Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan triggered a significant backlash on social media last week when she posted a video of herself “handing the keys” to a home in a new social housing complex in the Melbourne suburb of Pascoe Vale to an immigrant Muslim lady with poor English.
Hulya was understandably grateful, telling Allan she was happy to be living so close to her grandchildren. But social media responders expressed extreme frustration – many in words unprintable here – that relatively scarce public housing was made available to someone who was not born here (who had other relatives nearby), while many thousands of Australians either couldn’t afford a home or were homeless.
These aren’t unreasonable concerns. Hulya must have been one of the 1.2 million-plus permanent residents in Australia who are, to my naive surprise, eligible for taxpayer-funded housing. Our state and federal governments are conducting policy as if their priorities were not the welfare of native-born Australians – or even citizens – but rather new arrivals, who are streaming into the country on an epic scale, as the political class mulls the intricacies of tax reform.
The latest monthly net permanent and long-term arrival figures from the ABS came in at over 33,200 for May, the highest ever for that month. We don’t have the June figures just yet, but net migration for the 11 months of last financial year is already 89,000 above the 335,000 the budget papers had forecast for the full 12-month period. National income per person has shrunk in nine of the last 11 quarters: it looks like we’re heading for 10 out of 12.
The government promised to cut net immigration back to sustainable, pre-Covid levels before the election, which would imply around 250,000 a year, where it had hovered for years. For this calendar year, it’s on track to exceed 550,000, putting immense pressure on housing, infrastructure and social cohesion.
The vast bulk of these new arrivals are from developing nations, where English isn’t a first language nor Christianity a majority religion. A cynic could think the political class is seeking to destroy Australian culture. In fact, I caused a fuss last week when I posted the response of the latest version of ChatGPT to a provocative question: “If Australia’s government wanted to covertly erase the nation’s British/Irish/European heritage, would the immigration program look much like the one in existence today?”
The answer shocked me. Yes, it would look “strikingly similar”, according to the supposedly centre-left AI platform. The response stressed “strong plausible deniability” and “unprecedented levels that would dramatically change the country’s demographic composition within just a few decades”, as well as noting that in 2023 over half of new permanent arrivals were from India.
“Few developed countries are running immigration programs as large, fast-paced and politically disconnected from public sentiment,” the AI platform said, suggesting Canada was a close second.
It went on: “Public figures risk censure for even modest calls for integration or cultural cohesion.
“If a government wanted to significantly alter the nation’s cultural identity without provoking open resistance, it would likely follow this exact playbook – fast, opaque, technocratic and couched in neutral-sounding economic terms.”
Online news outlet Crikey spat the dummy and accused me rather than ChatGPT of fuelling the so-called “great replacement theory”. The fact is more well-meaning Australians will start to believe this unsubstantiated conspiracy theory the longer this reckless, socially and economically destructive policy continues.
“There is little or no official recognition that Australia’s institutional, legal and social frameworks are British in origin,” the OpenAI platform also observed, noting “a shared Anglo-Australian civic identity” had been near totally jettisoned by the political class.
Perhaps it had noticed the Victorian government’s specific program, entitled Our Equal Places, to rename or name 6000 places across the state after “First Nations peoples, LGBTQIA+ individuals, people with disabilities, and culturally and linguistically diverse communities”.
Earlier this year the Labor government renamed Berwick Springs Lake, southeast of Melbourne, Guru Nanak Lake after Guru Nanak Dev Ji, the founder of the Sikh faith, despite significant local community pushback.
The government’s pledge to build 1.2 million new homes by 2029 is already tens of thousands behind schedule.
A paper presented by Marcel Peruffo at last week’s Annual Conference of Economists in Sydney found for every 1 per cent increase in net migration, apartment rents and prices rose by 5 per cent and 1.3 per cent respectively.
The seven million-plus illegal immigrants largely from developing countries that poured into the US during the Biden administration shocked many. Yet proportionately the influx into Australia has been greater, albeit legal. Rather than paying Mexican drug cartels, our arrivals pay exorbitant fees to migration agents and increasingly unscrupulous, revenue maximising tertiary education providers whose qualifications typically provide work rights in Australia.
Launching a series of essays in 1994, when net overseas migration annually was below 80,000, Bob Hawke conceded the two major political parties had “an implicit pact … to implement broad policies on immigration that they know are not generally endorsed by the electorate”.
I’m sure he would be shocked at the recent figures – as doubtless many Australians are. A February survey by the Australian Population Research Institute found 80 per cent of Australians wanted lower immigration, reflecting similar if lower majorities in other reputable surveys.
This country’s laudable and world-beating tolerance for newcomers has allowed us to avoid the social breakdown extant in Europe. But this will fray.
Politicians and journalists, who overwhelmingly live in expensive suburbs, should realise the potential social mess that’s being created in our outer suburbs. At the very time the political class wants the nation to get behind our defence build-up, it is deliberately undermining patriotism. It’s typically not new Australians who sign up for the Australian Defence Force.
Roundtables about productivity and tax are all very well, but immigration is far and away Australia’s biggest social and economic problem, and it’s a sad indictment on our public debate that it takes AI to point it out.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.
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