Importing a Tasmania’s worth of people every year

Immigration is the sort of issue that Australians are told not to talk about. And yet, a few weeks ago, tens of thousands did more than that.

The March for Australia rallies were derided as neo-Nazi gatherings, but television footage told a more nuanced story: ordinary Australians voicing their frustration at housing shortages, clogged roads, and stretched services.

One marcher put it strongly: 'Love migration, okay. I'm from a family of immigrants as well. The point is how many do you bring into the country? Where do you house them?'

But there was some darkness. In Melbourne, Thomas Sewell, leader of the Nazi National Socialist Networks, took the microphone. Many other rallies had NSN members either speaking or present at the front of the crowd. The problem with all these marches is obvious: fringe leadership, opaque organisation, and no credibility.

Small wonder conservatives like Topher Field and Joel Jammal counselled people not to go.

And yet, despite the amateurism, people came. Tens of thousands of middle Australians, the sort of people for whom a footy grand final was probably the only mass gathering they'd ever attended.

The issue is real. Australia's immigration rate – 1.6 per cent of the population annually – is the highest in the OECD bar Luxembourg (a special case as tax havens attract an entirely different type of immigrant).

Each year we effectively import a Tasmania's worth of people, while building fewer houses than we need for those already here. The result? An economy that grows while the average citizen gets poorer, and a housing market that has become a battleground of young and old; and those with assets or an inheritance, and those without.

If Peter Dutton had campaigned on the issue at the last election he would have changed the map of Australian politics. He started off strongly and then backed right back.

While our polling showed immigration wasn't top-of-mind, it was linked to cost-of-living, and housing affordability which were. It was also the one driver of declining living standards squarely under Albanese's control. Deployed correctly it would have sheeted blame for the drop in living standards to the government.

I can understand why Dutton would have been nervous. Immigration is one of those subjects that the media and political classes insist cannot be discussed, and it has the potential to alienate migrant communities.

The government's outrage at 'racism' has been selective. Government members were part of the March for Palestine two weekends ago. This march included people chanting anti-Semitic slogans with some of them carrying flags associated with Hamas, and one holding a portrait of Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei.

Why the political attachment to high migration? Some of it is naïve idealism: the comfortable left thinks Australia must share its good fortune. Then there is the penance for Europeans having colonised the land. In some illogical way, original dispossession is made less worse by bringing in yet more settlers.

Added to that there is the cultural self-loathing that characterises the left. The 'other' is always better. Superior as our standard of life is to that of most other people, and the prime reason so many want to come here, it is said other cultures have 'so much to teach us'.

We've had over 50 years of the inculcation throughout political discourse, of multiculturalism, an idea that envelopes many of these themes. Rather than understanding our culture as pluralistic, a manifestation of freedom of thought, speech, and association centred on Anglo-Celtic antecedents, and Judaeo-Christian and classical Greek thought, our culture is said to be just one amongst many.

In its most benign form this theory says there is an Australian culture, but it has no special claim to be conserved or affirmed. Less benign is that Australia really has a culture that is in some way an average of all the cultures that have settled here, plus the Indigenous culture. Or that Indigenous culture has primacy, and all the rest are equally inferior.

Celebrating Australia's 'multicultural society' is a reflex phrase for people on all sides of the political debate wanting to plug a gap in a sentence, and when they do they import these concepts whether they mean to or not.

We have been rhetorically primed to accept high rates of indiscriminate immigration.

Then there are the economic 'benefits' immigration brings, particularly for a government that is bad at managing the economy manifesting itself in an empty boast that we've never had a recession for 35 years, apart from during Covid.

Then there is the electoral calculus that most of these new Australians tend to vote Labor. And it helps to keep the votes of those recent immigrants already here if you allow more of their friends and family over.

Bertolt Brecht, mocking East Germany's rulers after the 1953 uprising, quipped that if the people had 'let the government down', perhaps the government should 'dissolve the people and elect another'. That is exactly the logic of Labor's immigration policy: when existing voters tire of your failures, import fresh ones.

Immigration is too important to be left to fringe activists and too dangerous to be left in the hands of governments using it as a political tool. The policy should be simple: pause the intake until housing, infrastructure and services catch up. That's not xenophobia, it's common sense. And it's a message that can unite, not divide: from the newest arrivals to the original Indigenous colonisers of this land, all are affected by spiralling rents, unaffordable homes, and declining services.

Australians deserve a government that puts their needs first. If this one won't, then it needs to be dissolved as soon as possible, but that will only happen if there is a government in waiting that deserves to be elected.