Quite amazing to hear them admit most of the popular arguments for high immigration are nonsense, like the skills shortage argument, and the “solves ageing” argument (even if Parkinson says he buys the skills argument).
No one’s in control. Every reason ia fake. We’ve stumbled into the greatest social experiment in Australian history because business groups are rent-extraction-maxxing
If you are pro immigration, I am happy for you. If you prefer non-European immigration that’s your choice.
But if you’re angry because people have started to notice the demographics of their country are rapidly changing, and that there seems to be no reason or mandate for the change, you’re going to have to do better than “3% Chinese immigration in the 19th century so shut up bigot”.
I feel like we’re speed running through the ‘it’s not happening’, meme, with your response halfway between ‘It's a good thing’ and ‘People like you are the problem, actually’.
Australians were nervous about each of the changes in immigration you list above. All of them have turned out perfectly well. I have no arguments with any of the waves of immigration you mention, and like you I have Greek, Italian and Lebanese friends who are great Australians. Perhaps it’s because their families arrived when the rate of immigration and the proportion of non- British immigrants were lower than now.
The original article is not discussing these immigrants. It is talking about the very recent advent of immigration at a rate and non-Anglo proportion far in excess of anything we have seen before.
I disagree with you if you think weekly firebombing of vape shops, shootings in the suburbs, mass murder at Bondi, inflated rents and house prices and weekly processions of bigoted retards waving Palestinian flags is a reasonable price to pay for a couple of middle eastern restaurants and a barber on every street corner.
Weird, I was remembering only this weekend how when I moved to Melbourne in the mid 2000s I came right into the zone famous for its shootings , including at a local park after the kids soccer, all set out loveingly in TV series of the time - good catholic boys plus a Williams or two.
And mass killings at Port Arthur - even more than Bondi, no one was prepared for the idea of nice blonde boy calling by.
The immigration program post WW2 involved over 100,000 people a year each year for more than a decade. In a population rapidly growing but about 8 million at the start. That is equivalent to 300,000 today.
You and I have voted in our representatives, they select the government, it has has an immigration program for decades. That is the basis for action. The numbers go up and down. People who want to be here for what living here means, who in their own way then add and change. I notice you now use British not Anglo Saxon. Even that excludes the Irish.
The big social changes in Australia over my lifetime have come from within - being about what each person can be, not the box others want to put them in. And to the good.
We largely agree. I never used Anglo Saxon. I used Anglo, as a shorthand for Anglosphere, which includes North America, Canada and New Zealand which contribute a large proportion of immigrants to Australia. And I should have included Ireland -presumably where your family came from?
Strange thing is the more traditional people I know are like the Lebanese Egyptian ancestry people next door and the Vietnamese Chinese couple who call us their Australian parents.
Immigration of Catholic and Orthodox people from South and Eastern Europe raised eyebrows in the 50s and 60s precisely because Australia was so white.
As for the racial mix in the North in 1900, there were hardly any people there of any race. Even now, the population of the ACT is almost double that of the NT.
It is not valid to compare immigration under the white Australia policy as an equivalent social experiment to immigration now.
And even that misses the point made in the original post. There seems to be no accountability for the settings of the current system of immigration.
Fair enough, we can look at the expansion of Australia after 1901 (when 6 Colonies were federated into the Commonwealth) as a social experiment.
But let’s not forget that the overwhelming majority of immigrants to Australia have been British. Australians flew the Union Jack until 1954, and only stopped singing God Save the Queen in 1974 - one year after the White Australia policy was fully retired.
It’s one thing to launch a social experiment where overwhelmingly white Christian European immigrants move to a white Christian country in Oceania.
It’s another, entirely different experiment to do whatever’s been happening since 1990.
Do you mean all those wogs and balts post WW2? People like you hated that.
Have you noticed how people mixed up all those backgrounds generation by generation. Fuck I even have some English in my ancestry.
Christian: I was terrified when I first went to public school in the early 1970s that the protestants would get me.
Thing was - no one cared. Religion did not matter, hence why 40% of Australians have none now.
You want Christians: people from Africa and South America more likely to give you that.
And you are quite ignorant of the make up pre 1900 when laws expelled people grom wrong backgrounds. Northern Australia in particular had numerous people of Chinese and Indonesian (to use current terms) backgrounds.
White christians a tiny minority across northern half of the continent in 1900.
Ah you mean just the state of Australia. So you think creating a state in 1901 replacing the several hundred there before it and then dragging in millions from around the world was not a notable social experiment?
“Pezzullo is at pains throughout to emphasise that the immigrant terror threat is limited to a tiny portion of the Muslim migrant community. That may be so. But the question Joe doesn’t ask is: if one population brings in a few hundred men who seek to kill you (and a bunch more who non-violently hate you), and another population doesn’t, why not only bring the latter? Why bring any in at all? What exactly is the benefit we are getting as a country for this risk we are assuming? ”
Great stuff Cameron?
When I was young we had numerous incidents of violence from certain sets of immigrants - tiny proportions thereof. True there was not a big security system at work - ASIO preferred to fuss about anti war protests not Balkans agitators.
Great article. Joe Walker is a left-leaning liberal centrist, kind of like an Australian version of ''The Economist'' or the ''Financial Times.'' But his interview series on immigration was amazing from a right wing populist perspective.
The former head of Australia's Home Affairs Department Mike Pezzullo essentially admitted:
1. Australian anti-discrimination law would not have permitted authorities to deny a visa to future Bondi terrorist Sajid Akram.
2. Once present in Australia, it would have been virtually impossible for authorities to stop the Bondi terrorist attack because the father-son terror cell took steps to not speak outside the family unit.
So essentially you are doomed to endure constant jihadist terrorist attacks forever unless you massively limit immigration from certain demographics with a high proclivity for jihadist terrorism.
The only other solution is to create a totalitarian omnipresent surveillance state in order to play constant whack-a-mole with terrorists.
But this does not seem ideal, because it took the Western world almost one thousand years of historical, political, institutional and cultural development in order to build up a system that protects, nurtures and upholds individual liberty.
We either endure constant risk of jihadist terrorist attacks, accepting this as a regrettable cost of diversity, or destroy the entire edifice of Western liberty solely for the privilege of welcoming people like Sajid Akram into the country as migrants.
The trade off is simply ultimately not worth it.
RELEVANT TRANSCRIPT SECTIONS
PEZZULLO: ''If we could go back to that (student visa) application in 1998, and controlling for bias in terms of hindsight, would you have made a different visa decision? I suspect the answer would be no."
''Knowing that the guy ultimately, many years later, ended up being an assailant at Bondi Beach - would you make a different visa decision? I doubt it. I doubt it. Even if you had ... the digital capability, the data-checking capability that I mentioned earlier - would he have come up? I doubt it.''
....
PEZZULLO: "In a sense, as terrible as the outcome then was — because 15 innocent Jewish Australians were killed — the fact that the security intelligence service of your country says, 'Look, I've had a look at you. If you come up again, we'll have another look at you, but we're not going to tag you, we're not going to follow you, we're not going to be on your device' — that's actually the sign of a free society."
WALKER: "But it then creates that risk."
PEZZULLO: "So if it's just he and dad increasingly saying, 'Look, son, we're not even going to tell mom, to protect mom' — and I think there's a sister — 'let's go out the back and have a discussion,' it's almost impossible to break into that thinking, because there's no communication tail or tell associated with that increasing ideation, that increasing intent.''
Wasn't Akram regularly attending a super radical mosque or something? Like sure the majority of his stuff was inside the family but I don't think he gets as far as he did in Singapore
Yes in Singapore they just would have denatualised and deported Naveed Akram the second they found out he was hanging out with a pro-ISIS jihadi network. And everybody else in the network would have been rolled up too.
It's funny since even in most Muslim nations they'd be way more willing to crack down on singular super-radical mosques. Meanwhile most Western nations are afraid to do anything.
Chat suggests: covid catch up and low departures - which is interesting because it’s not a policy change - but poor management and presumably a poor response from a dynamic policy to an external shock.
That in itself is interesting- because most people would imagine the government is deciding on a number of immigrants. And that policy debates are raging over that number.
But in reality - over the past few years, between 80-90%, and about 90% during the 2022–23 spike — came from temporary or otherwise indirectly controlled categories rather than the capped permanent migration program.
So cutting immigration actually means cutting student visas and temporary visas graduates.
As a recent student, without a doubt international students are worsening the educational experience at universities. Most students can barely speak English and so courses have to be dumbed down, debate can’t happen - is basically a holiday for international students.
Mark Cully said something pretty incredible on the large temporary visa population: “We’ve moved away from being a so-called settlement society, where the people we brought in who came to the country were being welcomed as new members of this society and expected to be kind of participants, active participants in it, and in shaping the country. And now we’ve got these people here on a kind of transactional basis.”
That’s a former chief economist at the Department of Immigration!
The fact that you can write "Australian policy enjoyers", no matter how cheeky or ironic the intended tone, reminds us that Australia is still a blessed country (pick any random European country amd there are no policy enjoyers, certainly none who live there).
Comforting to know you guys are out there, running your own little air-gapped fork of civilization (I know this is not the message of this article at all but you're a patriot so I hope you won't mind the tangent)
Australia is a large empty country with an area double that of India, a population less than Ukraine or Poland, and a TFR of 1.4
The country should be able to accommodate and assimilate people easily.
The housing prices shouldn’t be this high. One can understand high housing prices for dense countries like UK or Japan or India.
A lot of economy is primary industries with limited value addition.
What’s the issue?
(Looking for genuine answers. I know what the far right things about immigrants. And one can understand concerns if there are too many too soon but there seems to be a deeper problem at play)
the interesting part that hasn't been explicitly stated is that Immigration scam is 100% orchestrated and supported by professional managerial class (PMC) in all sectors, government, private corporate, universities, unions ...
It's the bureaucrats who see their jobs dependent and not threatened by immigration who push for it because they see personal cheap labour benefits.
Hey Oz, respectfully, your list of "confessions" doesn't imo accurately capture Martin Parkinson's points. I may guilty of the same, but it's easy to hear what one wants to.
Rather than anything being necessarily wrong, I might just add what I think is important nuance (as an economist who leans pro immigration), which may suffer from the same problem as yours but from the other side:
1. Agree with the underlying point, but don't think "we wouldn't have voted for this" is particularly powerful. Making an ex-post judgement on policies in this way isn't reasonable (and I suspect many policies would fail this test). Would the previous CGT discount have been introduced if we could have known it's distributional effects?
2. Migrant workers put downward pressure on wages in the sectors they work in (e.g. aged care), but their demand for G&S also puts upward pressure in other sectors. Separately, what would be the implications of more expensive aged care, if we didn't have this lump of labour? Perhaps worse services and/or a worse fiscal budget. Seems like a tradeoff. Regarding whether it lowers investment in productivity enhancing tech: yes, in those sectors, but no in others. Even if it did overall lower it across the labour market, this should be balanced against the benefits of their subsidisation of university research.
3. Foreign students do drive up rents, but perhaps they're living in the ugly apartments that NIMBYs claim no one wants to live in. Agree this is a trade-off (which could be partly addressed by increasing the rental allowance); from the recent NG changes, I don't think people care much about higher rents.
4. In a theoretical sense, I agree that wages do and should do a lot of the work. But there is also benefit to getting more aged care workers today, than the case of wages rising slowly to encourage more age care workers. The temporal benefits should be weighed up as well. (It's also hard to imagine much capital deepening in sectors like child care or aged care.)
5. Tough problem to crack without weakening licensing bodies (something I suspect Martin and I would both be in favour of). In medicine, for example, lots of qualified migrant medical consultants (bosses) come to Australia and have to work as residents (2 years out of uni) or registrars (3+). Some don't have perfect English, others do. A flexible system to shortcut their promotion to consultants in some conditions would be an improvement. Martin isn't confessing anything here, just pointing out a serious problem with our system (but one that is really really hard to solve; imagine the storm if we "lowered" the standards of doctors.)
6. Fair, some international students certainly do lower the quality of education for all (I've heard many horror stories from nursing schools). But the trade-off is cheaper education for Australians + subsidised research. If one who was critical of the benefits of uni for all, you might take this trade-off so that we get more PhDs.
Hope this is taken in the constructive spirit it is intended.
I will never understand, in the space of my life span, how Western countries were so easily toppled by insane immigration policies. And the fact it wasn’t isolated to a single continent makes me wonder what the organizing force behind it was. Was it just a cabal of retarded Davos intellectuals selling the rest of the world on the worst idea since communism? Maybe the intersection of greedy capitalist and no border socialists?
Great article - you beat me to it!
Quite amazing to hear them admit most of the popular arguments for high immigration are nonsense, like the skills shortage argument, and the “solves ageing” argument (even if Parkinson says he buys the skills argument).
Incredible isn’t it.
No one’s in control. Every reason ia fake. We’ve stumbled into the greatest social experiment in Australian history because business groups are rent-extraction-maxxing
‘Greatest social experiment’? One that started in 1788, with the mass import of criminals?
People move. That is human history. States are just useful administrative units.
If you are pro immigration, I am happy for you. If you prefer non-European immigration that’s your choice.
But if you’re angry because people have started to notice the demographics of their country are rapidly changing, and that there seems to be no reason or mandate for the change, you’re going to have to do better than “3% Chinese immigration in the 19th century so shut up bigot”.
I feel like we’re speed running through the ‘it’s not happening’, meme, with your response halfway between ‘It's a good thing’ and ‘People like you are the problem, actually’.
Australians were nervous about each of the changes in immigration you list above. All of them have turned out perfectly well. I have no arguments with any of the waves of immigration you mention, and like you I have Greek, Italian and Lebanese friends who are great Australians. Perhaps it’s because their families arrived when the rate of immigration and the proportion of non- British immigrants were lower than now.
The original article is not discussing these immigrants. It is talking about the very recent advent of immigration at a rate and non-Anglo proportion far in excess of anything we have seen before.
I disagree with you if you think weekly firebombing of vape shops, shootings in the suburbs, mass murder at Bondi, inflated rents and house prices and weekly processions of bigoted retards waving Palestinian flags is a reasonable price to pay for a couple of middle eastern restaurants and a barber on every street corner.
That shit is unaustralian.
Weird, I was remembering only this weekend how when I moved to Melbourne in the mid 2000s I came right into the zone famous for its shootings , including at a local park after the kids soccer, all set out loveingly in TV series of the time - good catholic boys plus a Williams or two.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_Australia has a list and stats by year from 1970. Notice how the number bobs up and down a bit but essentially rolls along with a couple of incidents a year. Pity it starts in 1970. the 1960s had its series of Croatian bombings and the like https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/terror-is-an-old-story-even-in-australia-20170608-gwn9o1.html
And mass killings at Port Arthur - even more than Bondi, no one was prepared for the idea of nice blonde boy calling by.
The immigration program post WW2 involved over 100,000 people a year each year for more than a decade. In a population rapidly growing but about 8 million at the start. That is equivalent to 300,000 today.
You and I have voted in our representatives, they select the government, it has has an immigration program for decades. That is the basis for action. The numbers go up and down. People who want to be here for what living here means, who in their own way then add and change. I notice you now use British not Anglo Saxon. Even that excludes the Irish.
The big social changes in Australia over my lifetime have come from within - being about what each person can be, not the box others want to put them in. And to the good.
We largely agree. I never used Anglo Saxon. I used Anglo, as a shorthand for Anglosphere, which includes North America, Canada and New Zealand which contribute a large proportion of immigrants to Australia. And I should have included Ireland -presumably where your family came from?
1788 the start of a massive social experiment. The line that there weren’t many people there not persuasive about claiming low impact.
1850s to 1900 extensive Chinese immigration among others, perhaps 3-4% of population https://www.nma.gov.au/explore/features/harvest-of-endurance/scroll/chinese-gold-miners
1900 exclusion of more Asian immigrants and expulsion of some Pacific Islander populations. Another experiment, one you appear to favour.
Post WW2 major immigration program, in itself an experiement, lots of non UK or Ireland folk.
Heard of multiculturalism? No doubt you dislike it. I think the term a bit quaint - it is about creation a different more variable culture.
1970s policy: all about giving credence to the wogs etc from that post WW2 influx. Resisted and ridiculed.
Where are we now. China born population less than it was in 1961 at 2.5% https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/research-and-statistics/statistics/country-profiles/profiles/peoples-republic-of-china
Those with Chinese heritage is greater, 5.5%?
Strange thing is the more traditional people I know are like the Lebanese Egyptian ancestry people next door and the Vietnamese Chinese couple who call us their Australian parents.
Way more traditional than I am.
https://unsw.press/books/looking-from-the-north/ about north
Immigration of Catholic and Orthodox people from South and Eastern Europe raised eyebrows in the 50s and 60s precisely because Australia was so white.
As for the racial mix in the North in 1900, there were hardly any people there of any race. Even now, the population of the ACT is almost double that of the NT.
It is not valid to compare immigration under the white Australia policy as an equivalent social experiment to immigration now.
And even that misses the point made in the original post. There seems to be no accountability for the settings of the current system of immigration.
Fair enough, we can look at the expansion of Australia after 1901 (when 6 Colonies were federated into the Commonwealth) as a social experiment.
But let’s not forget that the overwhelming majority of immigrants to Australia have been British. Australians flew the Union Jack until 1954, and only stopped singing God Save the Queen in 1974 - one year after the White Australia policy was fully retired.
It’s one thing to launch a social experiment where overwhelmingly white Christian European immigrants move to a white Christian country in Oceania.
It’s another, entirely different experiment to do whatever’s been happening since 1990.
Do you mean all those wogs and balts post WW2? People like you hated that.
Have you noticed how people mixed up all those backgrounds generation by generation. Fuck I even have some English in my ancestry.
Christian: I was terrified when I first went to public school in the early 1970s that the protestants would get me.
Thing was - no one cared. Religion did not matter, hence why 40% of Australians have none now.
You want Christians: people from Africa and South America more likely to give you that.
And you are quite ignorant of the make up pre 1900 when laws expelled people grom wrong backgrounds. Northern Australia in particular had numerous people of Chinese and Indonesian (to use current terms) backgrounds.
White christians a tiny minority across northern half of the continent in 1900.
There was no ‘Australia’ in 1788.
Ah you mean just the state of Australia. So you think creating a state in 1901 replacing the several hundred there before it and then dragging in millions from around the world was not a notable social experiment?
“Pezzullo is at pains throughout to emphasise that the immigrant terror threat is limited to a tiny portion of the Muslim migrant community. That may be so. But the question Joe doesn’t ask is: if one population brings in a few hundred men who seek to kill you (and a bunch more who non-violently hate you), and another population doesn’t, why not only bring the latter? Why bring any in at all? What exactly is the benefit we are getting as a country for this risk we are assuming? ”
Great stuff Cameron?
When I was young we had numerous incidents of violence from certain sets of immigrants - tiny proportions thereof. True there was not a big security system at work - ASIO preferred to fuss about anti war protests not Balkans agitators.
I always knew it wasn't my fault I didn't have a hot Swedish girlfriend -- now I have the proof to back it up. Thanks!
Look at what theyve taken from you
Great article. Joe Walker is a left-leaning liberal centrist, kind of like an Australian version of ''The Economist'' or the ''Financial Times.'' But his interview series on immigration was amazing from a right wing populist perspective.
The former head of Australia's Home Affairs Department Mike Pezzullo essentially admitted:
1. Australian anti-discrimination law would not have permitted authorities to deny a visa to future Bondi terrorist Sajid Akram.
2. Once present in Australia, it would have been virtually impossible for authorities to stop the Bondi terrorist attack because the father-son terror cell took steps to not speak outside the family unit.
So essentially you are doomed to endure constant jihadist terrorist attacks forever unless you massively limit immigration from certain demographics with a high proclivity for jihadist terrorism.
The only other solution is to create a totalitarian omnipresent surveillance state in order to play constant whack-a-mole with terrorists.
But this does not seem ideal, because it took the Western world almost one thousand years of historical, political, institutional and cultural development in order to build up a system that protects, nurtures and upholds individual liberty.
We either endure constant risk of jihadist terrorist attacks, accepting this as a regrettable cost of diversity, or destroy the entire edifice of Western liberty solely for the privilege of welcoming people like Sajid Akram into the country as migrants.
The trade off is simply ultimately not worth it.
RELEVANT TRANSCRIPT SECTIONS
PEZZULLO: ''If we could go back to that (student visa) application in 1998, and controlling for bias in terms of hindsight, would you have made a different visa decision? I suspect the answer would be no."
''Knowing that the guy ultimately, many years later, ended up being an assailant at Bondi Beach - would you make a different visa decision? I doubt it. I doubt it. Even if you had ... the digital capability, the data-checking capability that I mentioned earlier - would he have come up? I doubt it.''
....
PEZZULLO: "In a sense, as terrible as the outcome then was — because 15 innocent Jewish Australians were killed — the fact that the security intelligence service of your country says, 'Look, I've had a look at you. If you come up again, we'll have another look at you, but we're not going to tag you, we're not going to follow you, we're not going to be on your device' — that's actually the sign of a free society."
WALKER: "But it then creates that risk."
PEZZULLO: "So if it's just he and dad increasingly saying, 'Look, son, we're not even going to tell mom, to protect mom' — and I think there's a sister — 'let's go out the back and have a discussion,' it's almost impossible to break into that thinking, because there's no communication tail or tell associated with that increasing ideation, that increasing intent.''
Wasn't Akram regularly attending a super radical mosque or something? Like sure the majority of his stuff was inside the family but I don't think he gets as far as he did in Singapore
Yes in Singapore they just would have denatualised and deported Naveed Akram the second they found out he was hanging out with a pro-ISIS jihadi network. And everybody else in the network would have been rolled up too.
It's funny since even in most Muslim nations they'd be way more willing to crack down on singular super-radical mosques. Meanwhile most Western nations are afraid to do anything.
Yes the Gulf arabs laugh at us
haha i was thinking of writing something like this up, good stuff!
I still have not heard a satisfactory explanation for the ballistic rise in immigration in 22-23?
Chat suggests: covid catch up and low departures - which is interesting because it’s not a policy change - but poor management and presumably a poor response from a dynamic policy to an external shock.
That in itself is interesting- because most people would imagine the government is deciding on a number of immigrants. And that policy debates are raging over that number.
But in reality - over the past few years, between 80-90%, and about 90% during the 2022–23 spike — came from temporary or otherwise indirectly controlled categories rather than the capped permanent migration program.
So cutting immigration actually means cutting student visas and temporary visas graduates.
As a recent student, without a doubt international students are worsening the educational experience at universities. Most students can barely speak English and so courses have to be dumbed down, debate can’t happen - is basically a holiday for international students.
Mark Cully said something pretty incredible on the large temporary visa population: “We’ve moved away from being a so-called settlement society, where the people we brought in who came to the country were being welcomed as new members of this society and expected to be kind of participants, active participants in it, and in shaping the country. And now we’ve got these people here on a kind of transactional basis.”
That’s a former chief economist at the Department of Immigration!
Yes. Incredible. Should have included.
Well said!
The fact that you can write "Australian policy enjoyers", no matter how cheeky or ironic the intended tone, reminds us that Australia is still a blessed country (pick any random European country amd there are no policy enjoyers, certainly none who live there).
Comforting to know you guys are out there, running your own little air-gapped fork of civilization (I know this is not the message of this article at all but you're a patriot so I hope you won't mind the tangent)
Australia is very confusing.
Australia is a large empty country with an area double that of India, a population less than Ukraine or Poland, and a TFR of 1.4
The country should be able to accommodate and assimilate people easily.
The housing prices shouldn’t be this high. One can understand high housing prices for dense countries like UK or Japan or India.
A lot of economy is primary industries with limited value addition.
What’s the issue?
(Looking for genuine answers. I know what the far right things about immigrants. And one can understand concerns if there are too many too soon but there seems to be a deeper problem at play)
the interesting part that hasn't been explicitly stated is that Immigration scam is 100% orchestrated and supported by professional managerial class (PMC) in all sectors, government, private corporate, universities, unions ...
It's the bureaucrats who see their jobs dependent and not threatened by immigration who push for it because they see personal cheap labour benefits.
Hey Oz, respectfully, your list of "confessions" doesn't imo accurately capture Martin Parkinson's points. I may guilty of the same, but it's easy to hear what one wants to.
What did I get wrong?
Rather than anything being necessarily wrong, I might just add what I think is important nuance (as an economist who leans pro immigration), which may suffer from the same problem as yours but from the other side:
1. Agree with the underlying point, but don't think "we wouldn't have voted for this" is particularly powerful. Making an ex-post judgement on policies in this way isn't reasonable (and I suspect many policies would fail this test). Would the previous CGT discount have been introduced if we could have known it's distributional effects?
2. Migrant workers put downward pressure on wages in the sectors they work in (e.g. aged care), but their demand for G&S also puts upward pressure in other sectors. Separately, what would be the implications of more expensive aged care, if we didn't have this lump of labour? Perhaps worse services and/or a worse fiscal budget. Seems like a tradeoff. Regarding whether it lowers investment in productivity enhancing tech: yes, in those sectors, but no in others. Even if it did overall lower it across the labour market, this should be balanced against the benefits of their subsidisation of university research.
3. Foreign students do drive up rents, but perhaps they're living in the ugly apartments that NIMBYs claim no one wants to live in. Agree this is a trade-off (which could be partly addressed by increasing the rental allowance); from the recent NG changes, I don't think people care much about higher rents.
4. In a theoretical sense, I agree that wages do and should do a lot of the work. But there is also benefit to getting more aged care workers today, than the case of wages rising slowly to encourage more age care workers. The temporal benefits should be weighed up as well. (It's also hard to imagine much capital deepening in sectors like child care or aged care.)
5. Tough problem to crack without weakening licensing bodies (something I suspect Martin and I would both be in favour of). In medicine, for example, lots of qualified migrant medical consultants (bosses) come to Australia and have to work as residents (2 years out of uni) or registrars (3+). Some don't have perfect English, others do. A flexible system to shortcut their promotion to consultants in some conditions would be an improvement. Martin isn't confessing anything here, just pointing out a serious problem with our system (but one that is really really hard to solve; imagine the storm if we "lowered" the standards of doctors.)
6. Fair, some international students certainly do lower the quality of education for all (I've heard many horror stories from nursing schools). But the trade-off is cheaper education for Australians + subsidised research. If one who was critical of the benefits of uni for all, you might take this trade-off so that we get more PhDs.
Hope this is taken in the constructive spirit it is intended.
I will never understand, in the space of my life span, how Western countries were so easily toppled by insane immigration policies. And the fact it wasn’t isolated to a single continent makes me wonder what the organizing force behind it was. Was it just a cabal of retarded Davos intellectuals selling the rest of the world on the worst idea since communism? Maybe the intersection of greedy capitalist and no border socialists?