Australia and Canada: what cost cultural diversity?

As O’Connor says:

Local and even national newspapers run a depressing spiral of puff pieces about how we are desperately short of skilled and willing workers - alternately with pieces about how we are desperately short of projects to provide employment. The intended solution is of course an endless cycle (or spiral) of increasing population and increasing construction. If only politicians could give Australia the construction industry its population needs, rather than the population its construction industry would like.

O’Connor cites Australia’s Anglo-Celtic property system for fuelling the drive to: “fill the country with people” by rewarding private speculation in land. He says:

By contrast, the nation’s capital, Canberra, was built on a French-style system, with the government resuming land from farmers at fair but moderate prices, auctioning it as cheaply as possible, and using the profit it couldn’t help making to provide roads, schools, services and an elegantly planned layout. Canberra remains one of the world’s most livable cities, and (for the developers who control much of Australia’s politics) an embarrassing proof that there is a better way.

To footnote this observation it should be noted that Australian population sociologist Sheila Newman has ably documented the relationship between the British property system and the population growth lobby on the one hand, and the French property system and the absence of any meaningful lobby for growth in France on the other hand.

Students of Canadian civic politics know that developers virtually own city councils. What sinister role do they play behind the scenes in framing federal immigration policy or influencing it?

The Urban Futures Institute, a high profile Vancouver-based think tank, is a consistent cheerleader for massive immigration. Its mouthpiece was formerly “demographer” David Baxter who couched his arguments in demographic statistics to prove that he was in possession of a crystal ball, in fact had no credentials as a demographer. He was merely a front man for the real estate industry which fully funds the institute. He was guaranteed an interview by every media outlet when occasion demanded it.

Has any voice of caution or restraint been raised against this mad rush to ecological oblivion? Well there was the Whitlam Labor government of 1972-75 which reacted to the first global oil shock by limiting immigration and population growth. Then the Australian Academy of Science made a major public statement in 1994 that advised that Australia’s population not exceed 23 million and that immigration be half of what it was during the Hawke-Keating era.

The Science Council of Canada issued a similar report in 1975 when it warned that Canada’s population should not go beyond 30 million. The government responded by abolishing the Science Council and then proceeding along a path that saw the land of frozen tundra, lakes and mountains fill up one-fifth of its Class 1 farmland with subdivisions and become a nation of 33 million with the fastest growth rate in the G8 group.

The Australian Democrats came out in favour of zero-net-migration, but the political culture was poisoned. Under the Hawke-Keating Labor governments of 1983-1996 Australia was essentially a “plutocratic democracy” where voters were presented with a Hobson’s choice between parties who were “servants of business-growth lobbies”. While cognisant of conservationist sensibilities, “Hawke dared not offend the growth lobby”.

But even the large immigrant communities were among the 73 per cent of voters who in 1991 said immigration levels were too high, or the 71 per cent in 1996 who held to this opinion. Again, Canadians have affected consistent opposition to immigration in the same proportions, but like Australians, have been presented with a solid parliamentary front in favour of a policy they detest.

But nevertheless, given the scale and persistence of this discontent Labor’s spin-doctors needed to give the old myth of Australia as an empty land a make-over. There was no farmland available and urban land prices were beyond reach, so alright then, it would no longer be Australia’s manifest destiny to build a “great” nation but rather a “diverse” one.