Morrison knows nation can’t build itself

It is a tragedy that much of Scott Morrison’s political movement has turned against immigration.

It is a saving good fortune that Morrison himself is too smart, and has too strong a sense of the nat­ional interest, to capitulate to them altogether.

His notional reduction of 30,000 in the permanent migration program “cap” of 190,000 should mean no actual change in the number of people coming to Australia. For this year, we ­accepted 30,000 fewer people than the cap provided for.

This terminological slipperiness between a cap and a target is pretty meaningless. The idea that from the whole vast world we couldn’t find 190,000 people who would like to live in Australia, and would fit readily in a good skilled migration program, if we really wanted to, is of course ridiculous.

The truth is we are a grievously underpopulated nation in need of many more people.

We need them for our security, our economy, our future viability. The loss of the nation-building purpose on the centre Right is not the least part of its present crisis.

But politics requires management. It is smart of the Prime Minister to put some of the onus on determining numbers on the premiers. State governments are terrific hypocrites on all this. They fund their budgets on the basis of immigration — the housing industry, the stamp duty, all the property transactions they create. Then they fail to build infrastructure quickly enough and blame Canberra for too many migrants.

OK, Morrison is saying, you want the housing industry, you bear some of the responsibility for the numbers.

There is another way in which the national decrease of 30,000 is meaningless. If you’re feeling congested in your suburban train or bus, it makes no difference whether the person next to you is an Australian-born citizen, a permanent migrant, a tourist, a student or a Kiwi here under the special provisions across the Tasman.

Yet no one campaigns to cut the numbers of tourists or foreign students. We want their money and we rightly see their presence as a sign of our success. Cutting out 30,000 skilled immigrants because a Kiwi or a tourist is crowding your wave at Bondi or St Kilda is perfectly ridiculous. And 30,000 fewer people spread across the whole of Australia won’t make any difference anyway.

The big issue which dare not speak its name is the great community unease about Muslim immigration and the fear of terrorism. Figures on the Right cynically use this unease to attach a wholly unwarranted pall of suspicion over the entire immigration program. The truth is we built this nation on immigration and we need a big, continuing program for our economy and our security. Morrison’s speech contains killer statistics that make the case.

Without immigration, our lab­our force would start to shrink in absolute terms by 2020.

Think what that really means. The Australian nation would have passed peak power by 2020. Every strategic analyst worries that we may one day have to provide for our security with less comprehensive American support. Almost all the powers in our region are growing bigger and stronger — bigger economies, stronger militaries. Do we really think we can negotiate such an environment if our own national power is in decline? A declining labour market would mean fewer and narrower job opportunities and a declining economy.

The average immigrant is aged 26. Our average age nationally is 37. Our immigration program ­allows us to grow much richer, and economically much bigger, before we grow much older. This is not a Ponzi scheme unless you regard the whole of life as a Ponzi scheme.

Despite our magnificent success as a nation, there are key ­elements of development we have so far failed.

Apart from the Gold Coast, we haven’t built a single city since World War II. Our Soviet-style imposition of uniform high minimum wages and excessive regulation mean that depressed areas cannot achieve new bursts of growth through offering low-cost, pro-development localism — a combination that has seen booming growth in countless US ­locations.

The challenge is nation-­building. Immigration is not the problem; it is part of the answer.