We now need ‘smart’ immigration

The past year has spectacularly elevated Australia into the consciousness of the world as the ‘place to be’, not just for the short-term but longer-term and permanently.

It’s time to start thinking about immigration.

No, I’m not talking about the process of moving gingerly to start letting people back into the country, over and above the essentially small numbers of – mostly returning Aussies – that have been dribbling in, all through ‘the virus’, except in Victoria.

Either because most of ‘us’ will be vaccinated or sufficient numbers of ‘them’ – the other 7.97bn people we share the planet with – are, so that we can sensibly just require ‘vaccine passports’ for un-quarantined effectively unlimited entry.

No, I’m talking about our fundamental long-term immigration policy. Do we go back to 200,000-plus long-term immigrants a year, plus who knows how many purportedly short-term arrivals?

And how would that integrate with our – pre-virus – higher education system, whose growth in the 21st century has been entirely built on selling education into Asia, increasingly as a stepping stone to permanent residence?

I pose the question in two contexts, that both flow out of the virus experience of 2020.

In my judgement, pre-virus, our economy had become far too reliant on what was, bluntly, an immigration-driven population Ponzi.

People poured into, mostly Melbourne and Sydney; we built more and more infrastructure – roads, schools, hospitals and so on to try to catch up; we also built more and more housing, either single dwellings on the fringes of the two cities or high-rise apartments in the inner suburbs; and property prices were on a permanent escalator.

THAT was essentially the pre-virus Aussie economy. Plus, digging up one billion tonnes of rich red Pilbara dirt every year and shipping it off to the northern hemisphere and mostly to China.

Thank goodness – especially for WA premier Mark McGowan – that the second, the digging up of the dirt, not only continued through 2020, but actually exploded, pouring billions into WA and the WA state treasury.

For the second time in a decade, a (relatively) booming China saved the Aussie economy, as it did, uniquely, after the GFC.

Is this going to be the Australian economy coming – hopefully – out of the virus and going through 2021, and into the future?

I would argue it should not be: it is to me, very clearly, a form of empty, prosperity-free, growth.

Yes, we get a bigger economy in overall terms, but barely so in per capita terms, and there is a net loss of livability in Melbourne and Sydney for nearly half the total population.

Before we simplistically rush back to it, as the ‘easy option’ – assuming of course we can – we should take some time-out from the usual daily frenzies that occupy our politico-media elites, to think about why the population Ponzi of the 2010s should be left in that decade.

The virus has actually opened up a spectacular opportunity for a real value-adding immigration future.

There appears to be a growing sense in those sectors of the business and financial communities with strong links into the global space that 2020 has spectacularly elevated Australia – and New Zealand – into the consciousness of people around the world as the ‘place to be’, not just short-term but longer-term and permanently.

We have often had these flavours, of a lot of people wanting to come here – indeed that has played out exactly in those 200k-plus yearly immigration numbers.

But senior business figures are talking about something on an altogether different plane; of whole businesses wanting to relocate to Australia. And from very different places – the usual ones like the UK and the US, but also Hong Kong and the rest of Asia.

This is an opportunity we need to pro-actively seize; but it requires drive from the top of both government and business and from a whole of – both state and federal – government perspective.

Originally published as We now need ‘smart’ immigration