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The Forum > Article Comments > An even bigger Australia > Comments

An even bigger Australia : Comments

By Jenny Goldie, published 27/12/2012

In figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) last week net overseas migration last year was 22 per cent higher than the net overseas migration recorded for the previous year.

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It says a great deal about the power of the internet forum that the arguments about Australia's population future have moved not one single inch further forward, even after so many airings. Everyone might as well be talking to themselves.

There are the Ludwigs, who believe that "a stable population" is some kind of economic holy grail, despite the fact that this would inevitably lead to stagnation, both economic and cultural. No amount of evidence will convince them that moderate, managed growth has been a fixture of our past, and will continue to be so in the future, to the benefit of us all.

And there are the xenophobes, who invariably use it as a platform to express their fear of anyone not their own colour or religious leanings - professing at every turn that they are neither bigoted nor racist. They use imagery from the fifties, of Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood", to sustain their fight against people who do not share their nineteen-fifties, white-bread, white-man "Australian" values.

The Ludwigs find these a source of embarrassment, of course, little understanding that they are all part of the same team, deep down. "Go away and leave us alone" is the battle-cry of both factions.

Anyone who has spent any time at all outside Australia understands how unbelievably well-off we are here, and how a programme of isolation from the rest of the world - which is deep-down what the Ludwig/xenophobe team craves - is the worst option of all that is open to us.
Posted by Pericles, Sunday, 30 December 2012 9:43:24 AM
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Helloow Pericles

You are so sooo schitzo!

<< No amount of evidence will convince them that moderate, managed growth has been a fixture of our past, and will continue to be so in the future, to the benefit of us all. >>

Controlled population growth would be just wonderful!

But the sort of growth that you call controlled, ie; our current growth rate, is a million light-years from it.

Real controlled growth would include full control over all the aspects connected to population growth.

If we were to achieve net zero immigration, we would still have a growing population for three or more decades before it stabilised. And hey, even you have said that we can’t keep growing forever!!

I would be more than happy with that level of growth.

That growth rate would presumably be entirely controllable. We would surely be able to start producing real improvements in all infrastructure and services, instead of, as I’ve said a million times before, constantly duplicating everything for ever-more people and suffering declining quality of existing I & S as they become overburdened and stressed out.

So I take it that you have no problem with the closeness of big business to government, and the resultant strong bias towards rapid expansionism (your brand of ‘controlled’ growth) and directly away from a sustainable future?
Posted by Ludwig, Sunday, 30 December 2012 12:41:09 PM
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Thanks for making my point for me, Ludwig.

>>Controlled population growth would be just wonderful!<<

As I have pointed out to you on a number of occasions - a number exactly equal, incidentally, to that which you have completely ignored - we do, in fact, have control over immigration.

Since this is precisely the growth element over which you insist we should exert control...

>>All we need to do is to reduce immigration to net zero or something of that magnitude. That's it in a nutshell!<<

...it is clear that you are reduced to delivering knee-jerk reactions, instead of actually considering a rational response.

Which is exactly the point I made in my previous post: your attitude is so deeply entrenched in your psyche, it is impossible for you to approach the topic in any fashion other than parroting your tired, baseless mantra.

Let's be very clear about this; your position is virtually indistinguishable from that of the bigots. For example, here is drab's sitrep, from a little earlier.

>>Excessive immigration is already ruining our environment, degrading our quality of life, straining our infrastructure, pushing up housing costs, driving down wages, intensifying job competition, eroding our historic national identity and culture, and threatening to transform Australia into an incoherent hodgepodge of conflicting peoples and cultures.<<

You have used every one of these descriptors yourself, with the honourable exception of the incoherent hodgepodge, as a justification to limit immigration.

This places you firmly in the drab camp, who inevitably follow their twisted analysis of immigration's evils with a dissertation on what Australia has "lost" through immigration, in these terms...

>>One can walk around some of the streets in our capital cities and not see a single white face in areas that were overwhelmingly white Australian only a couple of decades ago. If that isn't ethnic cleansing, then what is?<<

Take care, Ludwig. You are that close to being tarred with the same brush.
Posted by Pericles, Sunday, 30 December 2012 2:18:23 PM
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Pericles,

You like to accuse us of being motivated by bigotry, but we can equally claim that the people on your side are motivated by greed. So far as the business elite is concerned, a bigger population means bigger markets, more opportunities for rent seeking via control of essential resources, such as residential land in the cities, and a cheap, compliant work force. According to the 2006 Productivity Commission report into immigration, the per capita benefit is trivial and mostly distributed to the owners of capital and the migrants themselves. The average worker is actually worse off, because high immigration tends to depress wages. See p. 154 and the graphs on p. 155 and p. 147. This doesn't even consider negative effects from such aspects as crowding and congestion, skyrocketing housing costs, and overstretched and crumbling infrastructure and public services. The rich beneficiaries of mass migration are effectively insulated by their wealth from most of these problems,

http://www.pc.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/9438/migrationandpopulation.pdf

While migrants create jobs as well as taking them, immigration is currently running at about 4 times the rate of job creation.

http://www.monash.edu.au/assets/pdf/news/cpur-immigration-overshoot.pdf

The US has had similar high immigration policies to Australia, such as you advocate, since the country was opened up to mass migration in 1965. Between 1921 and 1965, US immigration was then around zero net, and all social classes prospered together. To see the changes since then, stagnant real wages for the majority and massive growth in social inequality, take a look at these graphs (among many others) from the State of Working America report.

http://stateofworkingamerica.org/chart/swa-wages-figure-4v-change-hourly-productivity/

http://stateofworkingamerica.org/chart/swa-wages-figure-4c-change-real-hourly-wages/

http://stateofworkingamerica.org/chart/swa-wages-figure-4-ceo-worker-compensation/

Mass migration is not the only factor involved, of course. Some of the others are discussed in economist Dean Baker's "The End of Loser Liberalism", but it is an important one. Not all jobs can be sent overseas.

Where are those marvelous economic benefits you keep talking about? Living in a leafy suburb as you do, you can hardly lecture the rest of us about sharing with the world's poor. Lead by example.
Posted by Divergence, Sunday, 30 December 2012 5:04:12 PM
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Divergence trots out the Productivity Commission 2006 report so frequently its a blind copy and paste job by now. The terms of ref of the PC only briefly covered the cost and benefits of immigration. He is highly selective in his choice of quotations as both Treasury and Immi are in agreements that targeted immigration, seeking specific skills at specific credential levels across different age levels add long term value to the economy.

If Divergence had read carefully Birrell's report Immigration Overshoot, he would too have discovered that NOM also covers a large proportion of humanitarian, international students and 457 holders. Let me state again that no anti-popuulation advocate here has shown that they understand this.

Divergence would also know that Birrell is strongly against any immigration and is the author of a number of reports which criticise Australia taking international students - although his salary in large part is paid by their fees.

It is also unusual that Ludwig criticises me for 'claptrap' when I have a professional understanding of Australia's labour market and generational strategy. For the last ten years I have written academic papers and spoken publicly on population and higher education and the effects of knowledge transfer.

The real population problem has already happened as six million Boomers were born in Australia between 1945-1964. From about 2020-2040 they will all die. At no time in Australia's history has there been such a mortality rate.

So Ludwig and Divergence's notion of slashing immigration to zero or by any arbitary figure (which they don't understand) is insane. The tax base would fold back to 30 per cent of its current figure which would place the whole pension and health load on to Gen Y and their children. Just for starters labour price inflation would go through the roof forcing up prices across the board.

It's bizarre that people would even attempt to compare Australia's labour market and immigration policies with the US. It shows an ignorance of the fundamentals of how immigration policy is set.

Ludwig and Divergence's 'policies' are laughable and frankly, embarrassing.
Posted by Cheryl, Sunday, 30 December 2012 6:25:04 PM
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Not really, Divergence.

>>Pericles, You like to accuse us of being motivated by bigotry<<

If you looked closely you would have noticed that I was warning Ludwig against bigotry, not accusing him of it. There are plenty of others who fill those shoes quite neatly.

Ah, here's one now...

>>20 and 30 year old muslim youths have been reported as plotting and carrying out terrorism acts in England [the country of their birth!] and training abroad with jihadists and al quaeda. Maybe the Greens should pay a visit to England. Only then will they be able to have a clear picture of the effect Muslims can have on a society.<<

I was merely pointing out to Ludwig that he is using exactly the same basis and rationale as these lovely people for his anti-immigration stance. And it can so easily rub off, I'm afraid.

And you exaggerate, of course.

>>Where are those marvelous economic benefits you keep talking about?<<

Perhaps you can point them out to me?

I do recall remarking upon the consistent rise in our standard of living, but apparently you regard statistics as irrelevant, while scare stories in the Tele and rampant stirring on Today Tonight are truly-rooly true.

>>Living in a leafy suburb as you do, you can hardly lecture the rest of us about sharing with the world's poor. Lead by example.<<

Apart from the fact that my suburb is decidedly non-leafy, being one of the top ten most densely populated parts of Sydney, I'm not sure what this has to do with anything at all. The "you live in a leafy suburb therefore you must be wrong" argument doesn't exactly have legs, you know. Facts are generally considered far more persuasive.
Posted by Pericles, Sunday, 30 December 2012 8:09:47 PM
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