Immigration is a serious issue and has to be managed properly

Dear ,

You may have attended one of the March for Australia rallies last weekend. Or, like me, you may have consciously decided to stay away. Others will have been indifferent.

This email is advice for you, whichever category you might fit, presumptuous as that might be.

The rallies were labelled anti-immigration, and even neo-Nazi, but the Channel Nine Sydney footage told a different story with fairly average looking Australians complaining about the stress on housing, services and infrastructure from the rapid increase in immigration.

As one said, “Love migration, OK. I’m from a family of immigrants as well. The point is how many do you bring into the country? Where do you house them?”

Things were different in Melbourne, where Bec Freedom  who seems to have been the originator of the marches, was chuffed that Thomas Sewell, leader of the Nazi National Socialist Networks, spoke at the rally, because, letting Nazis speak is apparently a testament to free speech.

Brisbane was different again, and I guess so were Adelaide and Perth, but there’s only so much research I want to do into events that were obviously run by people on the fringe of politics and pretty ineffective, even counterproductive.

When I first heard about the marches it was via a website that did not list the organisers or sponsors, or really anything much else about the events. Then I heard an organiser, probably Bec Freedom, being interviewed, but refusing to give her name.

If you want support you need to be transparent, or have an established reputation, so I was with conservative and libertarian influencers like Topher Field and Joel Jammal – don’t attend these marches, no matter how important you think immigration is as an issue, there is a high risk the marches are either a front for unsavoury forces, or so amateur and fringe they might as well be.

Despite all this the marches attracted tens of thousands, most of whom were mainstream Aussies – mostly European, but very mainstream, and the sort for whom a footy grand final was probably the only time they’d been part of a crowd this large.

So this issue has got legs. And it should have.

Our immigration intake is so large that with the exception of Luxembourg (which is a special case), Australia has the highest immigration rate in the OECD. For each of the last few years we have imported a Tasmania’s worth of new residents at the same time as we are not building enough houses for those who live here already.

Economically, without the immigration rate of 1.6% per annum, growth in GDP of the last twelve months which was just 1.8%, would collapse to 0.2%, with per capita growth negative.

The housing crisis is compounded by the immigration rate which is added to competition for resources from the attempted energy transition, as well as from the need to supply infrastructure like roads, water, sewerage, schools, police stations, hospitals etc for all these new Australians. In Queensland this is about to be made worse by the Olympics.  

If Peter Dutton had run on immigration at the last election we would be looking at an entirely different parliament now. We were ready to run a campaign on it, and I’m sure we wouldn’t have been the only ones, but there is no point when none of the major parties is prepared to confront the issue.

I’m advised Peter pulled back, after starting off in that direction, for fear it might alienate migrant voters. It might have, but it would have yielded many more votes than were lost, and would also have been good policy.

Our polling showed that immigration itself was important, but not top-of-mind. Top-of-mind was cost-of-living, followed by things like rent and home affordability. But immigration had links to those issues.

And immigration had one thing going for it that those other issues didn’t – it was completely under Albanese’s control and clearly making things worse. Combining immigration with cost-of-living and housing offered an easy-to-understand explanation of why things were deteriorating, as well as a vector to sheet the blame home to the government.

Immigration hasn’t gone away as an issue, but as these demonstrations show, it is in danger of being marginalized and becoming an issue that cannot be discussed.

The government’s outrage at “racism” has been selective. Government members like Ed Husic were part of the March for Palestine two weekends ago. This march included people chanting anti-Semitic slogans with some of them carrying Hamas flags, and one holding a portrait just behind Husic, of Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei.

It might also be relevant to the tone of that march that Mein Kampf is the sixth most popular book in the Palestinian territories.

So one could conclude that there were nasty neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic elements in both parades. That there is only one the government demonises, demonstrates that it is not fringe, terrorist or racist elements that really concerns them, but the preservation of their own immigration program.

Why are they so attached to high rates of immigration?

The most charitable view would be that it is a form of hospitality and charity – we lead such a good life in Australia that we should be prepared to share it. That would explain why it seems to be the preserve of mostly comfortable middle-class left-wing voters.

Then there is the penance for Europeans having colonised the land. In some illogical way, original dispossession is made less worse by bringing in yet more settlers.

Added to that there is the cultural self-loathing that characterizes the left. The “other” is always better. Superior as our standard of life is to that of most other people, and the prime reason so many want to come here, it is said other cultures have “so much to teach us”.

We’ve had over 50 years of the inculcation throughout political discourse , of multiculturalism, an idea which envelopes many of these themes. Rather than understanding our culture as pluralistic, a manifestation of freedom of thought, speech and association centred on Anglo-Celtic antecedents, our culture is said to be just one amongst many.

In its most benign form this theory says there is an Australian culture, but it has no special claim to be conserved or affirmed. Less benign is that Australia really has a culture that is in some way an average of all the cultures that have settled here, plus indigenous culture. Or that indigenous culture has primacy, and all the rest are equally inferior.

Celebrating Australia’s “multicultural society" is a reflex phrase for people on all sides of the political debate wanting to plug a gap in a sentence, and when they do they import these concepts whether they mean to or not.

So we have been rhetorically primed to accept high rates of indiscriminate immigration.

Then there are the economic “benefits” immigration brings, particularly for a government that is bad at managing the economy. Not that migrants make an economy grow faster, but that having a high immigration rate disguises the fact that per capita incomes are stagnating or going backwards.

If I mention the term “great replacement” I will be branded a white supremacist, so I’ll go to Bertolt Brecht for the last reason they are attached to high immigration. In his poem “The Solution” he satirizes the East German government who in 1953 quashed a widespread revolt saying “the people had let the government down”. Brecht quipped that in that case maybe the government should “…dissolve the people/And elect another”.

There’s no doubt this is part of the government’s game. Many of the most numerous immigrant groups tend to vote Labor so that helps to gerrymander elections. And it helps to keep the votes of those recent immigrants already here if you allow more of their friends and family over. Why else would we have accepted 1300 refugees from Gaza without proper vetting after October 7? And why would Tony Burke have been so keen to have citizenship ceremonies just before the last election to naturalise 12,000 to 15,000 new voters? And now we have the return of the Isis brides.

So my advice is this.

Immigration is a pressing issue and an important one on so many levels. It cannot be left to amateurs, incompetents and bad actors. Members of the major parties, and others with community standing, need to get involved.

Their message needs to be clear and needs to be communicated in a way that resonates broadly with Australians, particularly the young whose prospects are most damaged by our current mass immigration. Members of immigrant communities need to be encouraged to be involved as well, as they face the same difficulties caused by it. The message put has to be practical, not ideological (or flag waving).

That message should be that Australia must pause (not end) its migration programme until the needs of those already here are met. The focus of the message needs to be on pressuring the government to change its policy, and if they don’t, for the people to elect another government.

Instead of Australian flags there should be banners calling for affordable housing, lower costs, better services, better government. It needs to be based on common ground between those who’ve been here 45,000 years, and those who’ve been here less than a generation.

The current program just uses immigrants as political or economic pawns who unbalance the  existing order for everyone and denies the specialness of this culture that draws them here in the first place.

Kind regards,

GRAHAM YOUNG
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTE FOR PROGRESS