Australia needs a migration policy based on workforce reality, not populist fear, racial resentment or a political race to match One Nation’s impossible promises.
It is too much to hope and expect that an Albanese Labor government would implement a liberal immigration and refugee policy simply because it was the right thing to do, and very much to Australia’s advantage. But could or would they do it because it is the cunning thing to do, as both the Pauline Hanson One Nation movement and the conservative parties hitch themselves to populist, racist and pseudo-nationalist wagons that are not good for the Australian economy, not good for the most disadvantaged Australians already here, and which are destructive of social cohesion, whatever that is.
Australia must set its population policies according to its needs, but the argument that the nation does not need a bigger and more skilled workforce is nonsense, based more on opinions and prejudices – mostly false – about the character and colour of migrants, rather than on the facts.
Even were it true that the problems of housing shortages and the incapacity of younger Australians to get access to the housing market were a product of housing demand from migrants and international students, and that is dubious, the only way that the nation can build enough housing is with a bigger and better-trained building workforce. It cannot be raised here, and certainly not from among the millions instinctively leaning towards One Nation as the answer to the nation’s problems. They are mostly too old, for starters. We also need additional workers to make up many of the material shortages and supply lines that are restricting production.
The existing economy cannot supply the workers, nor adequately train those that are available. Building quality and standards are already dropping significantly, partly under the pretence that the biggest single obstacle to greater housing production is red tape, bureaucracy and relentless nimbyism. Adding an air of panic and urgency is already guaranteeing that future generations of Australians will live in shelter manifestly less well-built, safe and secure, and in a form other than they want, than their parents do. But the problem is not merely one of diverting and training existing workers from jobs they have into the building and construction industry. Australia has virtually full employment, if one with significantly less job security than most of the preceding generations, and those who want to redirect existing workers must specify where they must come from.
Australia also needs skilled and semi-skilled jobs in the community sector, including childcare, disability services and aged care, and is moving into an era where there will also be bigger shortages of teachers, doctors and skilled health workers. In the healthcare industry, we could barely survive were it not for thousands of well-trained workers from countries such as India, Nepal, the Philippines, Zimbabwe, Syria, Iraq and Ireland – nearly all trained abroad at the expense of other nations. Our own workforce in such areas is not reproducing itself, and government, at federal and state levels, has no labour-force education and training plan to make it possible over the next few decades.
The demand for workers will also be seen in defence industries, including ship and submarine building, and in skilled engineering and scientific jobs if the nation is to take any role in nuclear engineering, whether for defence or industry.
It is possible that some of the labour shortfalls will come from redundancies and retraining out of lost jobs with the development of artificial intelligence, cloud storage and renewable energy transformations, but these, the propagandists say, will in the long term create even more jobs than they displace. If that is true, we already do not have enough bodies for them.
This is not merely a matter of an ageing workforce as the baby boomer generation dies or retires. But demand for immigration is greater when the population is not reproducing itself, even as productivity is not increasing much and as gross domestic needs for goods and services show no sign of abating. It should be said that there are few signs that the skill levels of workers being recruited from abroad are falling compared with the times when Australia supposedly had the luxury of being able to recruit working families from north-western Europe.
Indeed, modern immigration tends to conform to the pattern of migration over the past 80 years, including in initially taking up many jobs Australians won’t take, in bringing in family who quickly adapt to the Australian way of life and who often are, within two generations, living more comfortably and productively than many other Australian taxpayers. As a generalisation this is often because they have valued education for their children more than many Australian families, and worked a good deal harder. The overwhelming proportion have integrated smoothly into the general community, and their crime and social dislocation rates are almost invariably lower than in the general population. This is even though a punitive and hostile approach to migration by a sector of the community and a sector of the political class has seen their access to general community services, including health and welfare benefits, restricted in their earlier years here.
We don’t train enough housebuilders, nurses or engineers to be the Australia we are
Many Australians have allowed themselves to be persuaded that there has been too much migration in recent years, but it is not clear why. It is certainly not the view of the employer class. Conservatives other than populists may pander to the open hostility and racism of some older Australians, but most are very conscious of antagonising migrants themselves, or those who support them. The Liberals have been burnt by statements made about Chinese, Indians and Muslims and are generally careful to insist they support non-discriminatory policies.
Many privately are not hostile to immigration at all, even as they feel they must “hear the people” and support some temporary reduction as a reaction to the current state of the economy. They adopt the claim that housing shortages are a result of too much immigration and make coded references to character and capacity to fit in that signal that the entry of Muslims is especially problematic. For all the indications of a populist problem, more than half the population was born overseas or has a parent who was. Among settled migrants, there is, as everywhere, a tendency to want to pull up the drawbridge.
As Hansonism has seemed to boom, Labor has responded by setting out to appease both Hanson and some of her supporters, particularly in relation to immigration. Cuts were made to the intake. Appearances were made to seem rigorous and tough-minded in establishing limits, and punitive in relation to people seen as outstaying their welcome. The times, including the Hamas massacre and Israel’s retaliations against Palestinians, were used to show the government as resolute and firm, particularly but unashamedly against people of Muslim background. The government has been girding itself to a new general statement showing that it is steadfast, resolute and reliable on immigration and refugee matters, not weak and hopeless as it supposedly was 15 years ago. Who better to demonstrate that than Tony Burke, the hand, the foot and the face of police, the security services and our concentration camps abroad?
But is it a field that Labor could vacate without much political risk to itself? Whether as against Pauline Hanson, who must carry the task of being extremist, populist and racist on matters of which she has had a bellyful? As against Angus Taylor, who has pretended that he would be “tough”, particularly on getting the “right type” of migrant, and anyway focused on responding to Hanson sentiment and cutting the numbers? Or the Nationals, even more ready to pander to hostility to migrants, if only out of desperation and the vague hope that they could command Hanson’s arena. Knowing, of course, that Hanson can up the ante at will.
No mild reductions to immigration – indeed no slashing reductions – can outdo what Hanson says she wants, or what the Liberals and the Nationals say that they will deliver.
Labor could allow itself to be painted as ‘weak’ and in some way effeminate in a hairy-chested race to the bottom. But a government which spends millions on PR can paint a different picture
Making a virtue of standing up both for the needs of the economy and the value and traditions of healthy migration numbers need not be seen as unwillingness to bite the bullet. Sticking to what is necessary at a time when it is recognised as being unpopular might win Labor some credit. And not only among some of its natural constituents, few of whom see themselves as involved in any rivalry with new migrants for jobs, but also among migrants themselves, and among businessmen and women who need a regular and generous infusion of well-educated and trained workers for their survival.
If Albanese stood for evidence rather than emotion-based policy, decency, dignity and common sense, it might even get some credit from those who have come to expect that modern Labor only embarrasses itself and its supporters.
Hanson faces a long march through the states and territories before she gets to Canberra
Labor is only about halfway through its term. Before it goes to an election, One Nation will have try-outs against some of the Labor state governments, including Victoria and NSW. Hanson has been very slow to get into action in Victoria, and has presented little in the way of policies, or grievance in Victoria. It is certainly true that she, as well as the conservatives, can say Labor has exhausted the patience of the electorate. Indeed, Victorian Labor might encapsulate every reason why many modern voters are furious and angry with mainstream parties. But it should be remembered that most of Hanson’s bag of grievances and prejudices are federally focused. She has not talked about service delivery functions of health, education and policing, or infrastructure. She did not do it well in South Australia, where her performance was middling. Moreover, the history of Hanson’s state-based campaigns, whether in Queensland in the 1990s or in NSW more recently, does not bode well for her capacity to manage or keep a team, to get it on message and to prevent it from being diverted by the idiosyncrasies, fixations and idiocies of some of her candidates, some of whom will inevitably be elected.
If Hanson is truly focused on Making Australia Great and Monocultural Again, she has little to gain by becoming a power of sorts in the state capitals. But so far as she develops an agenda, it could easily muddy her pitch for national power and undermine her message. Her poll numbers may currently look impressive, even if, as I think, we have already reached peak Hanson. It is quite possible that her balloon will have burst long before a federal poll. It won’t happen by accident but by being taken on.
A significantly weaker Hanson movement does not necessarily suggest that Australia will be back to mainstream politics, and a contest as of old, against two well-established philosophies. Indeed, the public taste for alternatives may expand. And some of the existing mainstream parties may have so further disgusted their constituencies that they are reduced to a mere rump. Albanese should hope that this is not him.
Republished from The Canberra Times
John Waterford AM, better known as Jack Waterford, is an Australian journalist and commentator.