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.

Watching news footage we appear to see many young-ish, able-bodied males to make up the greater number of so-called boat people. Do they not wish to defend their countries by staying there & help their resistance fighters ? I mean the allies keep sending young men over there & many return in coffins. Would many of the boat people stay & fight for their country if the allies only supplied the machinery to help them rather then have our young people getting killed on their behalf ? Would they not leave if the west provided everything they need to regain control ? I just wondered how many would choose to stay & fight rather than leave their families.
Instead of sending our young people there to risk so much why doesn't the west just pay the young people of those countries to fight their wars ?

The reason we have no money for schools and hospitals is the billions of dollars that we waste on our refugee creation programs. There are 42 million refugees world wide and we have been part of creating
8 1/2 million of them in Iraq and Afganistan alone. Most of our refugees come from these two countries. They would much prefer to stay at home but their homes and livelihood have been destroyed by our very expensive bombs. Then when they seek asylum we lock them in concentration camps for indefinate periods while we pat ourselves on the back for being such humane people. We should hang our heads in shame. Blade

Individual,

We in the West started both "their" wars....

Read Blade's post - you might learn something.

Umm... what costs? Is this like if they are unemployed when they get here? I feel I’m missing out somewhere.

I’m trying to understand the politics. When we talk about numbers can we ignore where the numbers are coming from – their circumstances of departure would impact arrival and any costs associated with them.

So we can only talk in numbers if we know where the numbers originated. Like an immigrant who already speaks English and secured a job before arrival who is paying taxes from day one is hardly like to be in the numbers of those who add to these “huge costs”?

NORMAL AUSTRALIAN CITIZEN

Ludwig:“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.”

OR

Poirot:”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.”

Poor people are not normal? I wonder what ‘they’ do understand of wider Australian society. I think my own judgment would be a little clouded due to OLO participation.

On tonight's news we saw Libyans volunteering to work for the resistance to help oust the present leader(s). What is the main factor why others don't try the same ? Are they simply outnumbered & reject democratic percentage ? It would be useful to get some info on this. I can appreciate a dictatorship making it extremely difficult for some groups to succeed but why do so many choose to just leave & ask others to do the fighting for them & then accuse those fighters of invasion.

The basis of my original post is that Whine Swan is pleading poverty in spite of having the greatest revenue stream ever. The projections might be lower than expected, but the difficulty in creating a surplus is more to do with Labor's lavish spending on failed policies public servants and pork barrelling than a lack of fiscal income.

<< When we talk about numbers can we ignore where the numbers are coming from – their circumstances of departure would impact arrival and any costs associated with them. >>

Jewely, yes there are very different costs associated with immigrants from England and Ethiopia, for example. But the difference in this sort of cost is just completely overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of our immigration intake.

I have strongly argued for years that we should greatly reduce our immigration rate to about net zero and within this, double the refugee component. We would then be accommodating something like 25 000 of the world’s most needy people per annum within a total immigration intake of about 30 000.

The per-capita costs of setting these people up as ‘normal’ Australian citizens would be high, but the overall costs compared to those associated with out current immigration program would be much less…….. and we’d be greatly improving our national humanitarian effort on the world stage. Oh, and we’d be able to stabilise our population and have some hope of living sustainably!

<< Whine Swan is pleading poverty in spite of having the greatest revenue stream ever. >>

Yes, Shadow Minister, it’s absolutely crackers, isn’t it!

How can the whining goose be saying this?? What he’s really saying is that Labor’s economic management is just hopeless. He’s also very strongly implying that all the massive amount of economic growth generated by record-high immigration isn’t helping at all!!

<< …the difficulty in creating a surplus is more to do with Labor's lavish spending on failed policies public servants and pork barrelling than a lack of fiscal income. >>

I’m not sure it is. There is certainly mismanagement here, on a grand scale, but by far the most important thing is surely the ever-rapidly-increasing demand for everything and ever-rapidly-increasing pressure on infrastructure and services, generated by humungus population growth, most of which is due to record-high immigration.

Our daft economists and politicians can only see one side of this – the economic growth or supply side of the equation, and are just about blind to the economic demand side or to the non-existent average per-capita economic growth factor.

In the decades following WWII, there were strong economies of scale associated with immigration. But now the diseconomies of scale far outweigh them.

This absurd locked-into-very-rapid-growth syndrome is by far the worst aspect of Labor’s fiscal mismanagement. And alas, the Libs are just as bad.

I don’t get it Ludwig, I pottered about and read some stuff and although on OLO I see immigrants, boat people, asylum seekers, and refugees being talked about similar to locust invasions I can’t find why they are talked about in this way.

As at 11 March 2011, there were 6819 people in immigration detention, including 4304 in immigration detention on the mainland and 2515 in immigration detention on Christmas Island.

http://www.immi.gov.au/media/publications/research/_pdf/csam-results-2010.pdf
How new migrants fare:
Analysis of the Continuous Survey of Australia’s Migrants

http://www.hreoc.gov.au/human_rights/immigration/asylum_seekers.html
Asylum seekers and refugees

http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/BN/sp/Asylumfacts.htm#_Toc280780944
Asylum seekers and refugees: what are the facts?
“While only about 20 developed nations, including Australia, participate formally in the UNHCR’s refugee resettlement program, the vast majority of asylum seekers and refugees are hosted in developing countries. “

In 2009, Australia received 6170 asylum applications, just 1.6 per cent of the 377 160 applications received across 44 industrialised nations ... Of the 44 nations; Australia was ranked 16th overall and was 21st on a per capita basis.
http://www.asrc.org.au/media/documents/how-we-compare-internationally.pdf

http://news.overseas.com.au/9231814.html
Wednesday 27th of April 2011
Australian Government Says No to Plea for 20,000 Refugees
“The current Humanitarian Program quota translates as 10 refugees for every 10,000 Australians and is not spectacularly generous.”

Well .....wont this be a nice show-down:) Its a game of how, out of the 2&3 worlds will chase the firsts up the tree:) NOW! Where is Paul-en Hanson?...lol....Jokes a side:)

If you dont qualified for mutuality......well....good by.

Dont bring your ill feelings here mate! Apparently we all have work to go to.

LEAP