Labor leader plays on race

NSW Labor leader Michael Daley believes Asian immigrants are stealing the jobs of young Australians. You read that right. The alternative premier of the nation’s largest state is playing the race card. It could be an obscure senator speaking at a white supremacist rally. Or Pauline Hanson, in her 1996 first speech to parliament, who warned “we are in danger of being swamped by Asians”. Yet here is a mainstream politician espousing a dangerous and ignorant view, one that is beyond the pale in modern Australia. It is dog-whistling on race and marks him as unfit to lead a major political outfit, let alone a state competing for global talent and foreign students, seeking to integrate its economy with Asia’s and be a model of racial tolerance.

Mr Daley’s remarks were made last September to a Politics in the Pub gathering at Wentworth Falls, in the Blue Mountains region west of Sydney. The area’s population is almost 80 per cent Australian-born, compared with 65 per cent for the rest of the state. “Our children will flee and who are they being replaced with?” Mr Daley asks in a video of the event. “They are being replaced by young people from typically Asia with PhDs. There’s a transform­ation happening in Sydney now where our kids are moving out and foreigners are moving in and taking­ their jobs.” Mr Daley apologised for these remarks, which have become public days before the state election this Saturday. But what exactly is the Labor leader speaking about? It’s a flawed understanding of the labour and housing markets, as well as a risky attempt to amplify grievances among locally born working people with low levels of education. Instead of speaking about raising aspirations and skills, Mr Daley is playing “us” versus “them”.

Yet when he is streaming on another channel, Mr Daley has more moderate views about Asian immigration. In November, a few days after winning the Labor leadership, he orchestrated a Chinese-only press conference and praised that community for “a great sense of energy, entrepreneurship, great business people. You’ve taught
us many lessons in business over
the years. You’ve lifted the spirit of this nation and this is just the beginning.”

Mr Daley’s political opponents branded him “two-faced”. At best, it could be a case of hypocrisy. More likely, however, it’s duplicity, telling different groups what they want to hear. Former Labor leader Luke Foley was admonished last year for carelessly speaking about “white flight” and the supposed exodus of Anglo-Saxon families from Sydney’s west because of an increased intake of refugees.

In a statement yesterday, Mr Daley said Sydney was a global city and many young people were being forced to leave it because of the high cost of living and property prices. He claimed his original comments were simply about housing affordability. But his contrition is as brittle as his economic analysis and understanding of history.

Mr Daley should ponder the effect of the failed policies of his predecessor as member for Maroubra, Bob Carr, and the 16 years of Labor rule that began in 1995. As premier, Mr Carr declared Sydney was “full” and large-scale infrastructure public works were shelved. The root of Sydney’s affordability crisis is an under-supply of homes on Labor’s watch, its aversion to population growth and proper planning, leading directly to an infrastructure strike, today’s traffic congestion and high home prices.

Former Reserve Bank chief Glenn Stevens argued in a 2017 report to the NSW government that political leaders needed to think about how the modern economy, strongly service oriented and driven by innovation, in turn reliant on collaboration and connectedness, could be accommodated. “(NSW) needs to think about how the population that will be attracted by the opportunities afforded by such an economy will be housed, moved around, cared for, educated and so on.” If Mr Daley really rejects xenophobia, he would be talking about how to attract the PhDs, coders, scientists and innovators needed for NSW to prosper. Rather than blaming foreigners, a true leader would promote the virtue of land use and transport planning and explain the opportunities that come from migration, skilled workers and a larger population. Sadly, Mr Daley has a smaller, nastier agenda.