Congratulations Immigration Minister Chris Evans for the best spin since Shane Warne was at his peak, but I suspect the Minister himself might be surprised at how easy it's been to befuddle most of Australia's media - they make Mike Gatting look like Don Bradman.
The "leaking'' of the "14% cut" in skilled migration on Sunday worked a treat, capturing all the headlines on Monday and getting a second run with the official announcement that night on the box and in Tuesday's fishwrappers. Oh, wasn't it lapped up, especially by the tabloids - just that little touch of xenophobic nationalism about it that so appeals.
And nearly all of it, as Chris Evans well knows, was misleading nonsense, just throwing the CFMEU a bone to protect a few construction and building tradies, being seen to be doing something about rising unemployment, while actually having no meaningful impact on this year's record migration surge.
Yes, Mr Evans did announce a reduction of 18,500 in the skilled permanent migrant category, "slashing'' the intake by nearly 14% to 115,000.
The Minister might not have mentioned that that still means a 12% increase on the previous year's skilled permanent migrant intake - and that it represents a bare 5% impact on total migration this year, that's running close to 350,000 people. Maybe make that 332,000 now - still a record high.
Full article
There are a couple of things we can deduce from this article.
The first is that Chris Evans is disingenuous.
The second is the vast majority of the journalists who reported the Rudd Government's "immigration cutback" are incredibly obtuse.
And the third is that unemployment levels will inevitably rise as a result of the massive flood of immigrants that the Rudd Government has decided to unleash upon the country.
You can see just how unbalanced federal immigration policy has become against the interests of the Australian people when the immigration doors are opened even wider during the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression.
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