Shane tees off again. Shane is pro the Population Ponzi. Invariably long on a rant and short of rationale or data, Shane has been the less conspicuous but ever-present mainstay of the Ninefax pro-Ponzi stable.
Let us examine his offering……
Migrants – what are they good for? A lot, actually
Senior economics correspondent
April 9, 2024 — 5.54pm
In a month’s time, Treasurer Jim Chalmers will stand up in the House of Representatives at around 7.30pm and utter these words: I move that the Bill be now read a second time.
It will be the starting line for Chalmers’ third budget.
He has the politics right.
He knows it is Chalmers’ last budget before going up for re-election. He knows the threat in a political sense to the position he is defending comes not from Peter Dutton and the idiocracy of the LNP, or even the dystopia of the Greens, but from the unknown of Independents and the palpable sense that Australians have at long last dawned to the idea that their politics has been pawned. It is no longer about them, but ‘interests’, and the ‘interests’ want the Population Ponzi, Margin Mauling and Housing Hostages.
Everyday Australians who have no real interest in this—including observable numbers of recent migrants—represent a real risk to mainstream politics. They may vote independently.
Their concerns and interests are directly related to the phenomena. They live and work in an economy swamped by the Population Ponzi. Their lives are shaped by the gouging enabled by large numbers of migrants, and the impact on corporate revenues and profits. Most of all, their lives are blighted by the sheer extortion of Australian housing, which has been baked in by state and federal politicians from all mainstream sides of politics for more than a generation.
But, Shane is a Junkie arguing in favour of junk. His article is based on the premise that addicts should be thankful for dealers and drugs. His warning is that without the drugs, we will be going cold turkey.
Actual health is the other side of cold turkey, and lots of Australians are already there. For lots of Australians doing the cold turkey, another dealer agent touting the line ‘These’ll make you feel good!’ has downsides as well as upsides.
Shane has missed that the economy may be afloat from where he is viewing things, but that the economy as experienced by individual Australians – in per capita terms – has been submerged for a few years now. Australia has been in a per-capita recession for 2 years, but that is after a decade of it floating face down in the water. That is the economy Australians live in; the one Shane reports on may as well be on the moon, or Alpha Centauri B, for most of them.
Without those migrants, countless small businesses – many which were desperately short of staff just 18 months ago – would have the shutters up.
A Senior Economic Correspondent might ask questions about here. Shane doesn’t. Shane is about Ponzi spruik and not the economy.
As countless lines in countless media pieces have rebutted against countless assertions of staff shortages 18 months ago, those shortages were all about meaningless economic activity inside a bubble made possible by a very small number of Australians engaged in doing something meaningful. They dig things out of the ground, or grow things on top of it, and load it on boats or planes for people somewhere else who pay for it. All the rest Shane is talking about are baubles, or cankers, on the edifice.
We saw plenty of staff shortage headlines from those cankers. Café proprietors who couldn’t get people to serve meals or cakes for the sums they wanted to pay them. Agricultural producers who couldn’t find backpackers to sexually harass or otherwise exploit. Convenience store proprietors who couldn’t ask for kickbacks from fresh migrant employees, and companies finding they could only get staff who wanted to know where their superannuation payments were going. But mainly employers who couldn’t find menial labourers willing to front up for the sums on offer. All invariably in the bauble sector of the economy, all holding off on productivity improvements and looking for cheap labour as a substitute.
Without those migrants, the university sector – one of Australia’s biggest economic advantages – would be slashing staff.
Shane omits any mention of the Tertiary education sector being the biggest single canker. MB has exhaustively chronicled deteriorating pedagogical standards, rising costs, and bloated Chancellories as administration-to-teaching staff ratios fall, not to mention the collapse in the good corporate citizenry and freedom of speech.
Tertiary education is a foundation stone for economic progress and the Population Ponzi has debased it to meaninglessness via corporate people imports.
Chalmers should be celebrating those migrants because at the moment, they are being attacked from the left and the right.
Are the migrants being attacked or are the policymakers and beneficiaries of the migration – harvesting the rest of us – being attacked?
From congestion on the roads and even the demand on water supply, social (and traditional) media is filled with complaints (many of which are unfounded, baseless or misinformed) about the unprecedented surge in migrant numbers that has taken place since the pandemic-era ban on international travel ended.
Let’s consider that unfounded, baseless, or misinformed sentiment for a moment. Let’s also consider those roads and that water usage.
Is congestion an issue? Is water usage an issue? Overrun provision of public services? Are these influenced by population growth? Are these unfounded baseless or misinformed sentiment?
Chief among these gripes is housing. There’s been some amazingly poor analysis written about the intersection of homes and our recent population surge.
Shane says housing is a gripe – he isnt wrong. The vast bulk of the electorate knows it is a national tragedy deforming the lives of future Australians and poorer Australians in the here and now.
Shane doesn’t mention that the average mortgage in Australia in 2024 of north of 600 thousand. Shane doesn’t mention that 600 thousand won’t buy much more than a shoddily built dog box in any major city in Australia and won’t buy conspicuously more a long way from those cities either.
That amazingly poor analysis Shane mentions has been written by people just like him touting the idea that immigration volumes have nothing to do with housing costs.
Through 2022-23, a net 528,000 migrants moved into the country. That’s an amazingly large number of people. Never before have so many people come to Australia in a single 12-month period, and it’s prompted claims that Australia is effectively full.
Some reckon it’s time to shut the borders, while even a few even-handed economists say there has to be a slowdown in this growth.
That 528 thousand new people Shane refers to is about 8 times the average of circa 70 thousand per annum which arrived between 1980 and 2005.
That 528 thousand new people Shane refers to is more than double the average of circa 200 thousand per annum which arrived between 2005 and 2019.
It is about 3 times the level of the Morrison Government’s proposed 160 thousand ‘Immigration cap’.
And has anyone seen any suggestion anywhere to ‘shut the borders’ or has it been to bring immigration volumes back to something reflected in the historical experience and which the economy and society we are part of can actually accommodate?
Much of the analysis is fixated on the raw number of migrants and the raw number of new dwellings being constructed across the country (which has fallen sharply after the pandemic-era burst). What this misses, is where these 528,000 extra people are actually living, despite us having clear data that proves much of this mathematically challenged fearmongering is at best misplaced and at worst, downright malicious.
There is nothing ‘mathematically challenged’ about the number of 528,000. There is nothing mathematically challenged about housing starts having crashed. The chart summing up his dilemma – and that faced by all Australians – is here (even the Guardian gets the issue). The chart tells us that population growth has outrun dwelling approvals every year since 1995 except for a brief Covid interlude. Last year we had 644882 new bums on seats and 162194 places to accommodate them.
Meanwhile back at the ranch Shane visits Scone….
The Australian Bureau of Statistics recently released its annual breakdown on the population of the country down to the suburb and small country town. In the NSW town of Scone, for example, it reckons the population increased by one person in 2023 – from 6039 to 6040.
The bureau calculates population change by births, deaths, internal migration and net overseas migration.
Last year, for example, 68 migrants moved to Scone. In a town of just over 6000 people, that seems like a lot within a 12-month period. At the same time, though, 403 permanent residents also moved into town, while 477 left. There were also seven more births than deaths. All of this means that without migrants, Scone’s total population would have shrunk.
Shane is now at the smoke and mirrors stage of the presentation. The rabbit he pulls out of the hat is Scone – just north of Muswellbrook in the Hunter for those not knowing. Australia doesn’t have an immigration issue because Scone’s population only went up by one is Shane’s line of thinking.
Thanks, matey.
The figures also show those parts of the country taking in the most migrants, and the 10 suburbs that have taken in the largest number of overseas residents over the past year happen to all share one key characteristic – they’re all home to huge numbers of (international) students.
More smoke, more mirrors, more ‘look at this!’, more nothing burger. The share of international students crowding out the locales where they are near university. Well, that will happen. It will happen even more if students are allowed back into the country after being blocked by quarantine laws.
But it does not change the fact that Net Overseas Migration, of which students who tend to stay in the country afterwards and have the right to do so, has grown by more than 500 thousand.
Meanwhile Shane visits Carlton…..
The largest increase in migrants in the past year occurred in the Melbourne inner-city suburb of Carlton where, over 12 months, 3722 net migrants moved to a suburb no more than three drop punts wide.
Carlton also happens to be home to the University of Melbourne.
This week, I walked around the suburb and, despite the influx of new residents, there were no tent cities along Lygon Street. No one was camped out next to the Royal Exhibition Building, which sits on Carlton’s edge (its main threat remains the state government’s failure to properly fund works on the world-heritage listed site).
There’s now 21,376 people living in Carlton. That’s 4000 more than in 2021, but just 300 more than in 2019. What happened between 2019 and 2021? We locked students out of the country, and Carlton’s population shrank sharply. But despite the growth, there are no tent cities popping up because the students are back and living in the “non-private dwellings” that were left vacant for two years.
Your question for the day is ‘How long would a tent last in the grounds of the Exhibition building, in front of the Museum?’
Carlton has 4000 more punters than it did in 2021 but only 300 more than 2019. That is less than 1% or 0.1% of the 500 thousand figure underpinning concern about immigration volumes.
Does Shane really think that they can all afford to live in posh Carlton?
All that is just an entrée to Shane the economics correspondent exploring what happens with incomes growth for the labouring, or low skilled, sectors of the economy when significant numbers of people arrive looking for labouring or low skilled employment opportunities in one of the world’s most expensive countries to live in. Some of those people affected might not just be the same people as affected by rising real estate costs, they might have a vote. The empathy of their members of parliament (as well as their senior bureaucrats, their business leaders, and even their media sources) may come into consideration.
It’s a story repeated across other Australian suburbs in the top 10. In Sydney its Haymarket, Kensington, Kingsford, Ultimo and Macquarie Park. In Melbourne, the students have moved into pre-existing (but vacant) accommodation in the CBD, Clayton and Box Hill.
Combined, these top 10 suburbs took in about 26,000 migrants last year.
Shane rightly identifies that story is being repeated. He doesn’t, however, identify that even if those suburbs are identical to Carlton we are only getting the story on about 9% of the issue.
Of those areas measured by the Bureau, 400 either de-populated or had no population change over the past year, including the Victorian north-east centre of Wangaratta and the western part of the inner Sydney suburb of Strathfield.
The fastest growing suburb was the Rockbank-Mount Cottrell area on Melbourne’s western fringe, where the total population grew by 4300 people in 12 months. Of that, just 219 were migrants. In Sydney’s west, the fastest growing suburb was the Marsden Park-Shanes Park area. Of the 3900 residents, just over 10 per cent were new migrants.
Shane digs up a further 1% of the 500 thousand number of new migrants Australia absorbed last year and notes they could be out in the boondocks of Melbourne or Sydney’s outer west.
That is after identifying that there are 400 locales in Australia which appear not to have grown or have shrunk in the same period. Presumably Strathfield and Wangaratta are traumatised by the experience and seeking counselling.
Apart from the student-heavy suburbs, the fastest growing parts of Australia were swelled by people already in the country.
I hope nobody mentions to Shane that some of those moving about will be migrants from previous years potentially being moved on from their digs after being outbid at rental auctions, or finishing their tertiary studies are now trying to slip into employment.
There are legitimate issues around high population growth and the nation’s ability to deal with them. We need more homes, better rentals and higher density developments built around existing transport infrastructure.
That’s a pretty weak copout after serving up ‘mathematically challenged fearmongering’ and ‘Unfounded baseless or misinformed sentiment’ in the opening stanzas.
But simply arguing one number (population growth) and another (dwelling construction) means we should be installing barbed wire at our airports to stop another migrant is a ludicrous approach.
Has anyone floated the idea of barbed wire? Has anyone said anything other than simply toning down the numbers of migrants and more overtly mapping migrant numbers to the actual economy they are coming to, and the houses, infrastructure and social services they will need to use? Maybe Shane felt the urge to let rip with some ‘Unfounded baseless or misinformed sentiment’.
So Jim Chalmers, use next month’s budget speech to thank migrants and acknowledge that far from being part of the economic problem, they’re actually an essential part of the solution.
This article is pure sophistry in defence of an employer that depends upon the Population Ponzi to stay alive.
As traditional media dies, online category-killer assets like Domain are the last bastion of hope.
The question Shane should be asking is: should we all be paying for it?