OPINION
As I wrote yesterday, on the issue of nuclear power, the Coalition has found a clear point of difference and a popular bludgeon to belt the government with. If it has the balls to stand up against almost every elite vested interest group in Australia, it’s got another opportunity.
Mass immigration.
Europe is once again in crisis mode as thousands of (illegal) migrants swarm across the Mediterranean in boats. In just one week, 10,000 migrants from Africa have swamped the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa.
Is that all? Australia gets more than that swamping our airports, week in, week out, with barely a peep from the media or the politicians on either side of the house. Sure, they might be doing so at least semi-legally, but the scam is little different. Almost all arrive on visitor or student visas, but almost immediately apply for “humanitarian visas” once they’ve hit the ground. It’s just people smuggling with a government stamp of approval.
And at a time when the country is facing a critical housing crisis, importing half a million people every year is little short of criminal, insane, or both.
According to the latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, net overseas migration (long-term arrivals minus long-term departures) reached 454,000 in the year ending March this year.
The largest component is student arrivals. The annual increase in Australia’s population was a massive 563,000 people or 2.2 per cent. The NOM [Net Overseas Migration] made up 80 per cent of the increase. Most new migrants head for Melbourne or Sydney.
Why on Earth is the opposition allowing this to happen, almost unremarked?
Migrant numbers of this magnitude are both ill-judged and unmanageable. And unlike Europe, where action is difficult, the Australian government could act to reduce the migrant intake but simply refuses to do so. The simplest route would be to put caps on uncapped temporary visas but there are a number of options.
The first would be to close off the “student visa” scam.
Under Labor, resources in the Department of Home Affairs to process visas have been ramped up to speed up visa processing. Boasts are now made about the number of visa applications being approved and the short time involved. Close to 90 per cent of all student visa applications are approved. The figures are quite staggering. In December last year, for instance, 97,000 student visas were granted compared with 24,000 approved in the previous December […]
Those on student visas no longer have to hide their real intentions – to stay in the country after they graduate – which has been made easier by the close-to-automatic issuing of lengthy post-graduation visas.
Earlier in the year the government also received a very unhelpful report chaired by former senior bureaucrat Martin Parkinson that recommended all temporary migrants be given a pathway to permanent residence.
There are a lot of powerful, vested interests in keeping the scam going, even ramping it up. Our greedy, shiftless university sector is determined to milk the foreign student cash cow for all its worth, despite clear evidence that over-reliance on foreign students, many of whom can barely speak English, is driving a drastic dumbing-down of course content and assessment criteria. Even greedier is big business, which wants to keep the river of cheap, unskilled labour flowing.
The argument that the government’s hands are tied because of the need to fill skilled job vacancies is totally misleading. The vast majority of the migrant intake is not skilled and even when they complete their qualifications, overseas-born graduates are much less likely to fill professional or managerial occupations than graduates born here.
Certainly, international students undertake unskilled and semi-skilled work, but the case for a large migrant intake has always been made on the basis of a strong skill bias.
Just how many Uber Eats drivers do we really need, anyway?
The better alternative is to allow the labour market to allocate workers to their best use and to limit the use of migration. Some firms may just have to shrink.
Or even, shock, horror, stop turning down job applications from locals, in favour of flying in thousands of cheap foreign workers and exploiting them for all they can squeeze.
It doesn’t take an economics degree to realise this surge in the population would put immense strain on the housing situation and this is exactly what is playing out, particularly in the cities to which the migrants are flocking.
The vacancy rates for rental properties are at historic lows and rents are rising very strongly, well above the rate of inflation. The fact federal ministers can express concern for those adversely affected by the housing crisis yet do nothing to curtail the size of the migrant intake underscores a wilful downplaying of the connection […]
In the meantime our urban landscapes will be transformed from the previous predominance of detached housing to clusters of poor-quality high-rise apartment buildings. Our cities are already rapidly changing and not for the better in the minds of many.
And that’s just the start.
The consequences of the migrant surge do not stop at the housing market. Congestion, crowded schools and hospitals, deteriorating social amenity, more generally, are some of the impacts.
The federal government can kiss goodbye to its emissions reduction pledge given such strong population growth.
Australians have had a gutful.
Survey after survey point to the lack of public support for high rates of immigration. The vast majority want a return to previous levels – NOM was around 100,000 a year in the earlier years of the century; some would even prefer a complete pause.
But the politicians would rather prioritise the wishes of the vested interests seeking more migrants – the property developers, big business, universities and, bizarrely, even state governments.
The Australian
If the Coalition have the guts, they can stand up against this insane human tide flooding the country and reap the electoral benefits.
Sure, the media and the rest of the left will go absolutely feral — but they’ll do that, no matter what the Coalition does. This is the big lesson the Coalition Wets never learn: no matter how much they toady up to the left media, whining, “Us, too, but in blue ties!”, the left is never going to be their friends.
But an opposition that calls time on the mass migration scam? You can bet voters will listen.