The ABC's pro-immigration bias on full display once again

In a report about the Rudd Government's recent announcement that it was making some modest cuts to Australia's skilled immigration intake, the ABC's Richard Lindell states:

"Skilled migrants have been one of the key drivers of economic growth over the past decade.

In fact, an Access Economics report for the Government forecast that this year's intake will add more than $800 million to the economy."

Notice how Lindell makes the completely unsubstantiated claim that immigration has been one of the prime drivers of economic growth over the last decade, and then proceeds to cite an Access Economics report as evidence of the economic "benefits" of immigration. However, put in its proper perspective, we find that these "benefits" amount to a $800 million increase in gross domestic product in a $824.9 billion economy — an increase of 0.08 percent. That works out to be a whopping increase of about $36 for every person in Australia. And when balanced against some of the substantial costs of immigration, such as downward pressure on wages, higher housing costs, increased consumption of natural resources, a larger current account deficit, and increasing welfare and tax burdens on state and local governments, these "benefits" disappear.

Also note how Lindell quotes some economists, both of which are employed by firms which have a strong financial interest in ongoing immigration, who complain, among other things, that less immigration will ease pressure on housing, thus making it more, shock horror, affordable! We can't have that, now can we?

Given that our public broadcaster has allowed itself to become a mouthpiece for the growth lobby, it is no wonder that many Australians have been duped into putting up with ridiculously high immigration levels for so long.

Gillard: The immigration juggernaut will not be stopped, despite rising unemployment

An update on this story.

From The West:

Govt rejects call to cut immigration

20th February 2009, 10:14 WST

The federal government has rejected research which shows its $42 billion economic stimulus package will not save jobs unless Australia's immigration intake is slashed.

In a paper to be released on Friday, demographic experts warn that new permanent and temporary migrant workers will soak up the 90,000 jobs the package is supposed to support.

That is because the immigration intake will exceed the number of jobs the commonwealth was trying to protect, The Australian Financial Review reports.

The experts advocate cutting the skilled intake to between 40,000 and 50,000 visas - down from a projected 133,500 - and forcing employers who want to import staff to prove that local skills are not available.

"It seems to me that this research could not be right," federal Employment Minister Julia Gillard told ABC Television.

"We are expediting the immigration of people who have the skills that we need."

Meanwhile, a key employer group says the research recommendations amount to a form of protectionism.

"The skilled program... can't be turned off and on," Australian Industry Group (Ai Group) chief executive Heather Ridout told ABC Television.

The government needed to be very careful about "chopping" immigration numbers, she said, adding that employers were committed to current intake.

"If we do not keep the immigration scheme robust our economic growth potential will be much reduced."

Original article

"It seems to me that this research could not be right."

Notice how Gillard dismisses the research out of hand, without even bothering to provide any evidence that the research is "not right", simply because she doesn't like the conclusion. Gillard's comments show that the Federal Government is committed to immigration irrespective of its effects on the existing Australian population. It is not prepared to even consider the possibility that importing record numbers of foreigners during a period of economic contraction and rising unemployment is a bad idea. In Gillard's words, immigration will continue, even if it means large numbers of Australians being forced to compete directly against foreign citizens for a declining number of jobs.

"We are expediting the immigration of people who have the skills that we need."

Oh, like more hairdressers and unemployable non-English speaking accountants?

"The skilled program... can't be turned off and on."

Yes, it can. The Government could slash immigration numbers tomorrow if it wished to.

"The government needed to be very careful about "chopping" immigration numbers, she said, adding that employers were committed to current intake."

I'm sorry, Heather Ridout, but I wasn't aware that Australia's immigration programme existed for the sole benefit of employers who only care about ensuring the uninterrupted influx of cheap labour.

"If we do not keep the immigration scheme robust our economic growth potential will be much reduced."

Wrong. Advances in productivity and technology, not increased labour inputs, are critical to economic growth.

The Murdoch press on immigration

From CanDoBetter.org:

Murdoch media contradicts itself on immigration

Posted February 18th, 2009 by James Sinnamon

Rupert Murdoch never misses an opportunity to preach to his captive Australian audience that this country must continue rapid immigration-driven population growth.

He usually does so through his media outlets controlled by editors who apparently know instinctively what their master wants the Australian public to think. On other occasions he will do so in person, as he recently did on the occasion of a dinner in honor of immigrant Frank Lowy:

"In my recent Boyer Lectures I spoke of the importance to Australia's future of a liberal immigration system,' Mr Murdoch said.

"'Few other Australians embody the breadth of achievement or the contribution to Australia's prosperity made by immigrants in this country than Frank Lowy."

One of Frank Lowy's more visible contributions to Australia has been the erection, by his Westfield Corporation, of massive sprawling shopping mall complexes in almost every substantial urban agglomeration in this country. Rupert Murdoch evidently fears that, if Australia's current record immigrant influx is not maintained, future generations of Australians will not be able to enjoy equivalent contributions from the potential Frank Lowy's that would be prevented from coming here.

In one of his Boyer Lectures referred to in his speech, Rupert Murdoch stated:

"In my view, Australians should not worry because other people want to come to our country. The day to worry is when immigrants are no longer attracted to our shores."

A possibility not acknowledged by Rupert Murdoch is that overcrowding this country may be precisely what will eventually make this country unattractive to immigrants, or, indeed, to people already living here. This was implicitly acknowledged in an editorial of 18 March 2008 "Queensland faces a tougher job on regional development", which stated:

"... much of (Queensland's) growth comprises city refugees making a sea change ..."

If high immigration is as beneficial as Rupert Murdoch insists, why is it that so many of Australians need to flee from the cities into which most immigrants have settled?

The story "English expats make Moreton the only Bay in the village" in Rupert Murdoch's Courier Mail newspaper of 10 January 2009 states:

"ESCAPING the overpopulated boroughs of the UK, British immigrants are moving to Brisbane's bayside suburbs, creating their own Little Britain by the Bay."

In the story one women stated, "I would never raise my kids back in England." Another stated " Back in the UK, five-year-olds ... don't know how to play any more."

The overcrowding of both England and the larger southern cities of Australia are precisely the consequence of governments having accepted similar such gratuitous advice in the past from the likes of Rupert Murdoch.

As a consequence, not only have living conditions become intolerable for many, but our very capacity to sustain any sizable population in the longer term, is under threat by runaway population growth brought about to satisfy the insatiable short-term greed of the property speculators and related concerns, whose interests Rupert Murdoch's media promotes.

Original article

The reality is that by most standards, Australia's major cities over the last few decades have become immeasurably worse places to live due to the very high levels of immigration that Murdoch and his fellow immigration enthusiasts have been championing. But don't expect them to ever openly admit the link between sustained high levels of immigration and Australia's rapidly declining quality of life.

How the growth lobby threatens Australia's future

From Candobetter.org:

How the growth lobby threatens Australia's future

Posted January 24th, 2009 by James Sinnamon

Why is it that the Australian government, and other governments, principally in the Anglophone world, deliberately encourage population growth when common sense and intuition, not to mention the hard evidence, tell us that a larger population cannot possibly be in the interests of the current inhabitants of this country or of the rest of the planet?

We are long past the point where adding extra numbers in any way increases the synergy of the inhabitants of this country. Consequently any additional population growth must necessarily make each and every one of us poorer on average as the per capita access to natural resources necessarily decreases in proportion to the increase of the numbers of people.

However, it gets even worse than that, because of the dis-economies of scale inherent in large populations. An obvious example is that Australians are paying extra water rates to finance costly water desalination and sewage recycling plants required to provide water for additional people.

Had we stabilised our population, this would have been totally unnecessary. We could all have been adequately supplied by our existing less unnatural and less technologically complex water infrastructure.

Similar points could be made about transport, electricity, health, education and other services.

To cope with increasing numbers, it is necessary to destroy ever greater tracts of native bushland, to abuse our topsoil and waterways, and to unsustainably dig up ever more of our finite endowment of mineral wealth.

Three and a half decades of extreme 'free market' economic policies have further compounded these problems. These policies hinder governments from making use of what economies of scale are possible. They prevent effective planning in the interests of all members of society. Obvious examples include the huge inefficiencies of the private property market and the shambolic state of Australian urban planning, a result of the dismantling of Whitlam's Department of Urban and Regional Development (DURD) by Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser in the late 1970's.

In some ways it may be the case that immigration does indeed enable the transfer of wealth into, as well as out, of Australia:

• The purchase of a home by wealthy or middle class immigrants as a means of buying Australian citizenship, which is effectively a transfer of wealth from the source country into Australia;
• The poaching of skilled workers, often trained at the expense of taxpayers of other countries, including of poor third world countries - a practice, for which the Queensland Bligh Government has become infamous;
• The selling of Australian university degrees and vocational training, which has notoriously become yet another means of purchasing Australian citizenship.

Little, if any of this wealth trickles down to ordinary Australians and whatever benefit they do gain is more than negated by the loss of previously available educational, training and employment opportunities, and consequent housing inflation (also discussed below). Even if it can be shown that Australia, as a whole, gains, rather than loses wealth through immigration, that wealth will most likely evaporate within this generation.

In any case, on a global scale such wealth transfer is a zero-sum game, at best.

All things considered, it seems far more likely that we are not only becoming more impoverished, but we are becoming even more impoverished than we might expect to be if we had simply divided the existing wealth amongst larger numbers of people!

In a perverse way, it seems to me that this may have actually made it harder, rather than easier, to argue the case against population growth and immigration.

Whilst I can't know for certain if this was true for others, I will try to summarise some of the ways that this fed into my own conscious and sub-conscious thought processes and caused me to avoid questioning our high immigration policies for many decades.

My own intuition caused me to conclude that, if, somehow, immigration made us worse off on the whole, it would surely be harder, rather than easier, for any group to gain from immigration. Therefore, when faced with the strident assertions from all the seemingly credible authorities that immigration was economically beneficial, I found it easier to deny my own gut instincts and not to make the considerable investment of emotion and time necessary to question this pervasive message. Instead, I just quietly hoped that the advocates of immigration, who promised me a more prosperous, vibrant, interesting and sophisticated society, were right.

Alternatively, on occasions when the economic arguments did not seem to quite ring true to me, then the only other likely plausible motive would have been an underlying altruism of an enlightened elite more willing, than the ordinary, backward, redneck, xenophobic masses, to share the wealth of this country with others less fortunate than ourselves.

However, the conclusive evidence, after many decades of this social engineering, is that Australia has, instead, become a poorer and more dependant country as consequence and this has not been brought about because Australia's elites are self-sacrificing and altruistic.

Contrary to what I expected, a small group has, paradoxically, not lost, but rather gained from this chaos and suffering, at our expense. That group is the growth lobby. It is really a group of land speculators and landlords operating in an organised way on a corporate level.

Land speculators and landlords openly welcome the way that growing demand increases the price of vital resources over which they have acquired a monopoly. They profit from commodifying and then controlling access to resources and services which include water, land, power, housing, roads, food production and transport, which each one of us needs in order to live a dignified life, or even simply to live.

As one consequence, in Brisbane at the start of 2009, even previously well-off professionals are being impoverished by insatiably greedy landlords, who exploit these circumstances to increase rents at every possible opportunity. A surveyor, who lives near me (who acknowledges that his own work entails the destruction of bushland to build new housing developments to cope with population growth), told me how he was unable to travel back to Germany this year for his holidays, because of being personally affected by recent rent increases.

The growth lobby also includes property developers, financiers, building companies and suppliers of building materials. There are also others that gain from population growth through high immigration, such as immigration lawyers, employment agencies and cheapskate employers.

Whilst these activities may provide a facade of economic prosperity, none are capable of increasing the underlying ability of this society to provide for its own needs.

Queensland Premier Anna Bligh in April 2006, then Deputy Premier, ludicrously defended population growth on the grounds that it was necessary to keep people in the construction industry employed.

How could Premier Bligh, supposedly an intelligent person, have failed to ask herself the obvious question: How are those additional people then to be employed? Must we build yet more houses to keep them employed and import yet more people to Australia in order to provide a demand for those houses?

At some point such 'growth' has to end and Queenslanders must be able to find gainful employment by meeting the needs of other Queenslanders instead of future inhabitants.

The longer Australians put off stabilising our population and establishing a steady state economy, the worse will be our circumstances.

But the growth lobby wants this situation to continue indefinitely. To ensure that the forced march to dystopia continues, the growth lobby pours funds into the coffers of Australia's major political parties, including Anna Bligh's Labor Party. It creates obligation and dependency in our political parties and governments. In turn, our governments endlessly facilitate the real-estate economy, in the face of every democratic objection, merely to keep themselves in Government.

If we are to hope for any kind of a decent future for ourselves and our children, these corrupt arrangements must be brought to an end and the power of the growth lobby must be broken.

Original article