Bob Carr and the mystery of his missing marbles

Former NSW Premier and Foreign Minister Bob Carr calls for a halving of immigration.

Over the past few months I have wondered whether the former Foreign Minister and New South Wales’ longest serving Premier, Bob Carr has lost his marbles.

At a dinner late last year, the former foreign minister lambasted the Israeli government for “Judaising and eliminating the Arab character” of Jerusalem and accusing it of “seducing and bribing parliamentarians” with “paid overseas trips to Israel.”

The former lion of the NSW Right almost fell over backwards extolling NSW Greens senator Lee Rhiannon for her verve and persistence in attacking Israel. For the sake of his sweet tooth, one hopes Bob Carr does not bear a fondness for Max Brenner chocolates.

The business of prohibiting Labor MPs from attending paid study leave tours of Israel -- the seduction and bribery of which Carr spoke of -- was roughly binned at the NSW State Labor Conference over the weekend as it should have been.

A motion proposed by the Labor Friends of Palestine group to ban “an ALP officer, MP or Young Labor member” from accepting “a paid trip from the Israel Lobby” while the Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu “continues settlements, refuses a Palestinian state [and] brutally mistreats Arab residents of the West Bank” did not see light of day.

A sensible motion proposed by federal shadow communications spokesman, Jason Clare, essentially endorsing the status quo was passed on the numbers.

The NSW Right has been hobbled in recent times from too many self-inflicted injuries to count here but even at a limp it continues to hold sway and the Left’s obsession with banning things and restricting people’s freedom of movement and association, not to mention its creeping and murky anti-Semitism, got the heave-ho.

Carry on.

More evidence of marbles going missing was presented yesterday when Carr felt the need to get to his feet again, clear his throat and call for halving the immigration rate as Australia’s population officially hit 24 million.

Citizen Carr can do and say as he pleases of course even when it comes to his frequent neo-Malthusianist ramblings but the old master of political communications would have known his remarks would draw headlines and comment and not all of them good in terms of Australia’s social cohesion.

By the way, when I mention Malthusianism, I am not contemplating the thoughts of a former AFL great. For the record, I always rated Mick as a coach.

Thomas Robert Malthus was a 19th Century cleric and social philosopher who postulated the first scare campaign over a population explosion. Malthus argued in his Essay on the Principle of Population that population growth expanded in times of plenty until the size of the population drained the available resources, leading to some vast human calamity -- the most common one being famine.

It seems an odd thing to panic about at a time where the global population was about one tenth of what it is today and that’s with Napoleon singularly doing his bit to keep the population down with 17 years of war and six million European dead.

Those who posit the Malthusian theory in some form or another ignore the fact that all famines invariably have political causes. The lack of available food is merely the symptom. Take a look at any famine you can think of from the Irish Potato Famine in the middle of the 19th Century to North Korea’s in the latter part of the 20th and you’ll see yes, a dangerous and deadly scarcity of resources but the root cause is, without exception, political failure.

Nevertheless Malthus’s zany theories continue to gather disciples in the here and now who, like Carr, promote apocalyptic visions of a sort of Bladerunner high-rise, multilingual future where we eke out a living and we may or may not be ruled by our robot overlords.

Carr’s most absurd statement, a dip of the lid to hyperbole was that Australia has a “third world style population growth rate.” But in September last year, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported a decline in Australia’s population growth and while migration was still the biggest contributor to population growth -- 173,100 more people migrated to Australia than left it over the year to March 2015 -- this was down 16 per cent on the previous year. In Western Australia net migration was down 71 per cent.

Carr continues to hint at a loss of living standards without presenting anything remotely described as evidence. The net declines in migration to Australia in recent years as reported by the ABS came with a warning from economists that economic growth would slow and housing prices would be affected. Anyone who didn’t believe them should take a look at state GDP growth and real estate prices in WA right now.

While calling for a halving of Australia’s immigration intake, Carr said yesterday that “I would run a very high refugee intake. Everything I say is compatible with an ambitious refugee intake. I think we have got an obligation, a humanitarian obligation. I don’t argue with that all.”

I agree with Carr that Australia should have a high refugee intake but it remains bizarre to deny around 100,000 people coming to Australia under a raft of other immigration programs every year who can pretty much look after themselves from the get go.

In his heyday, Carr was one of the smartest political operators I’ve come across and he has the runs on the board to prove it. There seems little doubt that Carr has lost his marbles. The question now is whether the finder could be bothered handing them back.