission[…] “in per capita income terms, empirical studies by the Productivity Commission and others have repeatedly found that the gains from immigration are small and largely skewed to migrants themselves. And that’s without considering environmental and other negative impacts.”
No side of politics, except for the “deplorables” of One Nation, has even condescended to listen to the punters’ views on mass immigration.
Demographer Bob Birrell says an “enormous swath of people are in favour of less migration”. “The reason why Australia’s big migration program has not run into ballot box problems, unlike much of Western Europe and the US, is that so far political elites here have continued to support the policy, thus giving voters no place to go except fringe parties,” he says.
But even one-time Big Australia advocates are starting to have second thoughts.
One-time productivity tsar Banks says that when he was treasurer, Scott Morrison publicly defended historically high immigration by citing Treasury calculations of how much tax revenue would be foregone with lower numbers.
“That is a pretty narrow way of looking at immigration, to put it mildly,” he said. “It ignores the cost side of the equation for a start.”
Big Australia will be a tough sell while unemployment is high, especially for young people.
The Australian
It will still be a tough sell, once Australians have had a chance at an actual debate on population policy.
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