Every few months I get approached by some bright-eyed bloke starting a new party or movement in Australia. I have zero influence on anything and have the political instincts of a wombat, but I suspect I’m just public and opinionated enough for some such folks to try on their ideas.
And good on them! I grumble, they act — or at least are trying to.1
It’s no surprise there is considerable political foment afoot. Job growth in this country is led by the government’s firehose of cash poured into fraud-ridden disability schemes. Our grand national productivity round table ends in obsolete jobs given “monumental” pay rises and indefinite protection against technology. Both parties are running on fumes, completely denuded of meaning or vision. The last election had all the gravitas of a washed up jellyfish, delivering a landslide victory to the Steve Bradbury of Prime Ministers.
What could a potent new agenda look like?
I’ve written about the enormous untapped potential of this great nation. But I suspect that has minimal salience among the general populace. Former head of the National Reconstruction Fund
has written about how our credit system is structurally stifling innovation and growth. But this is too wonky for politics.There are three issues that really matter, that really hurt, and that neither party can effectively touch: immigration, energy, and housing.
Why these three issues? No issues are more salient and painful to young Australians and as ignored by both major parties. Why ignored? For good reason: like almost everywhere, Australians are getting older. And older Australians are levered to house prices (include primary residences in the pension assets test!) and the stock market (through their savings and tax-subsidised superannuation accounts). Immigration pumps both: it drives housing demand, fuels consumption, and suppresses wages. Two-thirds of households are home owners, and so no policy to lower prices is going to win a majority, for which both major parties have to play. But it really might win a minority! Which is the whole logic of minority wedge politics.
Energy is no less crucial. Expensive energy makes everything else expensive. We want energy abundance. And we can have it.
Maybe a fourth issue is the NDIS, our good-intentions disability scheme golem that’s terrorising our national budget. This is for the bravest of the brave politicians. A difficult genie to get back into its lamp. What have you got against disabled kids anyway, you monster! Good luck wrenching those freebies from their everyone’s-autistic-now hands.
Immigration
Immigration has been at the heart of the Australian project since 1788. Australian politics in the 2000s was defined by an absolute allergy against illegal immigrants arriving by boat. Australians accepted harsh treatment for a few to stop the many. This harsh-by-design policy worked — it dissuaded others from risking the journey and spared Australia the fate of uncontrolled borders seen in the UK and southern Europe. Australians rallied to then Prime Minister Howard’s eminently sensible statement, “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”.
Unfortunately, he abrogated that decision-making to bureaucrats and universities who in a mix of crazed ideology and profit-maxxing pumped those numbers up.
And we’ve simply lost control:
I had a babysitter the other day, a young woman from Colombia, enjoying the Bondi life. Good for her. She was studying Management & Leadership at one of the godforsaken blood-sucking visa-mills we call tertiary education institutions in this country. It really doesn’t have to be this way. We can just say we want to import Latin American ladies to care for our children and build a home here, if that’s what we want. We don’t need to put them through fake non-universities where they pretend to learn and we pretend to teach.
Considering we have the highest foreign born population in the advanced world (twice the level of the US), Australia’s been pretty great at integrating its immigrants. But ruptures are increasing under the strain. Aside from the effects on housing and infrastructure, we are increasingly importing people who hate this country, who echo the voices of homegrown radicals declaring Australia itself an illegitimate project. We have brewed our own native concoctions of mental illness:
One can hear it in the chants around Gaza. Gaza is not about Gaza. It’s about decolonisation. To them, Israel and Australia are the same disease, just Israel its ugliest sore. But calling for the downfall of Australia only gets traction in university pubs and Victorian barrister chambers, and usually needs to be laundered in via historical revisionism, cultural upheaval (multiculturalism), or institutional vandalism (the Voice). Appropriating dead kids in Gaza to anti-Australianism gives it all a bit more verve.
But even a grisly old cynic like me is still shocked at the cooption of much of the establishment left by the most degenerate and nefarious forces in Australia. So we find Bob Carr, dressed like a member of the Cambridge Five, and Clover Moore as a Louis Vuitton gnome, marching beneath a banner of a gun-toting Ayatollah. Within a fortnight of this march, Iran’s ambassador from Australia was expelled after ASIO revealed Iran behind the firebombings of a Sydney kosher cafe and a Melbourne synagogue (reminder: Islamophobia is the real concern). No doubt it’s all a giant ‘Jewish Lobby’ stitch up.
They can’t feign ignorance. They’re standing with the same crowd who marched on the Opera House on October 9, railing against Jews, days after the massacre of 1,200 Israelis by Hamas — and before any Israeli response.
Immigrant enclaves capturing votes is not new in Australia. As marginal constituencies, they punch above their weight. And politicians, ever pragmatic, are tempted to court them, and to import more. I would never accuse them of doing so.
Energy
Energy is a weird one. Australia is a mineral and energy superpower. NSW and Victoria have some of the largest gas reserves in the world. We could have all the riches of Saudi Arabia. But exploring and drilling for this gas is effectively illegal.
Yes, oldies hungover from 70s environmentalism are partly to blame. But young people are all in on climate jihad too. Sure, if the earth opened up and swallowed Australia whole tomorrow it wouldn’t make one iota difference to climate change, but somehow energy reduction has captured the fevered minds of our political, media, and even technology elites.
But surely there’s a strong message here that can cut through: households and businesses can have much cheaper energy. An energy boom is a win for everyone. We can all be much richer. We just need the will.
A New Political Force?
Australia has had essentially the same two parties in charge for over a century. But smaller parties have been influential, even in my lifetime. The Greens left their mark. The Australian Democrats facilitated the Liberals’ GST reform. Enough of Pauline Hanson seeped into John Howard to tip the national equilibrium on illegal immigration into a uniquely sensible place in the West. The Teals broke away from the male-coded Liberals to form the Platonic ideal of the doctors’ wives party: luxury beliefs all the way down.
What might a new force look like today? Could it displace a major party? More likely, it would channel the discontent the majors smother, force them to face festering sores — and then be co-opted, as has so often happened. Which is still a kind of victory.
As Robert Moses showed in reshaping NYC, you want to be on the side of angels. Too often deranged policies have appropriated the moral high ground — from snuffing out nuclear and energy abundance, to the Voice, endless immigration, and swallow-the-economy disability schemes. Whoever fights for an immigration pause, energy abundance, and affordable housing needs to paint what and who they are fighting for and not just against.
Australians are not a revolutionary people. We are connoisseurs of bureaucracy and administration. Americans broke from Britain in open revolt; we sidled into independence under the safe umbrella of the Commonwealth. They carved out a homeland in a hostile wilderness; for almost two centuries our passage here was subsidised. Australians have not been selected for rebellion, but for welfare. We are not rising up. Besides, thankfully, we’re not yet in proper catastrophe. We’re in Utopia level farce. Nowhere near UK levels of Kafkaesque tragi-comedy.
Yet something is breaking in the Australian compact. Growth in wealth has stalled. Young Australians are locked out of the property market. Our demographics are being irrevocably changed in unprecedented ways we did not choose. Australians are no pushovers. Outsiders too often mistake Australian order and trust for weakness. A new force rumbles in the deep.
PS. Charlie Gearside. If you’re reading this. You’re doing great. Big props. But the new flag thing sucks. Flag changes are just going to get you sucked into the culture war chasm. My two cents only.
Special props to the lion-maned and lion-emblemed John MacGowan (a powerful Scottish inheritance) having a crack at the Tasmanian parliament with a powerful if unsuccessful campaign.
“we are increasingly importing people who hate this country” - the biggest sources of net immigration to Australia are China, India & the Philippines. I work with a lot of immigrants and they think Australia is awesome. So I am calling BS on this one unless you have some data to back these assertions.
There is a valid discussion to have around sustainable levels of immigration in Australia and the infrastructure needed to support this population. But this is not that discussion.
We should just let people pay directly for Australian visas instead of charging them for idiot fake degrees. Completely moronic system that degrades the quality of tertiary education and benefits nobody but a handful of rent-seeking administrators who believe they're entitled to free money. Aussies and Latin Americans are pretty similar - we should encourage the highest-functioning people in South America to come here, have them pay us directly for the privilege and use their money to build more houses so supply can keep pace with demand.