The same policy breakdown that has occurred in other areas of neoliberal policymaking is now occurring on immigration. It’s generating the same response as in other areas. And it has the same causes. Rinse, repeat.
Scott Morrison, who only a matter of months ago was an ardent defender of high immigration, now wants to cut it. The PM says he has heard the complaints of residents of Sydney and Melbourne about congestion and access to services and housing.
Ironically, 38% of people in Sydney and 35% of people in Melbourne were born overseas, so more than a third of this alleged problem are drawbridge migrants whingeing about people who arrived after them.
As people with expertise in immigration, like former senior public servant Abul Rizvi point out, cutting permanent migration by 30,000, as Morrison proposes, isn’t going to do jack when every year we have hundreds of thousands of foreign students crowding into our cities, pushing up demand for housing and using infrastructure and services.
Not that the government would touch the sacred cow of education exports. We’ve traded away a major chunk of the academic quality and intellectual rigour of our higher education system because we prefer to dumb it down to attract foreign students rather than adequately fund it from taxpayer resources (foreign students also make a great resource for exploitation by unscrupulous employers, as we’ve seen time and again).
Business is appalled at the government’s turn against immigration too. After all, immigration increases demand and the supply of labour, enabling business to maintain wage stagnation and undermine unions. But it was appalled about the royal commission, and the bank tax, and the government’s gas policy, and its energy regulation, and every other shift by the government to acknowledge the deep electoral discontent about an economic system that works great for corporations, but poorly for workers. For once, however, the blame rests only partly with business itself. It was business that created the backlash against banks and power companies with its own behaviour — but most of the fault lies with governments, and well beyond decisions made in the immigration and education portfolios.
It was state and local governments that for so long stymied property development in Sydney and Melbourne, preferring to give in to NIMBYism than to display some foresight in permitting higher density housing around established infrastructure and economic opportunities.
It is the Commonwealth which fuels property investment and speculation with the taxpayer-funded “excesses” — Scott Morrison’s own word — of negative gearing, something Joe Hockey urged Parliament to fix when he left it. It is state governments that have failed to properly manage transport infrastructure until recently, but they still refuse to countenance congestion pricing. It was this government that promised a serious study of congestion pricing before abandoning it in fear of what voters might think. It is state governments and territory governments (apart from the ACT) that have resisted a shift from stamp duty to land taxes. It is the Commonwealth that dumped Joe Hockey’s successful asset recycling program that encouraged infrastructure investment by states.
Business, too, is complicit — the community will inevitably find more congestion, higher housing prices and poorer access to services more difficult to stomach if they are receiving none of the benefits of the economic growth that immigration is supposed to provide — like higher real wages. But government is the main culprit.
None of these issues are easy. Immigration isn’t merely about turning a tap of people on and off — it’s an intersection of infrastructure, taxation, development, education, health and public spending policies across all three levels of government, and all three levels have failed in Sydney and Melbourne, to varying degrees, over the last decade.
Instead of trying to fix the failures, and encourage what has worked, Scott Morrison has taken the easy option. Like Commonwealth, state and local politicians of all stripes have taken the easy option before him. We’ve been governed by people who have failed at the challenge of solving difficult but manageable problems, and we still are.
What evidence is there that Australia has lost ‘a major chunk of the academic quality and intellectual rigour of our higher education system’?
https://theconversation.com/australian-unis-should-take-responsibility-for-corrupt-practices-in-international-education-40380
https://www.abc.net.au/4corners/degrees-of-deception-promo/6398568
Universities are now profit- and market-driven entities, and the most profitable business is in foreign students (basically a proxy for purchasing a visa, then PR and citizenship).
That’s before even going into the plethora of dodgy non-Univerisity “education” orgs.
Right-on smithy. Those of us close to university ‘insiders’ hear about the plagiarism scams that no supervisory software program can adequately control. And the horse-trading between well-connected foreign students (whose output has suffered because they’ve spent their parents money at the casino) and those who mark them. Universities have lost control, and the over-paid stuffed shirt (and -blouse) vice-chancellors are revealing whence cometh the ‘vice’ in their titles.
I would have thought that any person evaluating the policies and utterings of our senior politicians, in particular, Scomo, Potato Head and Michaelia Cash would have gathered sufficient evidence in support of this claim.
Not to mention Bill’s zingers.
“It is the Commonwealth that dumped Joe Hockey’s successful asset recycling program that encouraged infrastructure investment by states.”
“Asset recycling” – call it what it is, privatisation – was hardly a successful program. It took publicly owned infrastructure, sold it to big corporates who now “tax” users with tolls and fees or (worse) government subsidies calculated using bizarre formulae and opaque contracts. Then “asset recycling” took the proceeds and used it to fund things like motorways and other infrastructure operated by the private sector under similarly opaque contracts and minimal opportunities for community consultation.
None of this results in cheaper services to the end-user. Given the outrageous rent-seeking by the likes of Transurban, it’s probable that raising the funds through taxation and keeping old and new assets in public hands would have been more effective and transparent.
But neo-liberal “asset recycling” seems like a success to people who haven’t paid attention to the numbers. It’s about as popular with the public as banking.
Not to mention that Asset Recycling must bump into the Law of Diminishing Returns pretty quickly.
You have to be innumerate to say slowing down the tap of migration on the exponential growth of Australia’s population (the fastest growth in the OECD) won’t have an impact. The development industry, big retail business and the lazy economists push for the big Australia while they socialise the costs for infrastructure onto taxpayers and privatise their growing profits derived from population growth.
Thank you, Bernard, on behalf of my migrant self and my fellow migrant travellers. Finallly, someone has hammered the nail into the real reasons for failed infrastructure – failure of government.
Wow. Seems even a thinking person can catch passive neo-liberalism.
Congestion pricing works to reduce congestion by pricing people out (i bet your office cleaner doesn’t live in a CBD residence and isn’t well served by after hours public transport). It works for a few years – the Royal Borough of Chelsea claims 4.5 to 5 years before congestion is back to pre-pricing levels. At best, a respite that hits ordinary folks harder than our wealthy chums.
Replacing stamp duty with a land tax results in people who paid stamp duty paying twice, and a one-off charge incurred at purchase becoming recurrent – any guesses where landlords will pass that on to, while claiming it as a deduction. Again, hits ordinary folks harder than our wealthy comrades.
The problem is partly the tax base, but mostly what the taxes are spent on. Middle class and corporate welfare needs more than a haircut. “But these are the people who create jobs” I hear the tories cry. And if they want to keep making money, they’ll keep creating jobs. Higher taxes don’t seem to have hurt they quality of life in Scandinavia. Mind you, they invest their royalties instead of using them to subsidise the rich.
Replacing Stamp Duty with Land Tax would have to be phased in over several years.
People buying a property after the Land Tax came in would have to start paying it immediately, but won’t be slugged Land Tax.
People who bought their property prior to the Land Tax will not have to pay the tax until the amount that would have been paid is equivalent to the Stamp Duty that was paid.
I believe this is a process currently happening in the ACT.
btw, most (all?) states have Land Tax, but the primary residence is usually exempt.
Wayne… the thing we currently refer-to as ‘land tax’ is not the style of Land Tax the nation really needs (but probably will never get due to the strangle-hold of the big-end of town).
These wealthy people are not our “chums”. They are our enemies. If you don’t believe this think about our origins, think about our constitution, and then read the Powel Memorandum which is the blue-print for the oppression of the working classes and middle class by the rich one percent.
Here is a link:
https://research.greenpeaceusa.org/?a=download&d=5971
This memo was written as a consequence of the “excess of democracy” that arose when the poor of America were being sent off to war in Vietnam to kill Vietnamese peasants in the interest of US foreign, policy rose up against the ruling class of the US.
And where was Australia? All the way with LBJ.
And where will we be when the US declares war on Iran and/or China? I’m not sure what Trump rhymes with, but I’m sure our industry of propaganda, the media, will come up with some inane chant. Perhaps something like “We will Trump the Chongs” or something equally grotesque.
And remember we are still in Afghanistan and we’ve been there a lot longer than the USSR. I had a bet when we went in that we would beat them and I cashed in nicely. All proceeds went to the Armed Services benevolent fund as they need it more than I do.
The fact that we are still sending our troops there is disgraceful. We are party to the crime of armed invasion, a crime that Robert Jackson the US advocate for the prosecution of the Nazis ruled as a crime at the pinnacle of criminality.
We should be ashamed. I know I am.
The rich are the people who do this stuff.
I certainly do not consider them “chums”