Andrew Bolt: Rich and powerful finally to live with reality of mass immigration

Federal MP Monique Ryan suddenly isn’t so open-armed about welcoming migrants after Jacinta Allan announced some will live in new towers — next door to her and her voters.

How wonderful to see federal Teal independent MP Monique Ryan learn about cause and effect. Some of the many migrants she said she wanted are going to live in new towers – oops! – next door to her and her voters.

Last June, Ryan attacked Opposition Leader Peter Dutton for wanting immigration slashed. Importing 500,000 people a year was crazy, Dutton argued. Where would they all live?

Ryan got on her high horse, declaring “people in Kooyong” – her leafy inner-Melbourne electorate – were “very conscious … that the migrant experience and immigration to this country has been incredibly important to us”.

Shame on racist Dutton: “There are real concerns in my community at least about immigration being used as basically a tool for dog whistling” to “exacerbate social division”.

How wonderful to see federal Teal independent MP Monique Ryan learn about cause and effect. Picture: Martin Ollman

Yet it’s Victoria’s Socialist Left Premier, Jacinta Allan, now exacerbating social division in Kooyong by appearing to take Ryan at her word. You want more migrants? You’ve got ‘em.

With Melbourne full, Allan says she’ll create 50 development hubs which will include towers reportedly up to 20 storeys high.

Fantastic! Finally it’s the rich and powerful who must live with the consequences of the mass immigration that benefits developers, manufacturers and retailers, but buggers up living standards of battlers.

Until now, we’ve tended to shove migrants on the fringes of our cities, where they’re not under the well-shod feet of the elite, who can continue to ignore polls showing Australians want less immigration.

Fellow Teal Zoe Daniel’s electorate will get high-rise towers in Brighton, Hampton and Sandringham. Picture: Martin Ollman

But Allan has decided the first 25 of these hubs will be mostly at the top end of the Monopoly board – including wealthy Toorak, ­Armadale, Malvern and Hawthorn, all in Ryan’s seat. Fellow Teal Zoe Daniel’s electorate will get ones in Brighton, Hampton and Sandringham. Oh dear. Suddenly Ryan isn’t so open armed, and has “questioned the reasoning behind the government’s choice of locations”. Allan is now being savaged by commentators and booed in the street, but I hope other premiers follow her lead.

A few 20-storey blocks of cheap housing in, say, Sydney’s Point Piper might finally shock the rich and woke – hello, Mr Turnbull! – into backing a big cut in immigration, too.

Consider: in 2000, then NSW premier Bob Carr complained “Sydney is full”. Yet immigration ministers have since added 1.140m people to Sydney. No wonder it’s hard to find a cheap house.

No, build immigration towers among the rich and watch even a Monique Ryan see sense.