From OZ Conservative:

"Could the Prime Minister lose his own seat in the forthcoming election? There's been much interest in the media in a new poll putting the Prime Minster behind his Labor Party rival.

But why would John Howard be facing this difficulty? The answer, according to an informative SBS article, has much to do with a demographic shift brought about by immigration. One part of the PM's electorate has become Korean, another part is increasingly populated by immigrants from China and Japan.

If it weren't for John Howard's status as PM, it's likely that he would already have lost his seat of Bennelong. As the SBS article explains,

"The characteristic that separates Sydney inner-metropolitan electorates between Labor and Liberal is not income, or even property prices, but race. The dividing line is an ethnic mix of roughly 20 per cent of the population. Any seat with more than 20 per cent of its voters born in non-English speaking countries at the 2006 census has a Labor sitting member today with one exception - Bennelong."

This trend is also obvious in Melbourne. If you were to compare a map showing Labor seats and areas of the highest concentration of migrants there would be a remarkable overlap.

It's interesting that the tendency of migrants to vote Labor is holding true even of East Asians. If any migrants (of non-English speaking background) were to vote Liberal it would be this group. They tend to have higher incomes, to be engaged in business activities and they have been favoured by the Liberals in terms of immigration, employment and education policies.

But it hasn't worked. They don't follow the Anglo commercial class pattern of voting predominantly Liberal.

So is the Liberal Party taking stock of the situation and slowing down immigration to preserve its long-term viability? Not at all. It's doing the very opposite. The current Government has almost doubled immigration over the last ten years to about 180,000 per year.

Why 180,000? Because this is the magic number that business wants."

http://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2007/08/howard-immigration-electoral-suicide.html

How deliciously ironic that the rapacious greed of big business will spell the electoral end for their Liberal political lackeys. Serves the 'conservatives' right.

enjoy yourself, dres, they're also over-populating a dry continent.

Demos

Unlike our Federal policymakers, I'm all too aware of the adverse environmental, social and economic consequences of mass immigration. Too bad nobody in Canberra is listening.

"Too bad nobody in Canberra is listening."

And Pauline is their best asset. With her around, they can paint any objector as a racist and jack up immigration as high as they please. Then all their mates can profit greatly from selling shoddy housing at huge prices, forcing people to pay huge tolls to drive on roads, selling foul tasting desalinated water for $4 per kilolitre or higher, undercutting wages and conditions, etc etc. Oh, and yes, all those wonderful profits come at the expense of all Australians. Immigrants are as much victims as Australian citizens: This is about making a dollar from the degradation of this country. Racism is a convenient smokescreen to keep the dollars rolling in.

If demography is destiny, then it seems that the Liberals have hung themselves. Interestingly, this mirrors the situation in the United States where similar immigration-driven demographic changes are also hollowing out the Republicans' electoral support base. I always thought conservative parties were, at the very least, interested in self-preservation, but it appears the market (big business) does indeed call all the shots.

Fester, do you think a Rudd-Labor Government would be any better? On the one hand, there are some people within the Labor Party who do actually care about the well-being of the average Aussie. Yet, on the other hand, Labor is the largest electoral beneficiary of immigration-driven demographic change. "The government should dissolve the people and elect another one," quipped the communist playwright Bertolt Brecht after the East German riots of 1953. Labor would probably quietly agree.