Senator-elect One Nation’s Pauline Hanson dominated news headlines yesterday after she warned of “terrorism on our streets” and suburbs “swamped by Asians”, prompting righteous indignation from all manner of MSM commentators. The below extract from The Canberra Times captures some of the shenanigans:
At a fiery press conference in Brisbane on Monday, Ms Hanson claimed the major parties should respect the large number of votes One Nation pulled, and urged a return to an Australia “where we as a nation had a right to have an opinion and have a say”.
Asked about her maiden speech in 1996 when she said Australia was at risk of being “swamped by Asians”, the former fish-and-chip shop owner repeated the claim.“You go and ask a lot of people in Sydney, at Hurstville or some of the other suburbs. They feel they have been swamped by Asians and, regardless of that now, a lot of Australians feel that Asians are buying up prime agricultural land, housing,” she said.
“You ask people in Melbourne how they feel about it as well”…
Ms Hanson said on Monday: “We are a Christian country and that’s what I’m saying … [former Liberal prime minister] John Howard said we have a right to say who comes into our country and I’m saying exactly the same.”
My simple advice to Ms Hanson is that if she wants to be taken seriously in the immigration debate, then she must dump the racial overture and instead focus on the level of immigration and why it is too high.
The fact that many of us in major cities are stuck in traffic, cannot get a seat on the train, are experiencing crowded hospitals and schools, and cannot afford a home has little to do with race, but rather a high immigration intake that has overwhelmed our cities’ ability to cope with the influx. Worse, the plan from all sides of politics – the Coalition, Labor and the Greens – is to continue the policy of high immigration without the commensurate investment to cope with the influx.
Ms Hanson should also highlight that the system surrounding so-called skilled and student visas has been corrupted, with widespread rorting and fraud revealed by the recent joint ABC-Fairfax investigation (see Australia’s hidden people smuggling scandal). Again, rather than focusing on race, Ms Hanson should argue to restore integrity to Australia’s visa system so that it is not overtaken by “crooks and criminals”.
More broadly, Ms Hanson should highlight that for a major commodity exporter like Australia, which pays its way in the world by selling-off its fixed endowment of resources, ongoing high immigration can be self-defeating from an economic standpoint. That is, continually adding more people to the population year after year means less resources per capita. It also means that Australia must sell-off its fixed assets quicker just to maintain a constant standard of living (other things equal).
Again, none of this has anything to do with race – i.e. where the migrants come from – but rather that the overall immigration intake is too high and has overwhelmed the capacity of the economy and infrastructure to absorb them, eroding individuals’ living standards in the process.
There has also been no proper debate within the community about the appropriate level of immigration and no political mandate for pursuing a “Big Australia”.
Without consultation, the Howard Government dramatically raised the immigration intake while deflecting the electorate’s attention to “boat people”. John Howard scapegoated refugees to give the impression that he was stemming the migrant inflow while proceeding in secret with his ‘Big Australia’ plan – performing a classic political ‘bait-and-switch’. And the Rudd/Gillard Governments and the Abbott/Turnbull Governments have continued the subterfuge.
We should not forget that an Essential Research opinion poll published in May revealed that the overwhelming majority of Australians (59%) believed “the level of immigration into Australia over the last ten years has been too high”, more than double the 28% of Australians that disagreed with that statement.
Moreover, under current policy, Australia is on track to double its population by 2050 to more than 40 million people – something most Australians oppose. Again, this comes amid virtually no discussion nor mandate for this dramatic change, nor any plan on how to cope with this growth.
As long as Ms Hanson plays the “race card”, she will be rightly ridiculed and has already lost the debate.
Population policy is far too important an issue to be segregated into pro- and anti-immigration corners based upon views about race and cultural supremacy. Instead, the issue needs to be debated rationally and based upon whether or not immigration is benefiting the living standards of the existing population
