It is shameless how both the Labor and Liberal Party have exploited the refugee issue to distract the voting public away from the fact that both parties when in governmetn have massively pumped up the rate of immigration in recent years. Refugees are not the problem - it is the extreme rate of authorised immigration pushing us to surpass the population growth rates of even some developing nations.

Yes, there is a problem with supporting the aging population but there is no real solution other than to deal with it (to "take the pain") because to try to solve it with mass immigration simply shifts the problem forward 30 years and doubles its size. It is mass immigration that CREATED the demographic problem we have and repeating the mistake will not solve it - it will make it worse.

So, if so-called skilled migrants are as useless to Australia as the Productivity Commission says, it is not hard to imagine the harm to Australia and Australians that other immigrants, without a job to come to and no skills, are wreaking.

It's not as if the information from the Productivity Commission is new: it has been around for ages. Politicians have always known that big immigration is a costly and uncessarry con job, but they still persist.

What land Australian politicians are not selling off to foreigners - particularly foreign Governemnts - they are allowing foreigners to occupy for no good reason.

ericc.

The 'racist' twaddle is a worn out trick nobody even notices these days. Non-white commentators would be better employed looking at the attitudes of their own race, as we have done for a long time, and get themselves out of the colonial era when they might have had reason to resent white presence in their lands. We whites were called upon a long time ago to change our attitudes to people of other races and, in the main, we have done that.

It's long past the time non-whites had a good look at themselves and their attitudes to us - particularly if they want to come here live!

In the meantime, if they want to carry on with such abusive nonsense, stiff cheese; we shouldn't be taking notice of such stupid ignorance. Australia's immigration policy should be what is best for Australia, and at the moment it is not.

Your remarks about the author's hypocrisy on the link between large populations and climate change are very appropriate.

Except for the fact that if people weren't emitting carbon in Australia they'd be emitting it elsewhere. That was the point that Malcolm Turnbull made on immigration and the environment.

The other point is that if you want to protect the environment by reducing immigration, but you're content to increase Australian births then there is a real hypocrisy in your position.

"Non-white commentators would be better employed looking at the attitudes of their own race, as we have done for a long time, and get themselves out of the colonial era when they might have had reason to resent white presence in their lands."

It must bug the living daylights out of you that there are so many intelligent and thoughtful non-white commentators who appear on OLO on a regular basis. Did you stop to think that he is actually commenting on his own country :-) and better yet that he's done so here without any resentment?

This would be the most racist post I've read for a while. If you are accusing those who seek a stable and sustainable population racist, you should at least have a shred of evidence, rather than suggesting ill-educated caucasians need to be saved by more numerate migrants. If you applied your numerousy rather than ideology, you could have worked out that the costs of providing infrastructure and training for a much bigger population are massively greater than those needed to provide for a slightly older population, and far greater than the extra taxes added people provide. We are paying more in interest payments to overseas financiers for our population-fueled housing bubble, than we are paying for pensions and aged care.
In which country is quality of life declining faster: Japan or Norway (the developed countries with the oldest demographic) or Australia (the youngest)? Which country with an over-2% growth rate demonstrates that this is a path to prosperity? You won't find one. When we have a per capita immigration more than twice that of any other developed country, why is it racist to suggest this is too high?

Two points I would like to make:
1. We need political leadership, not short term pandering.
2. We forget how lucky we are to be Australian.

"When push comes to shove, polticians are there to serve the people of Australia" (Leigh)

Yes, they are. But sometimes a bit of leadership, strategy and foresight can be a good thing from our national 'leaders'. One of the key issues in Australian politics, as I see it, is that we've lost the willingness to take (and applaud) short term pain for long term gain. Every issue is now in terms of next week's opinion poll and the next election - how about having the guts to say 'This is unpopular, but a measure we have to have'.

I also can't help seeing how inward looking many of the comments are so far: 'We are not sustainable', 'It is MUCH MUCH better that we strive to stabilise (population)' etc. Population sustainability is a luxury of the developed world, especially if we put up the wall and ignore what's happening around us. The world's population is not stabilising. But it isn’t just ‘their’ problem.

Forget shared humanity, attitudes such as 'you are not Australian, so you are not coming here,' or 'I worked hard to get where I am today' ignores that we were all bloody lucky to be born into the wealth of opportunities of Australia (or allowed to preferentially migrate here) rather than Somalia, or Haiti, or <insert any of 100 other countries here>.

I appreciate that my middle-class, university educated, privileged life doesn't afford me the full perspective of 'real' working class Australia, but I'll take long term unemployment in Australia (did it for nine months a long time ago) over life in Bangladesh or Cambodia, two places I've been lucky enough to visit.

In world terms, Australia is still under-populated and inefficiently distributed. It is going to take political nerve (and dollars) to change current practices but the USA didn't get to its position today by steadfastly sticking to its first few cities.

True leadership is real ‘moving forward’.