Greens leader Andrew Bandt appeared on Sky News in June where a panellist asked: “Do you welcome the promised drop in migration? Do you think that will help?”.
Adam Bandt bluntly responded: “Migrants aren’t the cause of this crisis. The biggest line item in Labor’s budget for housing is tax breaks to the wealthy and property investors”.
Bandt’s comments follow those of housing spokesman Max Chandler-Mather, who downplayed the impact of record migration on the rental market:
“We just don’t think that migration is a major cause of the housing crisis”.
“In general, I think more people coming to this country is a good thing because we are desperately short of healthcare workers. We’re desperately short of construction workers. We’re desperately short of the people we need to make this country work”.
A few weeks later, Chandler-Mather spoke at the National Press Club, where he was pressed directly about immigration’s impact on the housing market and the environment.
Chandler-Mather played the racism card, refusing to acknowledge the detrimental effects of immigration.
He also argued that limiting net overseas migration to a historically high 300,000 per year implies a “race to the bottom”.
Greens senator and immigration spokesperson, Nick McKim, has continually lobbied to increase immigration.
On Wednesday, McKim addressed parliament, where labelled calls to lower immigration as xenophobic and racist:
It is absolutely obvious to anyone who is paying attention that part of Mr Dutton’s strategy in this campaign is going to be to blame migrants for as many of the challenges facing us here in Australia as he can…
He is going to weaponise Australia’s multicultural communities. He is going to weaponise migration levels to this country…
Of course, the Labor Party are not going to stand and fight proudly against that. In fact, they are going to start appeasing it, and they’ve done that already by cutting back on migration levels into Australia…
We are going to stand up for the amazing contribution that migrants have made, continue to make to this day and will continue to make into the future in this country…
The Greens are here to fight for people. We are here to fight for multiculturalism, and we are here to fight for a fair go for migrants…
This country has got a shameful history of being a racist country, back from the days when it was open and explicit, with the White Australia Policy, through to today—a shameful history of racism…
It is time for a reckoning about our racist history as a country…
The Greens’ own immigration policy would lead to even more immigration:
It’s time for a change – we need an immigration system that puts people first.
Our humanitarian intake should be 50,000 places per year, with special intakes for people from Afghanistan and Ukraine.
Obviously, importing another 30,000 humanitarian migrants every year would exacerbate the lack of public housing:
And what about Australia’s natural environment? The most recent State of the Environment Report expressly highlighted population growth as a major risk to the environment:
\ The Greens were not always staunch supporters of open borders.
As recounted in Green Left Weekly in 1998, fears of being connected with Pauline Hanson’s “racist” and “xenophobic” beliefs prompted the Greens to renounce their stance of “stabilising” Australia’s population and “a zero net migration policy” in favour of opposing immigration cuts.
Nonetheless, former Greens leader Bob Brown called for an immigration cut “to keep Australia’s population sustainable” in 2010:
“We’re at record high immigration and it’s got to be reviewed”, Brown said in 2010.
“I think immigration levels should settle down much lower than they are at the moment, without cutting humanitarian immigration”.
Australia’s annual net overseas migration averaged 190,000 in 2010, which is around one-third of the 550,000 that landed in 2023:
Yet, the modern Greens are vigorously opposing cuts to immigration from current extreme levels.
The reality is that the modern Greens’ staunch support of open borders contradicts the party’s stance on many issues, since cutting immigration would alleviate many of the problems that it portends to care about, including:
- Putting downward pressure on rents;
- Upward pressure on wages;
- Reducing inequality;
- Relieving pressure on the natural environment.
The modern Greens have become so preoccupied with identity politics and virtue signalling that they have become the useful idiots of blood-sucking capitalism, thanks to their fervent support for environmental and worker-destroying mass immigration.
Australia’s population has increased from 18.7 million in 1998 to more than 27 million today. The official projections have Australia’s population swelling to 40.5 million by 2062-63—more than twice the level in 1998 when the Greens abandoned their stable population strategy.
Even so, the modern Greens support increased immigration.
Bring back the real Australian Greens from the 1980s and 1990s.
The current mob is the antithesis of an environmental party.
