Economic steps to get Australia moving are the way out of the immigration impasse, writes National Civic Council president Peter Westmore
Courier Mail Perspectives 6th July 1998
Growing opposition to immigration in Australia is one of the most perplexing aspects of the current political climate and deserves serious attention.
The initial reaction to the rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party - that it was simply a repository for racists - no longer prevails, as many observers now recognise that many of its supporters have legitimate grievances stemming from the headlong rush to globalise the Australian economy.
In the controversy over immigration, some important facts are often overlooked. Since British settlement began in 1788, this country’s development as a nation has depended on the people who have made a new home here. However, the inflow has always depended on economic conditions and job opportunities.
During the great depression of the 1930s, Australia’s migration programme virtually stopped and, in some years, there was a net outflow from the country. Australia’s strategic vulnerability was reinforced during World War II, when it - along with every other country in South East Asia - faced invasion. At the end of that war, it was clear Australia could not survive as a nation with a population of just 7 million people, adjacent to the large and restless nations of Asia.
In the postwar period, there was a consensus which favoured large-scale immigration which, in the past 50 years, has helped increase the population to about 18 million.
That consensus was based on an implicit understanding that:
Since the Whitlam era of the early 1970s, that consensus has been destroyed by abandoning the policy of assimilation in favour of multiculturalism.
While the policy of encouraging the immigrant communities to maintain their cultural traditions was admirable, the policy quickly degenerated into playing one of ethnic favourites in pursuit of the ethnic vote. Hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer’s money were dispensed in ethnic patronage, which reached its low point in the early 1990s when Senator Nick Bolkus was immigration minister.
The polarisation caused by these policies has been exacerbated in some quarters by the perceived shift in migration patterns from Europe to Asia, despite the significant contribution which Asian migrants have made to this country.
Additionally, the policies of economic rationalism imposed by successive governments in the past decade and a half have destroyed job security and devastated the very industries in which large numbers of migrants previously gained employment.
Since the 1980s, about 400,000 jobs have disappeared in the manufacturing industry, visionary infrastructure projects in the tradition of the Snowy Mountain and Ord River schemes are derided by “efficiency experts” and jobs in service industries such as banking, public service and communications have been devastated by technology.
The economic downturn, triggered by the events in Asia in the past year, has merely reinforced the widely held view that job security is a thing of the past.
Ironically, many of those supporting a high immigration rate - such as business groups - also support a job-destroying deregulationist agenda.
The growing opposition to immigration therefore has deep and understandable foundations - and it accompanies a “flight from fertility” which has seen the birth rate fall to below replacement levels. Yet the fact remains that Australia is desperately underpopulated as French demographer Alfred Sauvy observed in 1975:
“With 7.6 million square kilometres at her disposal - of which the whole eastern portion could be cultivated, if need be, at the cost of a little effort - the country is situated, almost teasingly opposite the immense mass of Asia, with its large and growing population. The very lively campaign in Australia in favour of zero population growth begins to look like suicide.”
Australia’s population problem cannot be addressed by a single measure, still less by heaping abuse on those who give voice to popular discontent.
What is required is a comprehensive programme to deal with Australia’s economic plight, together with the social changes needed to restore the consensus in favour of immigration.
Such a programme would kick start Australian industry through a primage on imports, reform to the taxation system to ensure that multinational corporations pay their fair share of tax and the repatriation to Australia of billions of dollars of superannuation investment.
Just as a federal and state governments make low interest loans available to Aborigines and communities suffering the effect of drought and flood, low interest loans should be available generally to small businesses and the rural producers who already suffer under the distortions of the present economic system. A local version of Germany’s highly successful Reconstruction Bank could be used to consolidate and expand these sectors, creating many new jobs.
And national infrastructure programme - of which the Prime Minister’s announced Melbourne-Darwin railway feasibility study is just a halting first step - must be implemented to develop the nation’s economic potential and to reorientate Australia to its growing markets to its north.
If these steps are implemented as part of a national strategy to get Australia moving, the campaign against immigration may well disappear.