After using September’s Jobs & Skills Summit as a Trojan Horse to ramp immigration, Stephen Saunders argues immigration minister Claire O’Neil’s “big, gutsy” migration review is another sham with a predetermined outcome of driving immigration to record levels.
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In the blink of an eye, the Home Affairs Minister’s brand new Migration Review takes the population porkies to new levels of distraction and deception. Brava!
To recap, the government has just outdone the Coalition, by decreeing the biggest immigration program of all time. 235,000 in net migration (possibly underestimated) and 195,000 in permanent migration. Inducing 1.4% per annum population growth, ongoing.
The 235,000 is about three times Australia’s historical average. The 1.4% is around three times what sensible OECD nations are doing.
As usual, this humungous net migration serves to plump up population growth and boost “headline” GDP growth. Which serves to make Treasury look good.
As usual, Home Affairs “permanent” migration is quite misleading. Most of its “outcomes” are already camped onshore. Its numerical focus is anything but, principal applicants freshly entering Australia, to inject scarce and highly paid skills.
Reckless bearings for population policy are firmly reset, for the foreseeable future, whether ordinary Australians like it or not. Mostly they don’t.
At such a juncture, one can only admire the sheer chutzpah, of the Minister’s glossy Migration Review, announced 7 November.
Her Terms of Reference take it as read, that mass migration is Always A Good Thing.
“Central to the Australian story…holistic strategy…enrich the economy…complement the skills of Australians…address challenges with [sic] aging population.” A Home Affairs algorithm could write this kind of soul-sapping and brain-eating guff. Probably does.
Brags the Minister herself, her Review will be “big, gutsy” and asking “big, powerful” questions.
Except, not about the one thing that matters, “population size”. That’s “contentious”. Which is code for, politicians [and vested interests] do as they please.
The Minister repeats her persiflage about “sclerotic” visa processing in the global war for “talent”. After the 100-year COVID-19 migration low, the politicians pulled off a near quarter-million net-migration turnaround, in one year. No sclerosis there.
The Minister signals, her Review ought to look-over-there at worthy but tame issues. Like Home Affairs’ ridiculous proliferation of visa categories. And the absurdly low, income threshold for temporary “skilled” workers.
Beltway economic persona Martin Parkinson is Review chief. He’ll be safe as houses, in terms of skirting the predetermined migration and population policy he mustn’t review.
Just to keep things sanitary, he’ll be consulting with the usual “silo” of mass-migration loyalists, the same insider interests who got invites to the Jobs and Skills Summit.
Later on, there will be community consultation. The telephone-box of dissident organisations can have their say. Indeed, even private citizens. Isn’t democracy grand?
Unsurprisingly, fifteen frantic years of our Big Australia racket has captured Home Affairs and corrupted integrity. Has incubated a hot mess of immigration shills, agents, lawyers, ventriloquists, spruikers, and go-betweens. The Immigration Minister himself was one.
What a stroke of luck! Just in the nick of time! Our vividly reforming Home Affairs Minister is the one who can fix it. Her cleansing review can stamp out those horrid visa scams, all Peter Dutton’s fault, and threatening to wreck her pristine migration program.
Seriously now, if you really want integrity, don’t rerun the program at manic levels of overreach. Almost unequalled in the OECD, almost guaranteeing more corruption.
To ice the cake, let’s go back to the Treasurer, overall architect for population policy.
His immigration blitz will import about 1.5 million in net migration by 2030. This will trash housing and rental affordability, flatten wages and boost unemployment, accelerate fire and flood-prone outer-urban development, lock in environmental degradation and species crashes, and torpedo the purported 43% emissions reduction.
Against that, he giveth the workers the placebo, of a wellbeing framework. They’re all the rage in rich OECD nations. Who needs jobs and houses? Or environment and species?
As it happens, a key Labor precedent for this Review is their Population Strategy of 2011. That too deployed a fake consultation that took endless mass migration as the beneficial given. It didn’t have this fresh flim-flam of visa rorts and visa backlogs.
Take a bow, Labor, for opening out a whole new funfair of immigration smoke-and-mirrors. To top this, the next Coalition Government is going to have to try harder.
Stephen Saunders is a former APS public servant and consultant.
