Tony Abbott calls for Australia’s rate of immigration to substantially reduce
IN his address to the Sydney Institute on Tuesday night, one of the topics Tony Abbott spoke on was immigration. The former Liberal prime minister said his issue was not immigration, it was the rate of immigration. Here is an extract of Mr Abbott’s address.
Opinion
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AS someone born overseas, I could hardly be against immigration. Immigration is at the heart of who we are. My issue is not immigration; it’s the rate of immigration at a time of stagnant wages, clogged infrastructure, soaring housing prices and, in Melbourne at least, ethnic gangs that are testing the resolve of police.
It’s a basic law of economics that increasing the supply of labour depresses wages, and that the increasing demand for housing boosts price.
Before 2003, the number of long-stay business visas never exceeded 40,000 a year. Since 2007, it’s mostly exceeded 100,000.
Even at the old rate to the mid-2000s, on a per capita basis, our immigration was still about the highest in the developed world. At the subsequent and current rate, every five years, we’re letting immigration alone increase our population by about the size of the city of Adelaide.
So far, our main strategy to cope has been urban infill: putting more and more people into suburbs whose schools are full, roads are choked and public transport overcrowded.
At just 0.9 per cent over the past decade, annual economic growth per person has been anaemic compared with 2.4 per cent during the Howard years when immigration was much lower. Over the decade to mid-2007, 2.1 million new jobs were created while net overseas migration totalled 1.2 million.
Should it really be so easy to fill jobs from overseas rather than offer the better training or higher wages that locals want?
In the next decade, by contrast, just 1.8 million new jobs were created while net overseas migration almost doubled to 2.2 million. So it’s not surprising that for much of this time, jobs have seemed harder to find and that more and more foreigners seemed to be filling them.
If a high-end restaurant needs an executive chef, or if a university needs a world-class quantum physicist, or if a bank needs a new CFO, it might make sense to recruit someone from overseas on a high salary; and it’s good when people making a big contribution opt to stay here. But are we really so short of willing and capable workers that backpackers must pick our crops, overseas students serve our tables, and recent migrants run our IT?
Should it really be so easy to fill jobs from overseas rather than offer the better training or higher wages that locals want?
Almost half a million new dwellings have been required over the decade just to meet the increase in net overseas migration.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that temporary skilled visas have been a factor in allowing Australian business to neglect training and to keep wages down. Since the late 1980s, Australian house prices have been rising at well above the rate of inflation.
Much of this is due to lower interest rates enabling buyers to pay more without increasing their repayments.
But especially in the past decade, higher immigration has boosted demand and factored into price. Almost half a million new dwellings have been required over the decade just to meet the increase in net overseas migration.
Then there’s the integration question. As the head of the Menzies Research Centre observed last week, “something has gone badly wrong with our resettlement system when 58 per cent of refugees who have settled here in the past 10 years are living on welfare”.
With no insistence that refugees learn English it’s hardly surprising that only 30 per cent of the past decade’s intake are proficient; but without the national language how can newcomers ever really find a job and fully integrate into our way of life?
At least until infrastructure, housing stock, and integration has better caught up, we simply have to move the overall numbers substantially down.
This is an edited extract from Hon. Tony Abbott’s address to the Sydney Institute last night.