With the flames at Villawood, the ALP immigration policy ignites the nation. The question on most people's minds is "when the hell is the East Timor processing centre, that Juliar promised, going to open.

Swan is trying to soften up the public to a tough budget because of lower than forecast revenues, but the stark fact is that revenues are still 15% higher than in 2007, but government spending is 39% higher.

Some examples of some ALP sacred cows into which money is still being poured, but which are not mentioned as reasons for the budget tightening:

The cost of processing asylum seekers has increased by $1-2bn p.a.
The wasteful stimulus package to rescue the economy in 2008 is still continuing,
The public service has increased by 6% since 2007 without delivering any further services, and there are future plans for an additional layers of bureaucracy for the new health system,
And the costs of the NBN are mounting up even though almost nothing has been delivered.

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Shadow Minister, there’s another enormous cost, which doesn’t get mentioned in this sort of analysis… or I should say; many huge costs, which we could loosely lump together as the cost of absurdly high immigration:

I’m referring to the money being spent on setting immigrants up with everything they need to be normal Australian citizens.

And to the costs of forever increasing the scale of services and infrastructure to cater for ever-more people, without improving them for the existing average citizen, and indeed without stopping a steady decline in the quality of many service and infrastructure sectors.

And to the costs of taking our demand base further and further out of balance with the supply base, in terms of all manner of resources and quality-of-life factors.

While the cost of dealing with asylum seekers has just blown out to the most absurd level, and there are other enormous ongoing highly dubious costs as you have mentioned, they cumulatively are nothing compared to the cost of high immigration.

"I’m referring to the money being spent on setting immigrants up with everything they need to be normal Australian citizens."

What costs Ludwig?

When immigrants are mentioned could we have a definition of which ones, types, method of arrival, race, creed etc?

I might need help to understand the phrase "normal Australian citizens" too.

Jewely,

It's obvious that the term "normal Australian citizens" encompasses anyone whose ancestors arrived on big boats during the nineteenth century (as opposed to those who've arrived in small leaky ones in the last few years)...or anyone who migrates from afar from the "right type of country" with the right economic credentials.

Hi Jewely. Thanks for the response.

<< What costs Ludwig? >>

I’m referring to the costs of all the services and infrastructure that new citizens need in order for them to have a quality of life comparable to the existing citizenry. There are huge costs here, which the tax-payer has to meet, without getting on average any benefit from their expense.

Just about all costs of all services and infrastructure are going into this constant expansion, and into maintenance, with very little going into actual tangible improvements. This is borne out by the fact that transport, education, health, etc, etc, are arguably no better than they were a couple of decades ago, in terms of their contribution to quality of life.

<< When immigrants are mentioned could we have a definition of which ones, types, method of arrival, race, creed etc? >>

No, that’s not relevant to my argument. I’m talking about numbers. Race, ethnicity, religiosity, etc are very minor concerns compared to numbers. And BTW, I’m not being critical of immigrants, only of the politics.

<< I might need help to understand the phrase "normal Australian citizens" too. >>

I simply mean citizens that are living as mainstream Australian citizens, That is; not homeless, not left in a position where they can’t get a job, social security of health benefits, not living as an underclass and not living in an enclave where they have very little contact with or understanding of wider Australian society.