Friday, February 20, 2009

The Howard Legacy

For those who haven't heard of this book yet, I recommend picking up a copy of The Howard Legacy: Displacement of Traditional Australia from the Professional and Managerial Classes by Dr. Peter Wilkinson (you can read a review here).

Below is an extract from the book:

In 1994 the acerbic Lee Kuan Yew, then Prime Minister of Singapore, forecast that Australians were destined to be the poor white trash of Asia. Today one can say that white Australians are destined to be the poor trash of Australia.

What is the enduring contribution that Prime Minister John Howard’s regime has made to the future of Australia?

The scope and nature of taxation, industrial relations and so on can be changed, all in the space of a few years. There is one change that can not be reversed in less than many generations. That is demographic change.

This book is about the impact of the Coalition’s selective immigration policies. In selecting skilled immigrants, those who have done a degree in Australia receive bonus points in the criteria for acceptance for residency. In effect the policy selects those Asians who have higher cognitive ability, predominantly ethnic Chinese. In the ‘knowledge economy’ of today a premium is paid for qualifications and cognitive ability. They and their children (who will inherit their higher intelligence) will fill the professional and managerial ranks in Australia. They will dominate the cognitive class and hence have disproportionate influence in the country. This has important ramifications for both internal and external policies as ethnic demographic change continues.

The Chinese have been described as the Jews of Asia, but they are more than that. Throughout SE Asia and Oceania they are overwhelmingly dominant in the commercial and financial fields, less successful in the professional fields, because there is often discrimination to offset their superior performance in examinations. They form the ‘market dominant minority’, a term used by Amy Chua (Chapter 7). In this book the term ‘economy dominant minority’ is used to describe the equivalent in advanced knowledge economies. In such nations, and in underdeveloped ones where they have the opportunity, the Chinese have moved smoothly into the professions.

Affluent established nations over the centuries have allowed in unskilled manual workers at the expense of the host countries’ own cohort of people who have least economic advantage in terms of skill and/or IQ. Aggressive reaction can occur. In many underdeveloped countries where immigrants, who have above average commercial and cognitive ability, have been introduced, usually by a colonial/commercial power, violent reaction has occurred frequently and continues to do so.

Under John Howard Australia has become the first ethnic European nation to openly invite in distinct ethnic groups to provide the skills required in today’s knowledge economy. The need arises because governments have not been prepared to provide the necessary finance and motivation to sufficiently educate our own children. They have allowed ideologues in the education system to persuade parents and children that achieving certain skill levels does not matter. Recent arrivals are not fooled, they exploit existing Australian human and physical capital at the expense of the long standing Australian families in our schools and universities. The intergenerational transfer which has been an integral part of our society has been denied to many long established families without them realising it.

How has this come about when Prime Minister Howard has been stigmatised as ‘racist’ by the multicultural/left lobbies? There are no reports of groups participating in a ‘grand plan’1 to introduce a dominant ethnic minority. It seems to have happened through the combination of a number of Government policies, at both the Federal and State levels. Maybe the need for Howard to hold on to his own seat is a contributing factor. Significant changes in selective immigration policies happened over the period when Philip Ruddock, another hate figure of the Left over immigration matters, was the Minister responsible for immigration (1996 to 2003). Ruddock consistently opposed having a population plan. It is difficult to believe that Ruddock and the highest levels of DIMA were not aware of the implications described in this book.

Political correctness has meant that these topics are rarely raised2. Silence on the issue occurs because key players such as the universities, and increasingly the schools, are financially locked in. Few staff raise the question because they will be censured or sacked, since cries of discrmination/xenophobia/racism will be raised, leading to the fear that foreign enrolments will fall creating financial disaster for their institution.

After only five years of the selective immigration policies the results are apparent. In the 18 selective schools in NSW, 12 have more than 50% non-English speaking background, one over 90%. At the UNSW, students who are recent arrivals, Asian or Chinese, are 52%, 44% and 35% respectively. With recently announced increasing immigration and higher skilled quotas this disproportionately high over-representation will accelerate throughout the entire education system. It is true that signs of a significant number of Chinese were moving into the cognitive class before the Coalition took office, largely as a result of the Hawke decisions to allow students to stay after the Tiananmen massacre. But now it is a flood.

Australian politics has a set of largely unspoken bipartisan beliefs and policy directions whereby:

• We believe that our own citizens do not have sufficient innate ability to make Australia a prosperous knowledge economy, so we need immigrants of high cognitive ability.

• We can skimp on educating our own children and compensate by bringing in immigrants with the advanced education which is necessary for the knowledge economy.

• Even better, they must pay for that education in Australia, so that the government can cut grants to the universities for educating Australians.

• We are comfortable with letting the children of recently arrived immigrants have unfettered access to our premium schools and universities, displacing children of long standing Australians from the prestige universities and the lucrative professions.

• We are not concerned that universities discriminate against Australian students by lowering the standard for overseas students, who can then apply for a visa on the basis of the conceded pass.

• We are comfortable with introducing an economy dominant ethnic minority at the expense of long established families.

• We are not concerned that the combination of the economy dominant Chinese and increasing trade pressures will place Australia under the influence of super-power China rather than the USA.

The ALP has a policy to further discriminate against Australians. They would not allow them to enter fee-paying courses leading to prestige and lucrative courses, while overseas students would be free to do so and then apply for residency.

These are issues which need to be discussed prior to the election. We are already at a stage where the Chinese community is influencing immigration policy. In the seats of Bennelong (Prime Minister John Howard) and Watson (Shadow Minister for Immigration, Tony Burke) nearly one-fifth claim Chinese ancestry. Indeed, with less than one-third of his constituents speaking English at home, Burke is better styled the ALP Shadow Minister for Immigrants.

The crucial hold that the ethnic Chinese have over Howard in Bennelong means that the Coalition is unlikely to proclaim any changes. Indeed Howard has promised his Chinese constituents more of the same (see Chapter 12). Burke has no option but to remain silent, in keeping with the ALP strategy of bipartisan-ship on major issues leading up to the election. Kevin Rudd spent time in China, is a noted Sinophile, Mandarin speaker. Is Rudd the Manchurian candidate3 to lead us under the Chinese sphere of influence?


The Abandonment Of Intergenerational Transfer And Displacement Of The Traditional Australia.

"If ever there was a migrant success story, the life of 19 year old Tianhong Wu must be it."

So starts an article by education writer Chee Chee Leung in The Age 13 December 2006.

Tianhong Wu had just scored a perfect ENTER and had applied to Monash University to do medicine. As she had just received citizenship, she would be eligible for HECS. She came to Australia from China five years ago and attended Glen Waverley Secondary College (which is a de facto selective high school). Her English was poor on arrival, and her mother is less fluent. There is no mention of the father in the article, but the mother, a computer science teacher in China, works part time in a fashion house and has applied to do a laboratory skills TAFE course next year. She is applying for citizenship. The tone of the article is that by applying language skills tests to prospective migrants we would be denying Australia the benefits of having Tianhong Wu.

Let us look at her story from another perspective.

Taxpayer subsidized places at medical schools are Government limited. Somebody missed out. Since nobody can specifically claim to have missed out, let us construct a picture of a candidate who just missed out.

Jenny Smith is member of a family long established in Australia. Jenny lived in an outer suburb, one where the school facilities are run down, freely admitted by the Victorian Government. Students in schools in these suburbs are disadvantaged in following academic pathways as shown by declining success of such schools in university enrolments4.

The top matriculation teachers had transferred to de facto selective schools like Glen Waverley. Jenny’s parents did not have a tertiary qualification and did not realise the necessity to shift to another school zone. Besides, they had other kids and relocating costs are considerable. At Monash University, at equal ENTER, students from ordinary public schools perform better than those from selective schools (see Chapter 3), so Jenny was innately superior to some of those who made it, but she didn’t get a chance to prove it.

Jenny’s parents (maybe grandparents, and even further back) have dutifully paid their taxes for many decades, funding the considerable capital, human and financial, that has gone into building up the first class institutions such as Glen Waverley and Monash University. Tianhong’s mother has contributed virtually nothing to this during her short stay. Furthermore the medical course, and the TAFE course for her mother, will be part paid for by Jenny’s parents. Tianhong Wu will study medicine at a Group of 8 university, which guarantees her a very comfortable income for life. Her mother will build up very little super and so will be eligible for a pension.

If Tianhong Wu had never come to Australia, her position would have gone to Jenny. Maybe Jenny is committed to the health professions; then she can apply for the lower status, less well paid profession of nursing.

In effect the traditional Australia is being displaced. Their birthright is being handed to the overseas born on a platter. Not one letter published in The Age made this point in response to Leung’s article.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Another review of the book:

The Australian Immigration Crisis

A mirror image of our own crisis.

Peter Wilkinson, The Howard Legacy: Displacement of Traditional Australia from the Professional and Managerial Classes, Independent Australian Publications, 2007, soft cover, 170 pp. $25 (Australian).

reviewed by Thomas Jackson

Australia has an immigration policy that is like ours stood on its head. The United States is filling up with unlettered Hispanics, who make every social problem worse, whether it is crime, school failure, illegitimacy, youth gangs, obesity, or drug-taking.

Australia is importing hundreds of thousands of smart, hard-working people who are streaming into the nation’s best universities and working their way to the top. Mass immigration at its best? No. “In 1994 the acerbic Le Kuan Yew, then Prime Minister of Singapore, forecast that Australians were destined to be the poor white trash of Asia,” writes Peter Wilkinson in The Howard Legacy. “Today one can say that white Australians are destined to be the poor trash of Australia.”

These successful immigrants are almost all Asians—mainly Chinese—and white Australians have begun to resent their increasing dominance. As columnist Michael Duffy asked in the Sydney Morning Herald, “Is it perhaps the first time in history that a nation’s elite have invited another group to come in and replace it?”

Peter Wilkinson, a former president of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute and now editor of The Independent Australian, has written what is probably the first book-length treatment of this replacement. He has no resentment against Asians, pointing out that they are only exploiting an opportunity, just as the Chinese have done everywhere in Southeast Asia. It is white politicians who have sold out their children’s birthright who are the targets of Dr. Wilkin­son’s anger.

The Nature of Immigration

John Howard was prime minister from 1996 until he left office after a Labor victory on November 24, 2007. During that time, explains Dr. Wilkinson, Asians have accounted for a steady 40 percent of all immigrants. The Chinese percentage has drifted down slightly, from about 20 percent to 15 percent of the total, with Indians taking their places. Whites continue to be a minority of all immigrants, at 20 to 25 percent. Asians are now about 7 percent of the population and the Chinese, who account for half them, have an impact far beyond their numbers.

The Australian immigration system used to be weighted towards family reunification, but during the Howard years, the number of immigrants admitted because of skills rose from 28 to 45 percent. In some cases immigration quotas were even allocated to tradesmen, such as carpenters and electricians. This, says Dr. Wilkinson, is because of the foolish idea that everyone should have an “academic” education, which leaves many men with useless degrees in psychology or sociology and no trade. Whites from Europe and South Africa are the immigrant tradesmen; the engineers, accountants, and currency traders are Asian. Asians tend to be concentrated in the power centers of Sydney and Melbourne, where most of the Chinese movie houses and the 14 Chinese newspapers and magazines are found.

The Australian university system helps explain the Asian influx. Higher education is almost entirely free for Australians—only three percent of citizens pay fees—but the government has reduced the education budget over the years. This means universities have come to depend on foreign students, who pay full tariff. Almost one quarter of students are now fee-paying foreigners, and they supply 15 percent of national universities budget.

Graduation with an Australian degree almost guarantees the right to live in Australia. As Dr. Wilkinson explains, “the universities market themselves as providing education but they know, and certainly their prospective applicants know, that they are marketing permanent residency visas.” “Migration agents” do a brisk business recruiting foreign fee-payers. Some low-level cram schools have become almost entirely dependent on Asians, and they lower admissions and credentialing standards to keep the tuition money rolling in. Dr. Wilkinson notes:

“At one time in many cases the staff would have probably conceded passes in the knowledge that the students would be out of Australia soon and out of sight and out of mind. Not these days; most likely they will be applying for residency, then appointments to professional positions denied to Australian residents who have to met rigorous standards.”

Many classes are filled with people who hardly speak English, and are not much use to Australians, but anyone who complains is, of course, a “racist.”

Dr. Wilkinson points out that Asians who can afford to move to Australia or send their children to school there are middle class at least, and often wealthy. He says that if the first generation is held back by poor English, the second generation will not be. Their children will be just as diligent as they are, and will keep moving up.

Dr. Wilkinson admires the “firm family discipline” of Asians, and contrasts it to the lax, party atmosphere common among white students. Dr Wilkinson notes with disgust that whites are often so badly educated that “many born and bred locals have such poor English grammar and expression skills that recently arrived NESB [non-English-speaking background] immigrants are not particularly disadvantaged.”

Wealthy, motivated Asians take places in the top private schools, and buy houses in the best public school districts, often pricing out whites. The state of New South Wales, which is Australia’s most populous and has Sydney as its capital, has 19 selective high schools. No fewer than 12 have a majority of students who come from homes where English is not spoken. The three most heavily non-white are an astonishing 92 percent, 83 percent, and 78 percent NESB.

Hard work pays off. In 2005, the 3.4 percent of the population that was Chinese won 24 percent of the Australian Student Prizes given for high school work. The state of Victoria is 4 percent Chinese, but Chinese carried off 32 percent of the scholarships at the state’s prestige universities, Melbourne and Monash.

The table on this page shows just how overrepresented non-whites are in Australian universities, especially in the eight top-ranked schools, known collectively as the “Group of Eight.” The abbreviations are confusing, but the table shows what type of student is studying which subjects. In the fourth column, for example, we find that 37 percent of all students studying information technology were either born outside of Australia or were born in Australia of non-English-speaking parents. It is safe to assume that a large majority are non-white, with a heavy representation of Chinese. The last column on the table shows figures for the Group of Eight. No fewer than 49 percent of students in information technology are O/SB or ABNESB.

Dr. Wilkinson writes that most Australians have no idea how non-white Australia’s best universities have become. “Go to any Group of 8 university,” he writes. “Walk around, believe your own eyes.” At the University of New South Wales — in the Group of Eight, of course — 44 percent of the students are Asian. Dr. Wilkinson points out that Asians are heavily concentrated in dentistry and optometry, but do not yet dominate medicine because the English-ability requirement for doctors is high; patients and doctors must understand each other. This language requirement is routinely attacked as “racist,” and, in any case, Australian-born Asians, fluent in English, will soon be gliding into medical schools.

Dr. Wilkinson writes that if current immigration continues, Chinese will be 6 to 10 percent of the population by 2030, and will be concentrated in the best-paid management positions. “The Chinese have become an economy-dominant minority everywhere that they have a significant presence,” he writes. “Why would the situation be any different in Australia?”

There will be more than economic consequences: “Australia will gravitate over time into the Chinese sphere of influence … Traditional links with the UK, Europe and USA will fade … The leading politicians will be traditional Australians, in the pockets of the Chinese, as is the case in SE Asia.”

Dr. Wilkinson says whites will become rare in selective schools and in the corridors of power: “The cognitively gifted traditional Australian will be a minority. Traditional Australian culture is unlikely to survive in such an environment. Links to Anglo-European culture will evaporate.”

Chinese have generally refrained from boasting about their success, but there have been exceptions. Michael Choi, a member of parliament from Queensland said, “I want the world to know that we [Australians] are hard workers and entrepreneurs and able to sell ice to Eskimos because we have learned that from the Chinese community.” Peter Wong of the New South Wales legislative council says high immigration is a great benefit for Australia because the nation state is obsolete anyway. Whenever a Chinese—or anyone else—points out that whites resent the Asian influx he is hooted down.

Dr. Wilkinson makes the obvious recommendations: immigration should be cut, colleges should not have to depend on foreigners, and an Australian degree should not be a ticket to citizenship. He even suggests preferences for whites.

None of this seems likely. The new prime minister Kevin Rudd majored in Chinese as an undergraduate and held a diplomatic post at the Peking embassy. He is widely known as a Sinophile and even has a Chinese son-in-law. Mr. Rudd will not make it harder for Asians to tighten their grip.

What is happening in Australia is yet another example of why racial diversity does not work. The Chinese who can afford to immigrate are well above average in ability and even further above the Australian average. There is nothing to stop them from displacing the WASP ruling class, and changing the country in ways whites will not like.

Had these talented immigrants been Britons, Canadians, or white South Africans, there would be nothing like the friction that is sure to come. There might be a few murmurs of discontent if Boers, for example, took over a few major banks, but in a generation Boers would be indistinguishable from old Australian stock. The Chinese will remain Chinese, whether they are running a corner laundry or the foreign ministry. And, as Dr. Wilkinson points out, when the old WASP elite discovers that its children and grandchildren are sweeping floors in Chinese-owned factories, they will have only themselves to blame.

The Howard Legacy can be purchased on the Internet from the “book store” at digitalprintaustralia.com.

http://www.amren.com/ar/2008/01/#article1

Unknown said...

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