From immigration extremist Peter Martin today:
It’s great that we are talking about immigration. But could we talk about immigrants as well?
…To conduct the debate as the ABC did on both Four Corners and Q&A on Monday night, as if it was only about us, leaves out half the picture.
People come here to get a better life, and they generally do. Those who don’t, leave.
If we can lift the living standard of people who would like to come here, without much harming (or even while enriching) our own, why shouldn’t we?
…The Productivity Commission examined every piece of international evidence it could and found only “small (either positive or negative) effects”. Its own Australian modelling found only a “negligible” impact overall, but allowed for the possibility that immigration would make some workers worse off and some better off.
…It’s a future we would be denying would-be migrants, who often come from places far more crowded than Australia. That there are places worse than Australia suggests that Australia isn’t yet populated enough compared with the rest of the world. Anyone who gets out of our cities and looks at our coastline will have to agree.
We’ve a right not to choose this future – one where, with good planning, there’s a chance our cities will work. We’ve a right not to be confident enough in our governments to do it. But only up to a point. The rest of the world has granted us a licence to use this continent on the implicit understanding that we populate it.
OK, so we are getting somewhere now. Not even immigration extremist Peter Martin can any longer deny that it hurts wages (though he tries by also citing this debunked research).
We all know that migrants reap the greatest benefit from mass immigration. Nearly all studies agree on that. That is not the question. What this debate is about is how much sacrifice Australians should make to accommodate those that would like to come. The impacts on the existing population from sustained mass immigration are big and mostly deleterious, that’s why this debate has erupted at all.
We’re not building the extra houses and we won’t. The system is corrupt. And since when was the constant halving of domestic blocks anything but a savage cut to living standards? Housing affordability will be aided by lower immigration and vice versa.
The crush-loading of cities is productivity destructive, highly inconvenient, fiscally regressive and will materially limit out children’s access to essential services that we enjoy today. That was the crystal clear finding of Infrastructure Australia, which projected huge cuts to living standards as Melbourne’s and Sydney’s populations balloon to 7.3 and 7.4 million people respectively by 2046:
As for the stuff about our obligation to take more people then why have a country at all? Martin’s argument implies some ideal world in which geographic areas worldwide need to have an equal redistribution of people managed by the UN regardless of sustainability. I’m sure we’d all like to see world peace and nuclear fission too.
Moreover, if we’re going to mount a moral argument in favour of persistent mass immigration then let’s cut through the bulldust and double the humanitarian intake while stopping the poaching of the developing world’s talent, leaving it stripped of human resources and unable to raise living standards for the vast majority that can’t come here.
Basically, Peter Martin wants higher immigration. This extends to a preparedness to sacrifice the common good for more inflows.
But this personal view should not be confused with good public policy which is obligated to serve Australian well-being, in particular that of its children, before consideration of every human being, everywhere.
If there is any doubt about that then let’s have population plebiscite.
