Former Liberal Leader, John Hewson, last night joined outgoing Race Commissioner, Tim Soutphommasane, in condemning Australian politicians for playing the ‘race card’ on immigration. From The Guardian:
Hewson told the Guardian there had always been elements within Australian politics willing to “play the race card” for a perceived political advantage, and those elements had been emboldened by rising anti-immigration sentiments across the world. Hewson cited the example of Donald Trump exploiting xenophobia in the US the rise of hardline anti-immigration parties in Europe.
“Playing short-term politics with an issue that is so fundamental to our long-term national interest is damaging and dangerous,” he said. “People use it to score political points or to consolidate positions in particular seats, but at what costs in terms of our national coherence? It’s very shortsighted stuff in my view – it should be called out whenever and wherever it occurs.”
Hewson said race was often discussed under the veneer of policy discussion about immigration policy, “a sort of ‘nudge nudge-wink-wink-’, I say ‘immigration’ but you know I’m really talking about ‘race’”.
Hewson said Australia’s multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious polity was its “greatest asset” and must be carefully preserved, rather than divided for political gain.
“It’s divisive, it eats away at the basic social fabric of our community, which is something that must be carefully managed.”
Immigration is now the number one hot button issue in the country and for good reason. It is no longer a complement to the economy, people’s standards of living and society. It is a (the?) key driver of all three as we continue to drive huge inflows of temporary and permanent migration into a demand-depleted and over-supplied economy.
This is creating very obvious winners and losers that our ruthless political class are now vacuuming up on all sides, fracturing the multicultural consensus along the way. On the racist Right by attacking irrelevant but emotive symbols in specific minority groups. While on the Left, refusing to discuss the very real downsides of the mass influx of people, thus leaving the playing field open to the real racists.
The fact is, Australia’s mass immigration ‘Big Australia’ program is having a corrosive effect upon the public. It has clearly outstripped the ability of the labour market to absorb so many immigrants, as evidenced by the slight uptick in the labour underutilisation rate during the one million “jobs boom”. Two-thirds of all new jobs have gone to migrants (see next chart). Wage theft is at epidemic proportions.
Infrastructure is at breaking point, evidenced by rising traffic congestion and overloaded public transportation, hospitals and schools. The outcome is a spiralling infrastructure deficit that will never be dealt with so long as 4,000 migrants a week continue to pile into Australia, concentrating in Sydney and Melbourne.
Then there is the concurrent housing crisis with no end in sight, adversely impacting low-income households the most, especially in our major migrant hotspots of Sydney and Melbourne.
The economic elites love mass immigration because it helps drive down wages growth, boosts profits from expanding markets, and increases real estate demand. Yet bizarrely, those on the Left also support mass immigration, despite its deleterious impacts on the working classes and the natural environment that they purport to represent.
The Left’s usual response is to scream “racism” or “xenophobia” any time that reducing immigration is brought up, along with fabrications about the “need” for supporting the ageing population. This comes despite the five most recent opinion polls all showing overwhelming voter support for lower levels of immigration:
- Australian Population Research Institute: 54% want lower immigration;
- Newspoll: 56% want lower immigration;
- Essential: 54% believe Australia’s population is growing too fast and 64% believe immigration is too high;
- Lowy: 54% of people think the total number of migrants coming to Australia each year is too high; and
- Newspoll: 74% of voters support the Turnbull government’s cut of more than 10% to the annual permanent migrant intake to 163,000 last financial year.
Without representation from the left, the door has been left wide open for extremist elements to gain ascendancy by scapegoating migrants, rather than targeting the real problem of excessive levels of immigration.
Maintaining turbo-charged immigration levels will necessarily make housing affordability worse, dilute workers’ bargaining power, enrich the capital owners and wreck overall liveability.
Delivering those outcomes will jeopardise the multicultural consensus.
