Slow down immigration intake while we fix the problems

Reaction to Tony ­Abbott’s speech suggests many in the media don’t trust Australians to discuss immigration at all, let alone debate the make-up of the intake.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott addresses the Sydney Institute last month.

Immigration has been a hot-button issue in elections around the world since Britain’s Brexit vote in 2016, but reaction to a speech by former prime minister Tony ­Abbott to the Sydney Institute on February 20 suggests many in the media do not trust Australians to discuss immigration at all, let alone debate the make-up of the intake.

Abbott’s speech was slapped down by Treasurer Scott Morrison, who said today’s intake was the same as it was in the days when Abbott was PM and Morrison was immigration minister. Yet Abbott made many good points. He did not really discuss in detail the ­racial and religious aspects of immigration, concentrating on outer urban overcrowding, transport difficulties and the cost to states of catering to increased population.

The usual media suspects swung into action. Fairfax Media ran pieces by Jessica Irvine on February 25 and NSW Young Liberals president Harry Stutchbury on February 21 essentially disputing Abbott’s data. Guardian Australia published a piece by former Immigration Department deputy secretary Abul Rizvi on February 21 challenging the idea there was an economic downside to high ­immigration.

It took until February 24 for a high-profile economist to challenge the orthodoxy: this paper’s contributing economics editor ­Judith Sloan, published “Scott Morrison part of Canberra conspiracy to keep immigration high”.

She argued Treasury supported immigration to maintain GDP growth, even though in the only measure that counts, GDP growth per capita, there had been two technical recessions in the past two decades that would have been exacerbated by immigration. She cited Productivity Commission ­reports debunking the idea immigration was a solution to an ageing population and said the main economic beneficiaries of ­mig­ration were the migrants themselves.

A subsequent Sloan piece on February 27 belled that cat on elite Australian opinion refusing to engage with the views of ordinary Australians, including on the immigration issue. She is right.

Moral middle-class people like to look down their noses at the concerns of poorer Australians for whom the downside of immigration, including ethnic crime, is more immediate than for those in wealthier suburbs.

Excluding a humanitarian intake, which most years has been between 11,000 and 14,000, the Hawke government lifted immigration from 54,000 in 1984 to 124,000 at its peak in 1989 after the Tiananmen Square massacre. The Howard government lifted the intake from 65,000 to 148,000. It has often been more than 170,000 in the years since former prime ­minister Kevin Rudd’s election in 2007.

To that needs to be added foreign student visas, sitting at more than 300,000 a year, and 457s, to end this month, at more than 100,000. The total is large for a country of 24 million people.

No doubt immigration has ­enriched life in my 61 years. In the much longer term, there is also no doubt Australia needs to keep growing if it expects not to repeat the fate of our first inhabitants, who were too few to defend their island home.

Yet many on the green left have been advocating lower absolute populations for decades. The green mantra “act local, think global” apparently does not extend to using our own resources to protect those of the wider world. Yet the Greens are always quick to throw out allegations of racism at anyone who links immigration rates to ethnic crime, unemployment or welfare dependency rates. They want it both ways.

Abbott mentioned temporary work visas, such as the newly rejigged 457s, and the running down of vocational training. He is right. Why are we not training more ­apprentices but importing so many on temporary work visas?

In a drive through the Red Centre last May, my first for 20 years, I was surprised at the dominance of Chinese and ­Indian workers on 457 visas at tourism properties in the Northern Territory. In the 1990s, the NT believed these were to be the first jobs for future generations of young Aborigines.

In Queensland, one abattoir I know of on the Sunshine Coast is in an electorate with 20 per cent youth unemployment but more than 95 per cent of its workers are on 457s. Why is this OK?

The public wants an open discussion of the social costs of immigration-related issues beyond overcrowding and jobs. Think ­African gang violence, Muslim ­unemployment and the radicalisation of young Muslims.

No mainstream party will address these issues openly. They are left to One Nation and fringe groups such as the Australian Liberty Alliance.

Yet serious books have been written about the effects of Islamic immigration in Europe. This newspaper since the September 11, 2001, World Trade Centre terror attack has been asking, “Should a tolerant society accept the ­extreme intolerance of some ­religious minorities?”

Security agencies, keen to keep the door open to the families of potentially radicalising youth, are wary of further alienating young Muslims. Fair enough. But also fair enough for Australians to ask whether we need to slow rates of immigration to give arriving groups more time to assimilate.

Remember our last terror ­arrest last month was of a 24-year-old Bangladeshi woman who tried to stab a man in the neck, allegedly in an Islamic State ­inspired attack, less than a fortnight after arriving in the country.

There are also questions about which groups do best in making a successful life here. Concerns about Vietnamese immigration in the 1980s proved unfounded. ­Unemployment in the Vietnamese community is below 5 per cent.

Lebanese Christian and ­Maronite communities, many of whom migrated a century ago, tend to have low unemployment rates, but Lebanese Muslims and Iraqis, most of whom arrived after the Fraser government, have been slower to adjust. Labor force participation rates among Muslim adults in the 2011 census sat at 53 per cent. Among other religious groups participation was as high as 78 per cent. Muslim unemployment sat at 12 per cent, more than double the national average.

Politicians have always known the national consensus in favour of the immigration program depends on the political control governments have over it. Rudd lost control of the borders: 50,000 asylum-seekers came by boat; 1200 drowned at sea; and Australians turned to Abbott and Operation Border Force. It is not racist to ask if the program is in our interests or needs to be finetuned or temporarily reduced.

Then immigration minister Chris Bowen, whose seat of ­McMahon has high numbers of immigrants including many from Islamic countries, was brave about the issue on the front page of this paper in 2012 in the context of Labor’s embrace of offshore processing. He said critics from the inner-city Greens accusing Labor of using offshore processing to appeal to the “racist and redneck” vote needed to come to his electorate to hear the views of the real multicultural Australia.

My own view? An honest debate and temporary slowdown in the program are warranted now.

In the longer term, Australia needs to build bigger cities in the north. Driving up the coast from Brisbane, it is almost 9000km to the next town with one million people: Perth.

I see no reason Queensland’s large coastal provincial towns, from Bundaberg to Cairns, and Darwin in the NT could not sustain that sort of population.