For its 11-and-a-half years, the Howard government tried to use xenophobia for its political advantage while at the same time running a relatively high immigration policy. It was a tricky act, but John Howard was a skillful politician and, whatever one thinks of it in moral terms (and I have a very low opinion), he managed it very well.
Tony Abbott does not have the same set of political skills, and he has to perform the balancing act from opposition, which is intrinsically more difficult. So it was interesting to see how he managed it in a speech on Friday to the Institute of Public Affairs (reported beforehand in The Age).
What it shows is that Abbott is very explicit about riding two horses at once. A large part of the speech is taken up with the usual nonsense about “stop the boats”, but he then segues into an apparently pro-immigration position, saying “the Coalition has always been pro-immigration and pro-immigrant” and boasting that “John Howard rebuilt a consensus in favour of immigration”.
He then calls for an expansion of the 457 visa program (temporary visas for skilled workers), saying that Labor “has progressively made it more difficult” for them, “mostly to accommodate union concerns”, and that they should be “a mainstay of our immigration program.” It should be pointed out, however, that when Labor cut back on skilled immigration in 2009, the opposition’s response was that it should have acted sooner.
The political tradition Abbott comes from, represented most obviously by Bob Santamaria and the National Civic Council, has many sins on its conscience, but racism has generally not been one of them. The DLP supported dismantling the White Australia policy, and in later years Brian Harradine used his influence in the Senate to soften some of the hard edges of Howard’s policies.
So it’s not surprising that at times Abbott has sounded very much like a moderate on immigration, and that trying to toe the Howard line sometimes induced tension — Tony Jones once had to ask him whether he was “playing both good cop and bad cop simultaneously”.
It was in character then for him to say on Friday that “Australians have usually made it easier for immigrants to embrace their new home by appreciating that they would come to terms with life here in their own way and at their own pace. In the meantime, the different accents and different flavours of contemporary Australia have been a strength, not a weakness.” That’s an explicit endorsement of multiculturalism that many of his colleagues would have balked at.
Backing skilled migration in preference to family reunion plays into the narrative of “border control”, the idea being that it’s OK to have immigrants as long as we choose who they are. (Note that the people whose families are being (or not being) reunited don’t count as “we”.)
But in terms of Australia’s actual needs, the emphasis on skilled migration is misguided. Australia is a First World country; in the long run if we have labour shortages they will be mostly for the unskilled.
The idea that the government can pick in advance which immigrants will be useful and which sectors of the economy will need workers assumes a degree of omniscience that we know governments don’t possess.
And all this only makes it more obvious that the war on boat people serves no coherent policy objective. Its only purpose is to appease racist voters so that they will keep quiet about the much larger numbers of immigrants arriving by plane. Again, Abbott is possibly too honest for his own good.
Abbott tells us that “it’s invariably wrong to question newcomers’ commitment to Australia. If they weren’t committed they would not have come”. But there’s surely no group of whom that’s more true than those who risk their lives on small boats to cross the Indian Ocean. Only the politics of the issue forces him to deny that obvious point.
…not to forget the friendly private chat Abbott had with Andrew Bolt to keep up the good work … after the latter was convicted of breach of racial discrimination law amounting to, at the least, lousy journalism, and at worst tearing the multicultural social fabric.
And currently I still haven’t seen Bolt denounce the Norwegian white supremacist for the mass slaughter over there. Not on his extremist rants on Sunday tv show or sydney press columns.
Nor Abbott denounce his mate Bolt for that overt disinterest.
Why is that?
Is this for real? The cognitive dissonance is so garish it must be satire, You are basically saying Tony Abbott is evil because he supports high immigration numbers, precisely as has been Coalition policy for decades, and the cornerstone of the entirety of the Howard government. It does not matter a hill of beans what the Coalition’s policies are on refugees, or anything else. You cannot condemn a party’s immigration policy by condemning its education policies, or paid parental policies, or carbon tax policies. Equally, you cannot condemn an immigration policy by condemning its refugee policy, its foreign aid policy, or policies related to gay whales and their Japanese chasers.
Do you support Abbott’s ‘big’ immigration policy, yes or no?
Lin, Refugees are migrants and there is a contradiction between constantly saying ‘stop the boats’ and then calling for more immigration.
Lin & Jill – whereas 457 visa entrants are, specifically, NOT immigrants in the sense of settling here and becoming citizen. It IS possible but that requires a change of status, the conditions for receiving a 457 state clearly that permanent residence is prohibited.
This might be a good opportunity for DIMIA’s dimwit shill, Sandman Logan to weigh in.
@Lin: Sorry, I’m genuinely puzzled. Where did I say Abbott “is evil because he supports high immigration numbers”, or anything like that? Personally I support more liberal immigration rules (and have said so consistently regardless of who’s in govt), but I wasn’t trying to make that argument here; I was pointing out (a) that Abbott’s refugee stance is purely political, in that given his views on immigration it doesn’t make any sense as policy (I also, of course, think the stance is evil in its own terms, but that’s a question for another day), and (b) that focusing specifically on skilled migrants is the wrong way to go. (And, as AR points out, the 457 visas don’t even guarantee that people will be able to settle here, altho there’s an expectation that a fair number of them will.)