By Stephen Saunders
In America, Kamala Harris = word-salad is a national meme. Australia’s Harris of Demography has been at it again, garbling at great length for The Conversation.
Americans exercise certain democratic rights to roast Harris. But Allen, along with Abul Rizvi and Laura Tingle, exists in rarefied space as an immigration whisperer to the elite. There’s little capacity to critique or curtail their pervasive influence. It’s not Allowed.
Allen’s is a wearying log-cabin story. How often have we heard of her weight issues, passel of kids, inspirational rise from homelessness and teenage motherhood?
Demography has gifted Allen “language” to understand life’s “trajectory”.
Especially language to obfuscate and normalise colossal immigration that is overwhelmingly unwanted by (non-elite) Australians and renders homeownership overwhelmingly difficult for all but cashed-up migrants and those with access to the Bank of Mum and Dad.
Somebody had to groom this very modest talent with her childhood-obesity PhD. Who better than ex-ANU demographer Peter McDonald? He squandered his better talent to become proto whisperer for Treasury’s oppressive 21st century population deluge.
Showered with honours, McDonald still misleads. ANU groupie Alan Gamlen spreads McDonald’s nonsense of a post-COVID Australian immigration “shortfall”.
In turn, Allen has won cushy awards, for her population-rhubarb, suiting the agenda of the great majority of our 227 federal members/senators–not ordinary Australians.
Federal ANU allots their celebrity influencer a generous salary. They’ve even elevated her to their governing Council.
In 2018, federal ABC gave Allen a partisan gong as a scholar. Her 2020 book is a “call to action” for fairness and equality. As if.
Consider her latest 2250-word salad at the top-down one-way Conversation. As with dour Tingle, really her favourite topic is herself. The headline begins, Population panic. In paraphrase, You’re A Racist.
Without no apparent irony, the rest of the headline reads: How demography is used for political gain. Come on down, federal ANU demography.
Population, Liz begins grandly, is best understood “in context, and with facts”. The debate has been ill “informed” and overconcerned about population “replacement”.
Liz, Albanese’s 80% of population growth via immigration is near enough to replacement. This isn’t just about “white people” as you predictably assert.
Simply put, population is a “bunch of individuals living in a specific place” and growing via “births minus deaths plus migration”. These intense insights are almost too much to absorb.
Parrots Liz: mega-migration offsets the adverse economic “consequences” of “ageing” population. This must explain why average Australians are so much better off than they were three years ago, 10-20 years ago [sarc/].
“Is the nation’s population growing too slowly, too fast,” waffles our consecrated counsellor, “why are women having too few children? Are there too many migrants?”
Here’s a hint, Liz. This arid continent’s population is growing way too fast. About four times the rate of the US or the OECD bloc. As you celebrate your cloying personhood, Albanese’s immigration onslaught has thrashed the lofty Rudd record by an eye-watering 70%.
Doesn’t take much, warns Liz, to stoke “population fear”. Once again, playing the racist card.
Women shun having children, she continues, due to “housing affordability, gender inequality, financial insecurity and climate change”. So deep, so caring. Ticks the boxes, sidestepping the federal population-rush and the lush tax-breaks for housing.
It is nearly as deep as Treasury population overlords themselves. No irony, they claim fertility can be revived via “policies that encourage a more equal division of household labour, alleviate the financial cost of having children, and promote housing security”.
Now to grapple with the sophisticated “nuances” of permanent versus net migration. Even though net migration drives our massive population growth, the federal government has “little control” over it. A big lie, copying the big fibs of Treasury eminence Martin Parkinson in his dodgy Migration Review for Clare O’Neil.
Cutting permanent migration, says Liz, is unlikely to affect net.
Sure, because permanent migration is a number concocted in Canberra by Home Affairs bean counters, as they ticket-clip the visa-upgrades. As Liz concedes, most of those who go permanent were already camped here.
They knew our crazy 70-plus visa categories (doesn’t “independent expert” Rizvi just love these categories) created stepping stones to abuse the system, and win permanency if so desired.
Invisible to Allen’s worldview, Albanese’s astonishing 1.3 million net migrants over 2022-25 are only casually vetted at partisan Home Affairs, the Migration Agent to top all migration agents.
There might be a few bad apples, replaying global conflicts, spreading sectarian hate. It can’t be helped. Our migrant deluge is so young and productive, it scarcely impacts on accommodation and services, and pushes us closer to that net-zero rainbow.
While loquacious Liz (and the Coalition’s Home Affairs Shadow) are looking over-there, Labor’s been stacking northern Sydney’s Liberal seats with pro-Labor migrant voters.
In western Sydney seats, the current Home Affairs Minister has recently fast-tracked thousands more into citizenship and voting rights. Democracy 101.
Now for another Treasury lie—net migration is reverting to the “recent historical average”.
Sure, if you start off history from 2007. That’s when annual net migration first cracked 200,000, immediately followed by Rudd’s 300,000, closely followed by Albanese’s 500,000. The honest historical average is only about 80,000.
That’s where we should be now. But Allen’s socio-babble is immune to Australia’s dangerously vulnerable environment of droughts, fires, and floods:
“The government says it’s doing more for women and mothers…demographic insights have enabled an effective political sleight of hand…blaming population growth for the housing crisis is another stroke of political mastery”.
This mush is good enough for ANU Pravda. And who needs editors at the elite “academic rigour, journalistic flair” Conversation. What matters is ersatz housing-affordability hero Liz, weeping her government-friendly crocodile-tears:
“The Albanese government has introduced changes to build integrity into the migration system, but NOM [sic] figures were set to decline anyway. It comes down to the way it is calculated.”
Bravo, Liz. A Home Affairs fib, a Treasury fib, with an amuse-bouche of red herring.
Little people, try to understand, NOM means net overseas migration. Technical stuff, but maybe you can begin to grasp it if tutored by top-flight ANU demography:
“What happened with the NOM during COVID closed borders was essentially a calculation reset … taking a longer view of NOM … shows smoother growth than popular media suggests.”
From this word-paella, it’s difficult to derive a palatable English translation. But note the trite and cynical deceit. Federal Labor’s all-time immigration deluge isn’t really happening, people, you just imagined it.
Even at the 2000-word mark, this mock-heroic advocate can still find room in her bigly gender-equity-seeking heart, for cliché after postmodern cliché.
“The language of otherness”, she postures, creates fear in the “population narrative”. For a third time, it seems like we’re racists.
Shock horror, it’s even been suggested that migrants put “pressure” on local jobs and services. Fortunately, Liz stands stoic for “young people” and “enormous diversity”.
Demography, you see, is a “slow moving train” whose power we can harness to “solve our way out of the gigantic mess we’re in”. Granted, recognised demographic techniques are vital. But ANU fake-demography is a veneer for population hucksterism at any cost to socioeconomic equality.
What a joke. Parsing Allen’s tangled paragraphs, she’s just another happy stooge for harsh Treasury neoliberalism—with endless population-growth and falling living-standards.
Her “feminist” credentials are cannily curated—the sort of glop Ita Buttrose could have run at Women’s Weekly. That is, before Ita failed upwards to chair the ABC with influencer Tingle as her allegedly non activist chief political correspondent.
Though Tingle’s now quit the National Press Club presidency, the top three influencers maintain their pervasive currency in the self-satisfied silo of the top 20%.
Even in this Groupthink Australia, however, there exist isolated agencies reanalysing the Huge Australia boondoggle, with a weather eye on citizens’ welfare.
These provide invaluable counterbalance but can exert little here-and-now influence over Australia’s self-destructive and class-ridden population policies. It’s not Allowed.
