Immigration, Treasury maintained, was absolutely necessary to keep up economic growth and to give Australia the skills we needed. Well, a side effect of our pandemic-closed borders has been that immigration has virtually stopped for the past 18 months, so the Treasury doctrine has now been put to a practical test.
The result? At least in the absence of lockdowns, the economy has bounced back strongly despite zero immigration; there are indeed serious labour shortages but they’re for fruit pickers, restaurant staff and cleaners, not for people with university degrees; and, for the first time in a decade, wages are starting to grow strongly. In other words, the official orthodoxy, that high immigration boosts growth without depressing wages, looks like being exposed as bunkum.
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Routinely bringing in a city the size of Canberra every 18 months, especially with economic growth sluggish post-global financial crisis, has always struck me as putting downward pressure on wages, upward pressure on housing prices, and massive congestion on to our roads and public transport, and pressure on hospitals and schools.
The reality of our immigration program has never matched the rhetoric about skills. As every Australian who has ever tried to book a tradie knows only too well, our real skills shortages are for plumbers, electricians, carpenters, welders, builders and mechanics, as well as aged-care workers and other service industries. We’re chronically short of people who can make things and who can make things happen.
We’re not short of accountants, lawyers, middle managers, and marketers. Yet it’s professional skills rather than practical ones that dominate the “strategic skill” list that largely determines the composition of the 80,000 or so (including their dependants) who enter annually as points-tested skilled migrants.
As demographer Bob Birrell has shown, based on the most recent census data, 84 per cent of degree-level migrants during the previous five years had come from non-English-speaking backgrounds and only 29 per cent of them were employed as professionals or managers, even though that was the rationale for granting them permanent residency.
Back in 1994, launching a book of essays, former prime minister Bob Hawke made the remarkably frank admission that immigration policy had effectively been a conspiracy by the political establishment against the Australian public. Hawke agreed with one author’s observation that most voters wanted immigration reduced and that the parties had deliberately kept it out of public debate, saying there had indeed been “an implicit pact between the major parties to implement broad policies on immigration that they know are not generally endorsed by the electorate” and that “they have done this by keeping the subject off the political agenda”.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/we-need-to-talk-about-immigration-po...Annual immigration should be less than halved from 230,000 in 2019. I hope the evidence of 2020-21 will convince EVEN Treasury that nearly a quarter if a million new migrants a year are not needed.
SW Sydney, where the Covid cases are concentrated, has a population of 67% who do not speak English at home. That's ridiculously high.
In Fairfield (State Electoral Divisions), 23.3% of people only spoke English at home. Other languages spoken at home included Vietnamese 18.2%, Arabic 12.8%, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic 7.7%, Cantonese 4.0% and Chaldean Neo-Aramaic 3.5%.