The worm is turning in the populist race to the bottom on migration, overlooking the reality of its success and its humanity, Michael Pascoe writes.

It took Angus Taylor a little less than six months to develop – or devolve – his Australian Values Migration Plan dog whistle into the Coalition’s full One Hanson-slightly-lite Australia-First Migration Plan announced two weeks ago. Over that period, the political competition to be seen as the most anti-immigration party dominated media, successfully “flooding the zone” the way populists seek to do.

Politicians’ immigration race to the bottom ignores its success

by Michael Pascoe

Now the worm is turning. It’s happening slowly, but it is happening. With the One Hanson, Coalition and Labor positions staked out, rational voices are surfacing above the flood to skewer the absurdities of the Hanson/Coalition extremism.

And make no mistake, whether immediately crashing net overseas migration to zero or 100,000, the policies are extreme,

beyond merely radical and well off into wildly irresponsible.

Business, after mimsily keeping its head down, is seeing it needs to put its case; the Australian Hotels Association video leading the way.

Main stream media has started doing its job after months of horse-race reporting, getting around to telling people what the glib sound bites would mean.

At one end, the SMAge used the Parliamentary Budget Office to get an idea of the macroeconomic impact – a $275B national debt blowout under One Hanson, $150B under the Coalition.

In finer detail (and very finely done by Greg Bearup, an example of excellent boots-on-the-ground reporting), the relatively few who read the Australian Financial Review were served a clear picture of what migration means to Dubbo. As the headline said,

the proposed migration cuts would kill the town.

Throughout for anyone who wanted to know, Dr Abul Rizvi, a national treasure on matters migration and population, has been offering facts in the face of the simplistic slogans, an antidote for all those complying with  H.L. Mencken’s aphorism: “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”

The complex problem with the simple and wrong Hanson/Coalition answer, of course, is the cost of housing, itself the core of the “cost of living crisis”.

Yes, the post-COVID population surge did contribute some extra pressure, but it did not cause the problem – that was three decades of bipartisan policy failure in abandoning public and affordable housing.

And the populist instantaneous slashing of NOM won’t solve it either, while creating greater problems.

But don’t let facts get in the way of a good dog whistle.

If the issue wasn’t so important, if the damage done to our society by migrant bashing wasn’t so tragic, it would be hilarious to watch Hansonites and the remnants of the LNP twist and turn and backtrack with every lot of exceptions they have to pledge to make when the reality is put to them.

Yes, Australia does run on migrant labour. That cannot be drastically curtailed overnight. If Labor, which actually has to govern the country, not only produce slogans, could reduce migrant numbers by more than it is proposing without creating those greater problems, it would do so.

That’s what the polls say people want off the top of their heads.

But there is something else that is being missed, something that doesn’t surface in the macroeconomic headlines or the business cases or the dog whistles.

And that is the success and humanity of our migration story, in the lives of the migrants we individually know, and many of us are.

It is the reality of the people who arrive here every day, look around and say “how bloody-good is this”, or words to that effect, and get stuck in to make the best of it and make it bloody good in the process.

It was a sad honour to attend the funeral earlier this month of a friend, Peter Brennan OAM, who migrated to Australia from Ireland in 1983. Peter and Patricia arrived with little more than the contents of their suitcases, a baby and the offer of a job. They are symbols of the great tragedy of emigration for Ireland and the great success of immigration for Australia.

The Brennans’ story is far too large to adequately skim here. Peter played a major role in keeping St George Building Society and many of its commercial customers upright in the wreckage of our deep 1990-91 recession. As CFO, he was key in taking a small, broke furniture outfit, Fantastic Furniture, and building it into a public company with some 1,500 employees when it was taken over in 2016 for $361m.

More than any business success, Peter built and enriched our community, most obviously in the form of the Lansdowne Club, now a Sydney Irish institution.

And more than that, he and Patricia established their family here, their children and grandchildren.

Peter was always grateful for the opportunities Australia gave him, but we must be grateful for the opportunities he created for us, for the ways in which he made Australia a better place.

That’s what migrants mostly do. They make this a better place. The best place, in fact.

We should never lose sight of that, never let politicians lose sight of that when they go stomping over people in search of advantage.

You have to be brave to migrate, to leave what and who you know behind to take a chance on life somewhere foreign. Left to their own devices, some businesses will use a ready supply of labour to avoid investing to improve productivity, but at the same time, brave and striving migrants have a habit of innovating, of being more productive, of

bringing fresh eyes and perspective to our challenges.

Hanson, who started and continues her lucrative political career by sneering at others, wrapped in the standard faux patriotism of every empty populist, Taylor, hopelessly following her down the sewer, betray this nation’s greatness.

We’re better than that.

https://michaelwest.com.au/politicians-immigration-race-to-the-bottom-ignores-its-success/

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