Immigration policy and health care costs in Australia

From The Social Contract:

How Long Is a Public Purse String?

Immigration policy and health care costs in Australia

By Denis McCormack
Volume 14, Number 1 (Fall 2003)

Try this from a bygone era of Aussie public health pragmatism. It's an item from Melbourne's The Age dated 24 August 1896.

"Leprosy in New South Wales: Chinese patients shipped to Hong Kong"

"Arrangements were recently carried out whereby 19 of the 20 Chinese lepers in the Little Bay Lazarette [hospital in Sydney] were shipped on board a vessel, and they are now on their way to Hong Kong... but one of them managed to hide himself and could not be found in time... Everything has been done to make them comfortable... now in [the] charge of an experienced warden... a small sum of money has been given to each so that on their arrival in Hong Kong they will have means to go to their respective districts. It has been ascertained that no trouble will be experienced in landing the lepers in Hong Kong... Some two years ago a leper was deported from Victoria to China at great expense..."

Contrast the above with today's public health/immigration insanity. I'm listening to radio news as I write (6 August 2003) and by coincidence it carries a report of Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock having exercised his lawful but controversial "discretionary powers" to intervene in a "humanitarian" case in favour of allowing an African with AIDS to be reunited with family already in Australia. One could be forgiven for thinking this is just a bit of image softening from a government lashed for and to its tougher border protection policy of recent times, but the facts would suggest a wider set of problems arriving.

"African migrants will double this year with 5206 expected... African refugees will make up 43% of Australia's humanitarian intake."(1)

It's just this sort of no-brainer from a supposedly conservative government that drives reasonable people nuts in this country. We the reasonable majority who read of police services mobilizing against nascent African gangs (2) are supposed to continue supporting the "conservative" Government of John Howard because the Labor Party Opposition tells us that they would be even more "compassionate" on refugee/asylum issues should they take government at the next election. Heads they win, tails we lose, but I digress...

Unraveling immigration's costs to full length, to separate and identify the many strands, to tease them out and run the micrometer over the cascading, inter-twined masses of fibers, is a forensic accounting task which can be accomplished, but only by a willing bureaucracy directed to do so by government at all three levels in a federal, state and local government system.

In 1991, impatient of successive governments ever undertaking such purse string measurement and analysis, Stephen Rimmer, a senior economist knowledgeable on all three levels of administration, wrote a no-nonsense booklet, "The Cost of Multiculturalism" which was briefly reviewed in The Social Contract (vol. II, no. 4, Summer 1992, p.251). Having had an arms-length hand in editing, proof reading and funding the first print run of Rimmer's booklet, I wasn't surprised to see the consternation it attracted from all the usual suspects in the mainstream Australian press and the immigration industry at the time. Happily he was given right of reply in the press, nor did he lose his job.

A point he was at pains to make on page one was the difficulty in cost separation when tracking Federal funding of immigration and multiculturalism once those funds are added to, atomized by, and filtered through:

"Hidden expenditures by other state and local governments... The control of information is designed to minimize public debate and allow governments to hide from the public the economic costs... In addition the indirect costs... including the growth of organized fraud against governments; organized crime; terrorism; declining community health standards and affirmative action policies."

He even touched taboo topics like migrant workplace accident and motor accident insurance fraud. It was a punch-packed 71-page booklet not since bettered, and for the above good reasons laid no claim to be comprehensive. It begs statistical update and reissue for its shock value alone.

Here is what Rimmer had to say on "Community health and the policy of multiculturalism... Measuring the indirect economic costs" pp. 48, 49, 53, 57 about which little has changed:

"For instance, in the 1980s the Federal government assured the Australian community that all migrants and refugees settling in Australia were medically screened prior to migration (Senate Hansard 22 August 1988). However, throughout the 1980s State governments and medical professionals publicly claimed on numerous occasions that such medical screening of immigrants was ineffective.(3)

For example, in 1986 Dr Streeton, Adviser to the Victorian Public Health department, indicated that of the 246 cases of tuberculosis in Victoria, sixty percent were migrants and most had not been effectively screened prior to entering Australia. Professor Boughton, a leading figure in the development of the hepatitis vaccine, claimed in 1988 that approximately 10 percent -- or 4000 -- of Asian migrants who came to Australia each year carried the hepatitis B virus (Daily Telegraph 1988).(4) In addition, the incidence of syphilis had increased dramatically in Australia since the 1960s, when there were tougher health screening procedures for migrants. However, a spokesman for the Minister for Immigration, Mr Holding, said that health screening procedures were considered adequate by the Federal Government (Messina 1988a).

In 1987 the Australian Health and Medical Research Council said that large numbers of immigrants with active cases of leprosy and tuberculosis had passed through Federal Government medical screening tests without their condition being recognized. The Council recommended that the immigrants from high-risk areas be screened prior to reaching Australia by the Federal Government, and evaluated again when they reached Australia. (Sun, 1987). This finding was confirmed by the "Medical Journal of Australia," which expressed alarm about the number of immigrants and refugees entering Australia with infectious diseases (1987).

In 1988 the Victorian Health Minister, Mr White MP, called on the Federal Government to upgrade medical screening of migrants for infectious diseases. He argued that because of the ineffective screening Australia faced the threat of existing and eradicated diseases being reintroduced and Australian children contracting and spreading the diseases further (Messina 1988b). Consequently, large numbers of migrants with infectious diseases such as hepatitis A and B; AIDS; tuberculosis (TB); leprosy; malaria and syphilis are reported by such authorities to have been allowed into Australia over this period.

However, the Federal Government appears to have ignored these pleas, arguing that only a small number of persons with infectious diseases slip through current screens. By 1989, 238 cases of tuberculosis were reported in Victoria and 73 percent of these were migrants. Dr Jonathon Streeton, who co-authored a National Health and Medical Research Council report on TB, indicated that unless effective screening measures were implemented, TB would be spread throughout the community (Australian 1990b). In addition, in 1989 Dr Rouch, Victoria's Chief Health Officer, claimed that 10 migrants from Africa, who had settled in Victoria, had been found to have AIDS shortly after migrating to Australia. He indicated that both the Victorian and NSW State governments had consistently urged the Federal Government to introduce more widespread medical testing and stated that: "Its really high time there was an adequate policy for screening migrants" (Allender 1989).

In 1991, the Medical Journal of Australia again expressed concern about inadequate screening of migrants, who were contributing to the spread of TB. While there was an apparent shortage of statistics available to health researchers, some 225 of the reported 290 cases of TB in NSW in 1986 were migrants. While the United States government was campaigning to eradicate this disease by 2010, negligence by Australian governments had seen cases of the disease increase rapidly to the point where it might become common. The journal stated that: "It would be an indictment of our public health system if a disease of yesteryear, so close to elimination, returned with its resultant human and economic costs" (Canberra Times 1991b). The Medical Journal of Australia was also reported to have found cases of migrants entering Australia with live roundworms as long as 13cm in their bodies. It was claimed that the worm had infected 1.3 billion people worldwide and that immigrants who tested positive were not routinely treated, as it was felt that the parasite did not pose a significant risk (Canberra Times 1991c).

It has to be taken into account that medical screening of migrants, foreign tourists and students will not be effective in all instances, because of the nature of the diseases and the inexperience of many health professionals in identifying the early signs. However, it is also clear that throughout the 1980s the administration by governments of health screening of migrants has been negligent. Australian governments appear to have displayed an arrogant disregard for the health of current and future generations of Australians, regardless of ethnic background. The policy of multiculturalism has assisted governments to ignore pleas by health professionals over the last decade to implement effective health screening in the national interest...

While the economic cost of ineffective screening of immigrants are unknown, Mr Paul Gross, Director of the "Institute of Health Economics and Technology Assessment" estimated that in 1987 Hepatitis B, which is far more infectious than AIDS, cost the community over $50 million per year diagnosis and treatment costs and indirect costs such as lost productivity and premature death. The cost per patient was estimated to be more than $22 000 (Romei 1987). Given that approximately four thousand migrants are reported to come to Australia each year with this disease alone, the estimated cost to the community of ineffective health screening for Hepatitis B is $88 million per year, expressed in 1987 dollars. However, the cost of other infectious diseases imported into Australia by legal and illegal immigrants, foreign students and tourists cannot be ascertained. Nor can the cost of Australians infected with such diseases be ascertained. Clearly, a conservative estimate of these costs would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars each year - the total cost is likely to be several billion dollars higher than the estimate provided here."

It is fair to say that over the last decade or more as increasing numbers of Asian, Sub-continental, and Middle Eastern immigrant doctors have become more established across the Australian medical scene, one sees and hears less of the criticism catalogued by Rimmer above. Can professionally prudent self-censorship in the service of "community harmony and understanding" be more accurately described as institutionalized cowardice leading to abrogation of responsibility and duty of care?

Three years after Rimmer's booklet, The Age of 5 December 1994 carried the article "Migrants more likely on welfare" by Karen Middleton reporting unsurprising but surprisingly-admitted findings of the then Labor Government created and funded pro-immigration think-tank, the Bureau of Immigration and Population Research (now defunct):

"A higher proportion of migrants receive age or invalid pensions, sickness benefits, and the dole than do people born in Australia..."

According to a report in The Australian Doctor, 4 April 1997, "HIC swoops on medicine exports at airports" by Christina Anastasopoulos, a one-day search operation of passengers' luggage run jointly by the Health Insurance Commission, Federal Police, and Customs Officers at Sydney International Airport in November 1996 resulted in 24 people being charged under the National Health Act for attempting to illegally take medicines overseas which had been obtained through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (read public purse):

"All travelers involved were boarding flights bound for the Middle East or South East Asia."

Multiply by number of international airports, times 365 days, by how many years? (5)

Most recently a Melbourne University study of increased welfare dependency over the last twenty years reported in the Australian, 11 July 2003 by Christine Wallace said:

"Most of the increase appears to have occurred after 1989-90 and has been most pronounced among single males, particularly those born outside Australia."

Worry as we should about immigration's day-to-day public health costs, they are minor in the order of things most concerning about immigration. Think about the mass mental health implications for frustrated dwindling white majority societies whose well-founded and well-documented fears about our ongoing multiracial immigration continue to be flatly ignored by their elected governments, decade after decade. To what degree does the generalized repressed frustration and resentment so generated feed into mass subliminal post-modern apathy and political disengagement? Think about rising levels of despair, depression and dysgenic behavior -- conspicuous consumption, substance abuse, below replacement fertility. For too many people who have never considered the culture/history/curricular wars to be their business, life seems naturally disconnected from their past or future. As life's passengers they work, shop, eat, drink, watch TV, party, and too often holiday right on past family and children, trying to be merry today -- for tomorrow, continued bipartisan immigration policy ensures displacement, and eventual replacement by Third World immigration. Although a whole range of demographic and social indicators don't look good at present, these trends need not be terminal -- which reminds me of an alternative title I considered for this article, "Immigration Overdose: When tonic turns toxic, STOP!"

For the hyper-informed readership of activist newsletters and journals such as The Social Contract, the daily deluge of bad news from the mainstream media continues to confirm our worst fears about where immigration is taking us. We sift and clip, copy and fax, post, email, download and quote, discuss, catalogue, file, and otherwise integrate and incorporate the latest details into a broader more intricate mental landscape of related information. Sometimes for we realists, it may all seem a bit daunting or depressing even, but that's only to be expected:

"Indeed some studies have postulated the existence of 'depressive realism,' on the basis of evidence which suggests that depressed people have a more realistic assessment of both their level of control over events and their likely future circumstances than the non-depressed... those who are in a condition of mild depression that tend to see themselves and their world with the least amount of cognitive distortion." (6)

So there you have it -- our well-earned excuse to wallow in the occasional downer. Yet, irrepressibly, we are the types who leap at the letterbox on arrival of the latest edition of expert distillations on our collective predicament. We read in wonderment the detailed mirroring of our local immigration-derived problems reflected from around the world. We observe increasing numbers of journalists who are no longer able to so comprehensively avert their gaze from immigration's multifaceted downside. They signal an awakening that is as yet inchoate as it is general among Europeans worldwide: that Third World mass immigration and multiculturalism are unfolding disasters, only brought into sharper focus and magnified since 9/11. As social capital heads south along with social cohesion in increasingly multiracial "western" countries, collective white survival anxiety must eventually rise as a result. But what of the white masses around the world right now? Do they not fret as we do over the immigration/multiculturalism/demographic bad news stories sprinkled throughout the media? Do they not ponder a dim future for them and theirs? As T.S. Elliot observed in his Four Quartets, "humankind cannot bear very much reality," a concept perhaps reflected by some recent research:

"Humans possess a psychological immune system that allows negative events to fade from memory much faster than positive ones...� Researchers have found the human memory to be heavily biased toward the positive. But far from simply being in denial, the study says our memory systems process pleasant and unpleasant emotions differently. The study to be published in the Review of General Psychology says that the fading of negative memories faster than positive ones should be viewed as a 'healthy coping process.'" (7)

"Perhaps that might be one explanation..." -- so mused Jean Raspail through his narrator (more than once) in The Camp of the Saints when pondering the docility of the "paralyzed west" facing imminent immigration inundation. (8)

Having blacked out for too long under the accelerating G force of immigration-induced social change, more of our opinion makers and leading writers are awakening in white-knuckled fright to an imminent civilizational psycho-sonic boom-crash scenario. With immigration's reality kicking in so rudely and widely, some of print and TV journalism's long-embedded left are turning right. In Britain especially (9) they are stimulating the release of more adrenaline fueled "future fear" into the white English-speaking world than has been pumped into its mainstream organs since Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes, along with President Woodrow Wilson, won their unorthodox tag-team TKO at the post-WWI Paris Peace Conference. Against the odds, and at times each other, these two men prevailed to ensure immigration restriction and regulation remained in the domestic policy domain of sovereign nations. They stopped immigration becoming the plaything of internationalist do-gooders in Paris and thereafter at the soon forthcoming League of Nations.

We live in hope. It's only the end of the beginning. The fat lady is merely clearing her throat. There is every chance that eventually she'll be singing our song, in harmony with a growing chorus of those who are now hurriedly rehearsing to make the lyrics their own.

Denis McCormack is Australian correspondent for The Social Contract.

Notes:

1. Melbourne's Sunday Herald Sun, 25 May 2003, "African intake to rise."

2. The West Australian, 23 July 2003, "Police plan gang squad." "It will respond to the bloody machete and knife fights between the Asian gangs... the unit will also target the predominantly Lebanese gang the Sword Boys and smaller groups including an African gang with the potential to develop into a powerful..."

3. On the Australian Government website covering immigration health clearances updated to 30 June 2003, all the predictably exculpating caveats are cited including:

"Australia's health requirements are designed to:

a) Minimize public health and safety risks to the Australian community;

b) Contain public expenditure on health and community services including Australian social security benefits, allowances or pensions... No health condition with the exception of tuberculosis automatically precludes the issue of a visa...where signs of earlier infection, however small or old are apparent...you will not be permitted to visit Australia until you have completed recommended treatment and successful re-testing" Needless to say, cases of TB x-ray substitution fraud are not unknown."

4. Australians Against Further Immigration with Graeme Campbell, former Federal MP for Kalgoorlie, expended great effort and attracted much P.C. flack for politicizing the immigration -- Hep B connection as spelled out herein by the medical profession heavy-weights. A Federal Government recommendation for childhood Hep B immunization was eventually declared in May 2000 with little fanfare and no public acknowledgement as to Asian immigration being the driver of the belated recommendation.

5. Cited from an Australia First Media Release by Campbell and McCormack, 6 April 1997.

6. Cultural Pessimism: Narratives of Decline in the Post-modern World by Oliver Bennett, Edinburgh University Press 2001, pp.194-5.

7. Melbourne Age, 10 June 2003 "Bad News? Forget it, we all will."

8. The Camp of the Saints is available from The Social Contract Press.

9. There is next to no daylight between what the top end anti-immigration literature has been saying for fifteen years and the recent anti-immigration writings of widely published British journalists like Anthony Browne, Melanie Phillips, Peter Hitchins et al. Sample Anthony Browne in The Spectator, 2 August 2003: "Some truths about immigration" (or "Britain is losing Britain" also by Browne in The Times, 7 August 2002) in which immigration/public health concerns are worked in well with all the usual themes. British tabloids such as The Daily Telegraph, Daily Express, and Daily Mail have been pounding the Blair Government on immigration's downside, including its impact on the National Health Service. For a good summary see Spearhead, September 2003, "The great health scandal" by Rob Smyth. Also a very useful and welcome change has been BBC Radio World Services' frank reportage on immigration. Ethnic demographics, multiculturalism's dilemmas, and mounting asylum problems are now getting something closer to the coverage they deserve on BBC radio which is in stark contrast to their previous studied neglect of these issues.

Original article

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.

Aim for a sustainable population

Aim for sustainable population and generous immigration

CHARLES BERGER
13/02/2009 9:25:00 AM

Last October, the Commonwealth Treasury released modelling intended to inform the design of the Government's carbon pollution reduction scheme. The modelling assumed net migration to Australia of 150,000 people a year through to 2050, which would result in an Australian population of about 33million by 2050.

Operating on an assumption of 200,000 a year in the last half of this century, Treasury's modelling envisages about 45million Australians by 2100.

Pause for a moment to consider whether you support an increase in Australia's population that would, among other things, transform Melbourne and Sydney into mega-cities of 10 million residents each.

Now consider that the Treasury's assumptions about Australia's population in advising the Government on climate change were woefully on the low side.

Australia's actual net migration in 2006-07 was 177,600, the highest on record at the time. The preliminary net migration figure for 2007-08 is 213,500. Because the Government further increased skilled migration numbers in 2008, it is likely net migration for 2008-09 will be higher still. In fact, we are now roughly tracking a ''high-growth'' scenario developed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2006, which projects an Australian population of more than 62million and growing by 2100.

There is a real difference between an Australia with a stable population of perhaps 25 million to 30 million people and an Australia with twice that number and still growing fast. Our ability to cope with climate change and manage our environment sustainably is vastly improved with a lower, stable population.

It is not only the Treasury assumptions for its climate change advice that now appear completely superseded by population growth. Most state planning frameworks, including Melbourne 2030, were based on population estimates that are now laughably out of date, largely due to the massive increase in migration begun by the Howard government and accelerated under the Rudd Government.

As a result, state and local planning schemes for housing, water supply, electricity, health care, education and transport are becoming redundant almost before the ink is dry on them. Victoria's latest State of the Environment report concludes that development on Melbourne's urban fringes is driving the loss of natural habitat and biodiversity, degrading waterways, taking up good agricultural land and creating a host of other pressures.

In this context, the release of the book Overloading Australia by Mark O'Connor and Bill Lines has sparked another round of debate about Australia's population. Some commentators have been quick to detect a murky agenda of xenophobia hovering behind a green cloak in the population debate. They are right to be suspicious. Population control movements have been associated in the past with anti-migrant agendas and coercive birth control policies in developed and developing countries. In light of this dark history, it is critical for those who advocate population stabilisation to reject any such association unequivocally.

And yet it is possible to argue for a sustainable population policy that includes some limits on migration without being anti-migrant. When I was in law school in the US, I spent many late hours volunteering at a legal clinic that represented refugees making application for asylum. I feel deeply that one of the true measures of a society's ethics is how it treats refugees and others on the wrong end of the modern global economy.

Many people may not realise that in recent years more than half of Australia's permanent migrants have been through the skilled migration stream, compared with only 7 per cent of the total being humanitarian migrants and 25 per cent family migrants. So having a sound population policy that brings migration back down to reasonable levels does not mean shutting the door on refugees. In fact, Australia could even increase its refugee intake, while still tracking for stabilisation of the overall population by about 2050, if we reduce skilled migration substantially.

Since most of the recent increase in migration is attributable to perceived economic requirements, not humanitarian or family obligations, perhaps we should scrutinise more closely the claims by industry that they are needed to meet ''skills shortages''. One wonders whether such claims are really just code for ''lower wages''. The truth is, the rapid increase in skilled migration is being used as a crutch for the economy, a way of providing a short-term boost to things like housing construction and retail demand but without any serious reckoning of the long-term consequences. Relying on migration to prop up sectors of the economy also diverts us from the task of devising more sustainable solutions.

In trying to ease the pressure overpopulation and excessive consumption are having on our planet and its ecological systems, we must debate immigration and demographic patterns while keeping Australian values of justice, equity and fairness front and centre.

Those who are sceptical of calls for a sustainable population policy are also fond of pointing out that our modern, high-consumption lifestyle is the most pressing cause of our environmental problems. They are correct that we must tackle our high pollution and consumption levels and shift to a more sustainable lifestyle. According to the World Resources Institute, Australia's greenhouse pollution level of 26tonnes of CO2-e per person per year is double Germany's, six times China's and 11 times Indonesia's.

But, while a lower-impact way of life must be a top priority, we must also understand that a rapidly growing population will make that transition much more difficult. For instance, in 2002, a CSIRO report analysing the possible consequences of different population levels for Australia found a 28 per cent increase in the nation's population by 2050 would lead to 20 per cent more energy use and greenhouse pollution, 25 per cent more urban water use and higher food import requirements (especially for fish and vegetables), among many other impacts. The sobering reality is that the growth of a consumption-intensive population in Australia is seriously damaging our environment. Despite these pressures, Australian governments have continued to pursue high-population-growth strategies or have had no coherent demographic policy at all. The baby bonus (or the new plasma screen bonus, as they call it at one major retailer) is an example of such a misguided policy.

Australia now needs to shift its focus to policies that seek to match human populations and consumption levels within nature's carrying capacity, while transforming our economic and social systems to function within the limits of ecological systems.

We should also support programs in high-fertility countries that improve education and maternal and child health care as well as provide sustainable economic opportunities. The good news is, these programs are the most effective means of reducing fertility and promoting sustainable development. We can achieve a sustainable population while discharging our ethical obligations to accept refugees and play a positive role internationally. It is not only achievable: our future may depend on it.

Charles Berger is director of strategic ideas at the Australian Conservation Foundation.

Original article

I found some of the reader responses to this article interesting.

One reader called "Katherine" commented:

It is absurd that our Government is pursuing high population growth while, at the same time, having no population policy at all. It is also odd that the motives of environmentalists who question immigration-fueled population growth are sometimes deemed suspect. In contrast the business interests that profit from population growth (and lobby for it) are seldom subjected to scrutiny.

I would argue that the Government does have a tacit population policy: import as many people as quickly as possible!

As for the question of motives, Mark O'Connor and William Lines made this point in their book Overloading Australia:

"In general, rather than opponents of high immigration having a hidden agenda, it is immigration's advocates who have a personal or institutional vested interest, whether they are are ethnic 'leaders' seeking to increase their 'market share', industry groups seeking to increase their business opportunities, or New Class intellectuals expressing their moral superiority."


Another reader called "Milly" wrote:

We in Australia have a right to control who comes here to live, and how many. It is not about being "anti-migrant" or discriminating according to nationality. It is about numbers. Without people emigrating, our gross numbers are increasing, and already our environment is under stress. Garnaut's report is being virtually ignored, and the threat of losing our MDB food-bowl is not even making any impact in Canberra! Kevin Rudd is denying and ignoring climate change. We cannot reduce our greenhouse gas emissions or have any real conservation while our numbers are increasing, deliberately. Only few people benefit from our heavy immigration program. With contradictory policies from our government, they are obviously not taking our environment seriously and future generations will pay the price for their short-sightedness and greed.

Milly is correct. For conservationists (which I am not even though I obviously share their concerns about the ruinous environmental impacts of population growth), the issue is about numbers and numbers only.

To quote O'Connor and Lines again:

"Questioning population and especially immigration will always attract controversy. But conservationists need not involve themselves in debates as to whether our national identity benefits or suffers by a very large influx of people with different cultures or values. (Although this is an important debate to have.) Conservationists need not even be interested in the effects on living standards, life-style, house prices, or security from terrorism. The conservationist's main point is that all groups coming to Australia aspire towards the same high-consuming material culture and lifestyle. In terms of their impact on nature in Australia, differences in language or ethnicity are irrelevant. Numbers, not culture, count."

Rudd Govt's immigration programme a threat to Australian workers

From the Herald Sun:

Sponsorship system open to exploitation, say academics

John Masanauskas
February 20, 2009 12:00am

AUSTRALIA must slash migration to protect local jobs, argues a Monash University report.

The report said the Rudd Government was running a record high migrant intake while job prospects for locals were bleak amid the global economic crisis.

"On the face of it, Labor's migration program constitutes a direct challenge to the interests of domestic workers," the report said.

"It will add a huge influx of job seekers at a time when the bargaining power of domestic job seekers has taken a turn for the worse."

The report, Immigration and the Nation Building and Jobs Plan, will be released today by Monash's Centre for Population and Urban Research.

Authors are demographers Dr Bob Birrell and Dr Ernest Healey, and labour market expert Bob Kinnaird.

Last year the Government increased annual permanent migration by 37,500 places to about 200,000 people.

That's about the same number of Australian school leavers and uni graduates who will be looking for work over the next year.

The number of temporary skilled migrants sponsored by employers has also grown rapidly, reaching almost 60,000 last year.

The report said the Government's $42 billion stimulus package to protect Australian jobs was compromised by high migration figures.

"If the migration program is not cut sharply, the growth in migrant job seekers will exceed the number of jobs the stimulus plan proposes to protect," the authors said.

They also called on the Government to crack down on employer sponsorship of skilled migrants, claiming the system was open to exploitation.

"There are no rules stopping sponsors from recruiting migrants instead of locals, or even of retrenching locals ahead of temporary visa holders," the report said.

It also recommends the range of jobs eligible for migrant sponsorship be reduced and that bosses give proof locals can't be found at market rates of pay and conditions.

Original article

No surprises here. Bringing in record numbers of immigrants, many of them with dubious skills, during a period of growing unemployment is sheer stupidity. But, then again, the Rudd Government's immigration policy never made sense in the first place, even before the economy nose-dived.

Melbourne "wrecked" and "full"

In a column entitled "Melbourne is wrecked, and full", Andrew Bolt makes the link between high immigration and Melbourne's declining quality of life.

He writes:

It’s bad enough that we’re already struggling to keep our most basic services running.

But now consider this: at the rate we’re being growing lately, Victoria will add at least another 1.5 million to its population over the next 20 years.

In fact, it could well be more. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd last year cranked up our immigration intake to a record high - more than 330,000 a year, if you include workers on temporary visas. And that’s not yet counting new births.

A year ago, even before Rudd opened our door even wider, the Australian Bureau of Statistics noted Australia’s population was now growing by 1.6 per cent a year, which means that if we don’t stop this madness, there will be half as many of us again by 2050.

And, of course, most of these new people will be trying to squeeze into our cities. Like Melbourne.

Imagine Melbourne growing 50 per cent bigger in your children’s lifetime, if not your own. That’s 50 per cent more people, cars, houses, gardens, air-conditioners and train travellers. Everywhere where’s there’s two, imagine three by 2050.

Forget the social stresses of simply getting on with so many more immigrants, or of trying even to find a little elbow room.

Consider this more basic problem: how on earth are we going to give all our new neighbours power, water, roads, land and trains when we don’t have enough for the people here already?

*snip*

Kicking out this government may not be enough to stop our slide. After all, there is little evidence yet that the Liberals would be any better.

But one thing is clear and urgent: until we learn once more how to give our citizens power and water, trains and roads, we must cut immigration.

After all, why inflict on two million more strangers what we’ve just endured ourselves? We’d only double our pain.

Full article

Rudd evading the question of population

From Online Opinion:

Population pressures

By Barry Naughten
Posted Thursday, 22 January 2009

The Rudd Government has allowed vested interests to veto serious action on climate change.

Rudd himself has rationalised this with an argument about rapid population growth but evades the question of population policy. This comment takes up aspects of the nexus between population policy and climate change.

The White Paper’s conditional target for 2020: the backdown
In its December 2008 White Paper on CO2 reduction schemes, the Rudd Government failed to adopt the “conditional” abatement option of 25 per cent reduction relative to 2000 levels by 2020, as recommended in the Garnaut Report. Instead, the Government has adopted the far more modest target of 15 per cent reduction for 2020.

A reduction commensurate with the 25 per cent cut would be required internationally if global concentrations in the atmosphere were to be held to no more than 450 ppm CO2e, thereby significantly reducing the risk of “dangerous” climate change. Such a path would also require countries such as Australia to adopt 90 per cent emission reduction by 2050.

Other examples of weakening resolve evident in the White Paper included its excessive allocation of free emission permits to trade-exposed industries and unconditional payments of as much as $3.9 billion in free permits to coal-fired generators.

Professor Garnaut has harshly criticised the Government for caving in to the pressure from vested-interests in what has been the most expensive, elaborate and sophisticated lobbying pressure on the policy process ever.

In the White Paper, a lower, “unilateral” target of 5 per cent reduction for 2020 is based on an assumption of no comparable burden being accepted by other countries. The purpose of the higher “conditional” rate is to enable Australia play its part in encouraging a sufficient and co-ordinated response from the rest-of-the-world.

The next major step in these international negotiations is in Copenhagen on December 7-18, 2009 at the United Nations Climate Change Conference. This will be the first test for the most critical player, the United States under the new Obama Administration.

The urgency of such action is heightened by indications that an Obama Administration may systematically conflate climate change with a bogus campaign - supported by neo-conservatives, “oil hawks” and others - urging US independence of “foreign” oil.

Rudd’s “population gambit”
Prime Minister Rudd’s rationale for rejecting the “conditional” 25 per cent abatement option is that Australia’s population growth is high relative to Europe’s. His claim was that “If the Europeans were to embrace the same per capita obligations that we're about to embrace, then you'd be seeing European reductions of the vicinity of 30 per cent”.

Consistent with this claim, the White Paper states that the 15 per cent cut in Australia’s emissions is equivalent to a 34 per cent cut in per capita emissions. Similar calculations show the 25 per cent cut to be equivalent to a 42 per cent cut in per capita terms, in both cases assuming a projected population of 24.6 million in 2020.

This 2020 population projection amounts to as much as a 44 per cent increase on the 1990 level, or a 29 per cent increase on the 2000 level. The Bureau of Statistics (ABS) projects that by 2056, Australia's expected resident population (ERP) could be between 31 and 43 million people. These are extraordinarily high figures for a fragile land under increasing stress, as documented for example in Jared Diamond’s chapter on Australia in his book Collapse.

We do need debate about the nexus between population and climate change
Clearly, a lower projected population growth to 2020 and beyond would ease Australia’s burden in meeting a tighter emission target. But what Rudd’s rationale for “15 per cent” ignores is the absence of any explicit population policy that takes into account Australia’s limited “carrying capacity”, especially given climate change that is already “inevitable”.

Yet there is a lack of informed public questioning of Australia’s population goals.

That said, prominent environmentalists such as Ian Lowe and Tim Flannery have long argued the ecological dangers of excessive population growth, not least as one major determinant of unsustainable forms of economic growth.

By contrast, in his comments on the deficiencies of the White Paper, Ross Garnaut says:

Our population grows strongly because, for good reasons, we choose to keep our doors open to people from many lands. Our new citizens need transport, a home with Australian accompaniments and access to employment income - all of which generate greenhouse gas emissions.

Other environmentalists such as George Monbiot also discount population growth as an issue comparable to, and relevant to the excesses of consumerism or “affluenza”.

Indeed, the role of population growth, whether due to natural increase or to immigration, is “difficult” for many reasons - political as well as technical.

With respect to natural population increase, it is generally agreed that improved living standards, personal security and education, and especially the empowerment of women, tend to reduce family sizes. But impacts on population growth will also depend on factors such as longevity and age-specific death rates.

The case of “dangerous” climate change shows that affluent states can impose burdens on the less affluent majority of the world’s population. Along with pricing emissions and a variety of other “complementary” mechanisms and abatement policies, this burden can be lightened by curbing excesses of both per capita consumption and of population growth, especially in the affluent countries.

“Lifeboat earth” and right-wing politics of climate change
Immigration and population movements also encompass controversial aspects of population debate.

On the extreme isolationist and elitist right-wing of environmentalism is Garrett Hardin’s notion of “lifeboat ethics”. This envisages the inhabitants of affluent states, having heedlessly created a global environmental crisis such as “dangerous” climate change, then withdrawing behind their own borders to repel environmental refugees by all means deemed necessary. The image is of a “lifeboat” that will capsize if too many boarders are admitted. The Howard government was not averse to playing on such xenophobic fears, when electoral advantage could be had.

Climate change denialists and the “adaptation only” policy pessimists alike can offer only a business-as-usual scenario, both groups failing to support strong abatement of global greenhouse gas emissions. In such a business-as-usual scenario, the affluent states - having predominantly caused the problem - can use their wealth to adapt to such climate change as impacts on their own regions, at the same time choosing to ignore the consequences for the more vulnerable and less self-reliant rest-of-the-world.

Repelling environmental refugees by force - the lifeboat image - is just one component of such a business-as-usual strategy, albeit one rarely highlighted publicly. The Canadian journalist Gwynne Dyer has documented military establishments around the affluent world more-or-less secretively planning for just such an eventuality.

Whatever their views on population policy, part of the reason that progressive environmentalists push for sufficient action on abatement of global greenhouse gas emissions is precisely so that such a “Hardin” scenario, catastrophic for human civilisation and humane values, will not come about.

Conclusion
The main conclusions are twofold.

First, the Rudd Government’s rejection of the 25 per cent reduction proposed in the Garnaut report is reprehensible. This is especially so in a political sense, with the Government having rejected any notion of blocking with the Greens on the issue, instead openly seeking to negotiate just with the Coalition, a strategy that risks even further dilution of targets, and offers little prospect of dividing the main political adversary.

Second, Rudd’s population gambit has, if inadvertently, highlighted the role of population growth, not least in magnifying greenhouse gas emissions. Like most of its predecessors, the Rudd Government has sought to keep population policy off the agenda. Its rational and balanced discussion should not be inhibited by “elaborate and sophisticated lobbying pressures” such as those identified by Garnaut.

Barry Naughten was a senior economist with ABARE, specialising in technology-based energy systems analysis. Currently he is at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (CAIS), ANU, Canberra.

Original article

The threat of population growth

From The Age:

Population Australia's 'big threat'

Peter Ker
January 24, 2009

PROMINENT Australians have thrown their support behind a controversial new book which argues that population growth is the biggest threat to environmental sustainability in this country.

In a provocative attack on water conservation schemes, such as Melbourne's Target 155, the book Overloading Australia urges Australians to ignore water conservation, forcing politicians to rethink population and immigration policy.

Focusing on perhaps the most taboo aspect of environmental debate, authors Mark O'Connor and William Lines have argued that pro-immigration and "baby bonus" policies are at odds with plans to reduce carbon emissions and secure water supplies.

"The task of simultaneously increasing population and achieving sustainability is impossible," the book argues.

Predicting Australian cities will suffer more congestion, pollution, loss of biodiversity and diminished services, the authors argue there is no point conserving water "until we get restraint in population".

O'Connor said his background was largely in poetry, yet despite his lack of conventional expertise in demography and population studies, his book has struck a chord with prominent Australians and increasingly echoes the views of leading environmentalists.

Former New South Wales premier Bob Carr has agreed to launch the book next week, and has lauded O'Connor's previous books about the perils of unchecked population growth.

The Australian Conservation Foundation has also called for a "substantial reduction" in the nation's skilled migration program in this year's budget.

In its budget submission, the foundation said Australia's population needed to be stabilised at "an ecologically sustainable level".

"Population increase makes it harder for Australia to reduce carbon pollution levels and is placing immense stress on state and regional planning, infrastructure and ecological systems."

The comments will resonate with the Brumby Government, which has presided over an increase in total emissions in recent years, despite improvements in emissions on a per capita basis.

Monash University population expert Dr Bob Birrell, who has read Overloading Australia, said despite the global nature of the emissions problem, national borders still mattered because people tended to adopt the typical emissions profile of the nation they lived in.

"When you add an extra million in a society like ours you are imposing a very considerable additional burden, there is no way of escaping it, and that's the key to understanding why the population issue is so serious in Australia; we live very high on the hog," he said.

Australia will welcome a maximum of 203,500 new migrants this financial year, with skilled migration accounting for 133,500 of those places, and refugees just 13,500.

A spokesman for Immigration Minister Chris Evans said the Rudd Government had started developing a longer-term migration plan that would consider "net overseas migration rates and the impact of demographic changes".

Victoria has swelled by about 1500 people a week in recent years, a rate that Premier John Brumby has described as "about as fast as we want to go".

Original article

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

Migrant accountants fail English test

From the SMH:

OVERSEAS accountants are flocking to Australia under the skilled migration program but few pass the English requirements to work in the sector, leaving labour shortfalls unmet, a study into immigration policy has found.

There are now more overseas accountants gaining visas each year than there are domestic graduates in the field, a study in the upcoming edition of the People And Place quarterly journal has found.

But the occupation remains on the critical skills list because students using Australian accounting courses to gain permanent residency do not find work.

"The main reason is poor English skills," said the director of the Centre for Population & Urban Research at Monash University, Bob Birrell. Of the 9107 foreign accountants granted visas in 2007-08, more than two thirds studied at Australian institutions.

"The fact that such a large majority of overseas student graduates possess poor English indicates that Australian universities are conferring graduate credentials on students who do not have the skills needed to practise their profession," Professor Birrell said.

The study that Professor Birrell wrote with Ernest Healy uses the "abysmal" employment experience of overseas accountants, by far the largest group in the skilled migration program, to illustrate the program's shortcomings.

For example, the accounting firm KPMG said substandard English resulted in less than 1 per cent of former overseas student applicants landing a job in the company's entry level program.

"This experience indicates the potential for pruning the current program without damage to its core objective of filling skills shortages," the paper said.

The number of skilled migrants entering Australia is at a record. The Minister for Immigration, Chris Evans, has said a small cut to the yearly intake of 133,500 was "more likely than not" when numbers for 2009-10 were adjusted in the May budget to factor in the global financial meltdown.

The mismatch between accounting graduates and available jobs exposes a problem that was allowed to brew for a decade, the paper said.

From 1996 to 2007, the Coalition government tied only a small number of new university places to accounting studies. At the same time, universities hungry for the bigger financial returns of full-fee-paying students gave priority to overseas students, it said.

Part of the solution was for the Department of Immigration and Citizenship to raise the English language standard for student visas and demand higher standards of accrediting bodies, the paper said. "DIAC is fully aware of the dire employment situation of migrant accountants and of the role of English language skills in producing this outcome."

Full article

More:

Degrees still lure low-skill migrants

Bernard Lane | January 14, 2009

AUSTRALIA'S misguided trade in selling accounting degrees to migrants seeking permanent residency visas should be tightened up yet again and locals should be trained to fill severe shortages in the profession, says Monash University researcher Bob Birrell.

Dr Birrell, whose earlier work on the visas-for-degrees industry has inspired sharp debate and partial reform, will release this week new, more complete figures showing that more than a third of overseas students who secured visas as Australian-trained accountants had worryingly low English language skills.

"I regard the 2006-07 data as the best indication yet of the standards of Australian universities ... they're nowhere near the standards required by the profession," Dr Birrell told the HES.

In a paper to be published by People and Place journal, he and co-author Ernest Healy use updated figures and a new breakdown of nationality and occupation to show that accountancy as an easy route to permanent residence is especially attractive to the weaker English speakers among mainland Chinese students.

On the English language test known as IELTS, 45 per cent of mainland Chinese given visas as accountants did not manage a score of six (see tables, page 26). The percentage for mainland Chinese awarded visas across all university disciplines was 37 per cent while the figure for all nationalities given visas as accountants was 38 per cent.

Dr Birrell argues that even an IELTS score of six is not good enough for genuine university study while professions that take communication seriously demand a minimum score of seven, a standard adopted by large accounting firms such as KPMG.

Poor English is commonly cited by employers when asked why so few overseas graduates accepted as skilled migrants manage to secure jobs as accountants at a time of chronic shortages.

"The (former overseas) students who have struggled in the boom years are almost certainly going to go to the back of the queue as the economy slows," DrBirrell said.

"(Universities) are going to come under pressure from the students who are looking for permanent residency - that they can actually achieve this result from their heavy investment of time and money."

Dr Birrell pointed to a "wilful neglect" of domestic training of accountants and cited Curtin University of Technology as a dramatic example of an imbalance whereby overseas students greatly outnumbered locals (see tables).

He hoped the Bradley review would lead to more local opportunities in the medium term but urged the federal Government to complete the reform of the visas-for-degrees market started in September 2007 and revisited last December.

Little improvement would be found in the 2007-08 figures given the "very long pipeline" of former overseas students in the system. He said the 2007 and 2008 rule changes meant many overseas students pursuing the accountancy route to permanent residency would take up the soft option of a new professional year, the Skilled Migrants Internship Program, because it did not stipulate any English language requirement.

"What happens if people finish their professional year and (get a visa but) but still don't have level seven (in IELTS), which is quite likely?" he said.

Full article

If the Department of Immigration and Citizenship is aware of the situation, as the authors of the report claim, then why hasn't it acted to rectify the problem? Why does it continue to allow the universities to serve as permanent residency factories* for non-English speaking foreign students? Why has the Department allowed this to continue even though the students in question are virtually unemployable and, thus, no benefit whatsoever to the Australian economy?

* See chapter six of Dr. Peter Wilkinson's book The Howard Legacy (2007) for a detailed look at how Australia's universities have allowed themselves to be exploited as visa factories. As Dr. Wilkinson notes, "the universities market themselves as providing education but they know, and certainly their prospective applicants know, that they are marketing permanent residency visas."

Economic growth needed to employ immigrants?

From the October 2008 SPA Newsletter:

Economic growth needed to employ immigrants

For some time now we have been told that we need immigrants to this country to fill the enormous number of job vacancies left unfilled. However, it seems we have been fed ‘spin’ by the business leaders and economic consultants.

The story line goes that the gowth in immigration from 171,000 in 2007-08 to a forecast 203,000 in 2008-09 is required to support the economy. The benefits to the country have been modelled and mount into the billions of dollars over 20 years. [Note: these "benefits" are dubious as they do not factor in infrastructure and environmental costs incurred by immigration. Even if one ignores these costs, the "benefits" of immigration are trivial in per capita terms.]

Imagine my surprise when listening to an interview by Fran Kelly (FK) with Shane Oliver [chief economist at AMP Capital Investors] the other day, discussing the economy and in particular the impact of the latest interest rate cut by the Reserve Bank and the expected slowdown in the ABS GDP figures for the April-June quarter on employment. Here we have Shane Oliver telling us that now we have to maintain a high level of economic growth (3.5%) to enable the country to provide jobs to employ the large number of immigrants we have coming into the country. Its the ‘smartest’ about face I think I have ever seen.

FK: If growth has slowed further, if we find that out in the National Accounts today, what will that mean for unemployment?

SO: Well, the bottom line is that Australia needs to have (GDP) growth of between 3 to 31/2% each year to absorb the new entrants to the labour force and those new entrants are coming from natural growth in the population and pretty high immigration levels. So if we’ve got (GDP) growth running way below that and through the first half of this year average growth will be something of the order of about 2% if you average the March and June quarters, then that suggests that unemployment will start to rise and in a year’s time I think we’ll see unemployment well above 5%, maybe 51/2% and even though the labour force figures don’t yet show that, all the labour force figures show is a slowdown in employment growth. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence out there with a whole range of companies over the last couple of months announcing layoffs including Holden, Ford, IAG, Qantas, National Australia Bank, and the list goes on, so I think we will see rising unemployment.

(ABC Radio National “Breakfast” with Fran Kelly (FK), 3rd September 2008)

Read full interview

This blind commitment to maintaining high immigration levels irrespective of labour market conditions simply demonstrates how Australia's immigration program has become divorced from serving the needs of Australia and its existing population. It is an example of immigration for immigration's sake.

As Geoffrey Blainey put it, "an immigration system set up originally to serve the nation has been undermined. Now it is the nation that exists to serve the immigrant."