The charge that the Morrison government is playing up immigration reform to tap into xenophobia — plainly a far more toxic allegation now than it was before last Friday — is false. The collision of population, infrastructure, economic and property development policy that has caused such a mess in Sydney and Melbourne is real enough, whether the roads are full of “Asians with PhDs” as NSW Labor’s Michael Daley claimed, or seventh-generation Australians. But there’s a link between the issues that runs deeper.
As that raging leftie Judith Sloan pointed out today — neatly shredding the glowing coverage elsewhere in The Australian — the government’s fiddling at the margins of permanent migration numbers will do virtually nothing to affect the net overall level of immigration, especially when it has created entirely new classes of visas to allow more workers to come in. “The Coalition government is completely captured by the big Australian lobbyists (think big business, industry associations, universities and some community groups),” Sloan warned, “and won’t do a thing to reduce population growth.”
It’s not quite as blunt as Sloan — a born-again enemy of Big Australia — portrays. But as with its decades-old exploitation of racism and Islamophobia, and as with its enthusiastic support of large corporations, the Coalition has now discovered that a core part of its long-term agenda has turned politically toxic.
The Coalition has long implemented the demands of business to expand the immigration of workers, in order to keep downward pressure on wages and boost demand. The Howard government nearly doubled Australia’s permanent migration intake, particularly via the skilled migration visa intake (which not merely undercut wages, but reduced the need for Australian companies to invest in training), and more than doubled entrants under the 457 visa class, while selling itself as the party of border control.
And as part of its agenda to commercialise and defund a higher education already battered by the Hawke-Keating governments, the Howard government encouraged universities to rely ever more heavily on foreign students, who more than doubled in number over the life of that government. As a result, according to ABS data, in the four years to 2007, the net number of temporary visa holders entering NSW and Victoria almost doubled to over 100,000. Since then, both Labor and the Coalition have been happy to underfund higher education while universities trashed their academic rigour to attract and retain lucrative foreign students. From a negligible $2.5 billion at the turn of the century, higher education exports surged to more than $22 billion in 2017.
As with its support for deregulation and cutting taxes for corporations, the Coalition’s support for a virtual open border for workers and students was exemplary neoliberalism, which views borders as irrational obstacles to the free movement of business inputs and the free operation of markets (or, for corporations lucky enough to be able to do so, regulatory structures to be gamed to minimise costs and maximise profits). And when the Gillard government first broke with the open-door orthodoxy in 2013, Gillard was accused by Tony Abbott — of all people! — of demonising foreigners and dog-whistling (presumably Tony Abbott will now accuse Scott Morrison of the same? No?)
But this disdain for borders, a key marker of national identity, in favour of acknowledging only people’s economic identity (you have no value as a person, or an Australian, only as a worker) ended up backfiring on the neoliberal project (cf. Trump, Brexit) and feeding tribalism and ethnicity-based victimhood, contributing to the current surge in white supremacism and fascism. But the policy consequences were also damaging.
In Australia, the federal government left dealing with the consequences of its open-door policy to state and local governments: they were the ones that had to fund the extra housing, infrastructure and services needed by hundreds of thousands of extra workers and students; they were the ones that had to endure voter anger over congested roads and hospital waiting lists and crowded schools. And when those political structures proved not up to the challenge — NSW Labor and local councils in that state proved hopelessly corrupt — federal leaders did nothing to help clean up a mess of their own making. Some, like Tony Abbott, actively cheered on the growing unaffordability of housing in Sydney that had resulted from the Coalition’s open-door policies.
Now, belatedly, the party that massively increased migration and accused Julia Gillard of racism for restricting 457 visas wants to claim it has got the message. But Sloan is quite correct: as with its attempt to claim it is a government of moderation and love, rather than of race-baiting and Islamophobia, open borders for workers and students are such a core part of the Coalition’s political thinking it can’t see the world any other way.
“The charge that the Morrison government is playing up immigration reform to tap into xenophobia — plainly a far more toxic allegation now than it was before last Friday — is false. ”
See, when you wrote that column about Coalition race-baiting, and I wrote that comment about how a big part of the problem is that media writes one-off pieces about it but then goes back to ignoring it and treating Coalition MPs as honest actors who shouldn’t be doubted?
I wasn’t expecting a shining example quite this soon.
Nice of you to vouch for Morrison to the extent you are prepared to make an unequivocal statement that his motives are pure. My general belief that press gallery journalists are suckers continues.
Yes I was startled by that declaration too. When you have a Government whose very identity has been shaped by race-baiting, at least since Howard and the “children overboard” lie, since “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come,” every word they say about immigration, about multiculturalism, about Aboriginal affairs, needs to be first examined for its racial context before even looking at any other consideration. Race-baiting isn’t a suspicion or an accusation, it’s just what the Coalition parties and their various offshoots do. It’s like speculating on whether our Great and Powerful Allies will “stumble into a war” with, say, Ruritania. War isn’t something they stumble into, it’s what they do.
Well put, BK.
Morrison can be a race-baiter on one issue (asylum seekers) and a non race-baiter on another (over-population).
In fact, we can all pick and choose side on each of these issues.
Population and general immigration have nothing to do with refugees and the humanitarian program.
Refugee numbers (20,000) are firmly capped. And nobody ever says a word about it. These are the most vulnerable citizens of the world and deserve more attention.
457s, students, investment visas etc (160,000 – 250,000- ???,000) can look after themselves very well.
Also:
“The collision of population, infrastructure, economic and property development policy that has caused such a mess in Sydney and Melbourne”
I don’t live in Sydney and can’t comment. I do live in Melbourne and this is just a version of “African Gangs” and “afraid to go out at night” dressed in nicer clothes. What fucking mess?
“But this disdain for borders, a key marker of national identity” – OK, you think that letting immigrants into the country equals a disdain for borders and that we need to close the borders or something to have a national identity? What even is this? Is this some white nationalist pride schtick?
The ‘mess’ is exactly as Bernard characterises (housing affordability, strain on infrastructure (e.g. congestion) and strain on public services such as health and education).
Calls for a better managed/smaller migration program are sensible (to address the ‘mess’).
It’s true that a subset of these calls are rooted in xenophobia and racism, but most calls are from people who are concerned with housing affordability, low wage growth, etc.
Our current permanent migration program of 190,000 people, and 15,000 humanitarian/refugee visa’s should be discussed without conflating changes in planned levels with racism.
For instance, why not migration program of 50,000 and 50,000 refugee/humanitarian?
The charge that the government is playing up immigration reform to tap into xenophobia may well be false but citizens who want a stable population are in instantly labeled racist no matter how carefully they explain their views. I for one don’t care if the population is black brown, brindle or even white as long as it is not increasing. I do care that citizens are Australian first and that the cultural landscape is a moral, liberal (small L) one that applies the minimum restrictions necessary.
Ah Bernard, didn’t take you long to go back to siding with the racist Coalition Government. Your claims regarding migration impacts on infrastructure & property are so ludicrous that I thought you must have been reading off a One Nation pamphlet. Privatisation of national infrastructure (a policy most ruthlessly pursued by the Liberal Party) & exploitation of Negative Gearing/CGT exemptions by property developers is a much bigger factor than immigration in the issues you are pointing to. Arky is right, you’ve lost the plot again.
It is all a consequence of small, unimaginative minds.
Minds focussed on the coin and not the value.
Minds which are unable to project beyond the status quo and current methodologies.
Minds which are closed to any actual observation of that which is actually occuring, unless it supports an established dogma.
Minds which, like those of Political partisans, are inwardly focussed seeing only their deemed personal needs and those of their ‘tribe’ and which cannot visualise the adverse consequences to themselves of their own actions.
Tiny minds.