Over the past week or so, we have seen ABC’s Laura Tingle ruthlessly attack Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s announcement that a future Coalition government would modestly cut the permanent migrant intake.
Shortly after Dutton’s announcement, Tingle published an article claiming that “the opposition leader has opened the doors to migrants being blamed not just for housing shortages but for all these other problems, too”.
“The significance of a major political leader playing so divisive a card on our community is a step that shouldn’t go unnoticed, no matter how inured to it we have become over the years in the wake of Pauline Hanson and “boat people” politics”, Tingle bemoaned.
“It is deadly simple, but very dangerous, politics”, she said.
Over the weekend, Tingle told a panel discussion at the Sydney Writers Festival that Australia is a “racist country”.
“We are a racist country, let’s face it. We always have been, and it’s very depressing”, she said.
Tingle accused Peter Dutton of encouraging abuse towards migrants looking to buy or rent property in Australia by suggesting “everything that is going wrong in this country is because of migrants”.
“I had this picture of people rolling up to an auction or to rent a property. And if they look a bit different… he [Dutton] has given them a license to be abused”.
“And any circumstance where people feel they are missing out… To give license like that. I find profoundly depressing. And a terrible prospect for next election”, Tingle said.
Now let’s take a walk down memory lane. It is September 2017 and The Australia Institute’s Richard Denniss is interviewing Laura Tingle on the Lucky Country podcast.
Below is what Laura Tingle had to say about immigration in 2017 (listen from 24.50):
“A particular one [issue] that I have a bee in my bonnet about, because I don’t think we talk about it, we don’t talk about immigration in the way that we used to”.
“While we spend a lot of time and effort on keeping a few people that arrive by boat in the news, the fact that we have several hundred thousand permanent arrivals arriving every year, which is record levels of population growth in Australia and has immense implications for the economy”.
“I think there is a bit of a conspiracy of silence about that, partly because both sides of politics know that population growth is actually a very important economic driver. And the population if it keeps going as it will, will get to the sorts of levels that Kevin Rudd talked about when he talked about Big Australia”.
“Australian are a bit alarmed about that. They don’t feel comfortable about the idea. And it readily runs off the edges into issues about xenophobia and race. About border protection. About a whole range of issues. About infrastructure”.
“My take on it is that both sides of politics think it is too hard an issue. They don’t feel confident to actually be able to run this issue and keep control of it because they saw what happened when Kevin Rudd popped his head up on it”.
In 2017, Tingle also wrote in The AFR that politicians were burying the immigration debate:
“The number of people coming to Australia, who want to have somewhere to live, and a job or a place at one of our learning institutions, has a huge impact on both our rate of economic growth and on the demands for housing and infrastructure”…
“The aversion to talking about the number of people coming back to Australia particularly stems back to Kevin Rudd’s advocacy of a “Big Australia” …
“Since the time of this debate in 2010, the population has already grown from around 22 million to 24 million”.
“The reality is that neither major party knows exactly how to frame a discussion about our population without igniting ugliness from various quarters who might jump in with their own agendas”.
Clearly, Tingle’s sensible 2017 take on immigration—when Australia’s net overseas migration was far lower than today’s—is the polar opposite of her current take, which accuses Australians of racism and Peter Dutton of dog whistling.
Tingle in 2017 lamented the “conspiracy of silence on immigration” and the accusations of “xenophobia and race”.
Yet now that Peter Dutton has broken that conspiracy of silence and proposed modest immigration cuts, Tingle has branded Australians as racist.
What has made Laura Tingle change her tune so aggressively? Could it be because the Coalition has proposed the immigration cuts, not Labor?
Tingle clearly doesn’t want to be viewed as endorsing Peter Dutton’s position on immigration. However, judging by her 2017 comments, she would have if Labor had proposed it.
