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Why facts (voters) can’t get a look-in against ‘Huge Australia’ groupthink

By Stephen Saunders - posted Thursday, 21 March 2024


Late 2022, Treasury held the Jobs and Skills Summit. 140 handpicked participants for Big (now Huge) Australia. No dissidents. Federal agencies and media weren't direct participants either.

The summit endorsed a 195,000 (now 190,000) "permanent" migration intake plus band-aids for "training" and "housing".

Albanese Labor romped to an unheard of 518,000 net-migration in 2022-23, probably 400,000 this year. Canada and Australia are world outliers, in the low-immigration OECD bloc.

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Sez Labor, mega migration's catching up for COVID (misleading). Not government policy (yeah right). Sorting visa backlogs (hilarious). Coalition had higher migration (nope).

Late 2023, Clare O'Neil released guru Martin Parkinson's Migration Strategy which boasted of generational reforms fixing a broken system and halving migration.

Stakeholders accept this abysmal propaganda. Or wouldn't undermine it publicly.

Their "conversation" ignores Albanese's 60% hike, on Rudd Labor's crazy 24-month immigration record based on his one-sided qualifications and immigration deals with ultra-nationalist Modi India.

They dine on Treasurer's talking points (budget surplus, inflation, cost of living "relief") and the perennial immigration fibs.

Like - we're "migration nation", importing "skilled" migrants, it's boosting "jobs and growth", better "planning" neutralises immigration, emissions shrink as population swells, immigration counteracts ageing, only racists oppose mass migration.

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Actual mass-migration impacts – historic productivity and per capita fails, struggling infrastructure and environment, collapsing household incomes and real wages, all-time rental crisis and housing unaffordability – are off the table.

Greens-Labor theatrics misrepresent housing as a wicked supply-problem. Hullo, wicked politicians have superheated the demand side with endless migration and tax incentives.

Who are these stakeholders?

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About the Author

Stephen Saunders is a former APS public servant and consultant.

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All articles by Stephen Saunders

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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