QUALITY NOT QUANTITY

A PURELY QUANTITATIVE APPROACH TO POLITICS IS THE CRUX OF OUR CURRENT PROBLEMS

By Trevor Tolstoy

Conservative commentator Peta Credlin recently confirmed the worst kept secret in Australia. That is, that the country is run according to the mass-migration demands of Big Business and the Treasury with little regard for social cohesion or any other wider concerns. As Credlin reiterates, we are not “being run according to any cogent plan”.

Indeed, Australia is little more than a population Ponzi into which a ceaseless steam of immigrants are funnelled to obscure our failings. As the article notes, three quarters of a million migrants are due this year and next. A number that follows the 240,000 who arrived each year in the decade prior to Covid. Figures that are shockingly high with reference to our historical average and global migration rates per capita; with Australia now the world leader in per-capita immigration. 

Not only are our migrants plentiful, they’re thoroughly diverse. In contrast to our Anglo-European origins, any notion of natural affinity is ignored as we source migrants from all over of the world. As Home Affairs data shows, our migration program is dominated by Asia and the Subcontinent: India, China, Nepal and the Philippines are all in the top five, while Britain, New Zealand and South Africa the only Western nations in the top ten. A complete inversion of natural law, yet one’s that’s now par for the course.

Why is this done? Largely for the not unjustifiable imperative of fuelling the economy and avoiding a recession. As Credlin recalls “I will never forget sitting in a discussion with senior ministers hearing Treasury officials explain that the best way to get economic growth over 3 per cent was to boost immigration because each extra worker added to the size of the economy.”

Constant immigration - with three quarters of our growth to come from mass migration - is thus the easy way to inflate the economy and maintain the illusion of a soundly-based society. It also helps our politicians avoid much-needed reform and the deeper question of ideological failure. As Credlin adds, for our elite: “ever higher migration [is] a way for reform-shy governments to keep delivering economic growth.”

Thus the only plan our brightest policy minds can conjure is to flood the country with migrants ad infinitum. An outcome that harms ordinary Australians through the rising congestion, house prices and social fracture it engenders, but one that is crucially supported by our political elite and the usual interests.

Who these interests are is easily apparent. As Credlin notes: “Universities are a massive lobby for higher migration via the overseas students who have become their business model.” Big Business is too as the “higher supply of labour keeps wages lower than they otherwise would be” while the growing population fuels demand for goods and services. Nor should we omit the property sector either - a group that’s so blatantly self-interested it’s hardly worth mentioning.

Still, a strong economy isn’t an unreasonable goal: so what’s the problem? The main issue is that by making quantitative considerations your sole criterion you ignore the crucial import of quality in political life. Simply, we have focused for far too long on economic quantity with little regard for harmony and related notions of quality.

The only thing that has mattered has been economic growth. While growth qua growth does solve a lot of problem, as Spectator Editor Fraser Nelson confirms, it’s moronic to assume it doesn’t come with an array of negative effects.

An obvious one is crime. As is evident, many of the groups we’ve imported under the aegis of economics or asylum are vastly overrepresented in our crime statistics. The Sudanese, for instance, are the most crime-prone group in the country: imprisoned at a rate four times the Australian average and double the second-placed group, The Somalis.

Aside from the Romanians, all our major offenders hail from outside our European heritage. Pacific Islanders such as the Tongans and Samoans are jailed well above the average rate. Other more distant groups like the Colombians, Vietnamese and Lebanese are also incarcerated in excess of European migrants and the native-born.

And the crimes committed by Islamic immigrants could fill an essay in itself. It was only last week in fact that Melbourne experienced yet another car attack by a man of Muslim descent. An incident that comes in the wake of the 2017 car attack - committed by an Afghan refugee - and the 2018 death of restaurateur Sisto Malaspina, stabbed to death by a Somali migrant.

A related issue is the effect immigration has on our workplaces and the labour market. In contrast to the usual propaganda that Australia is only importing nuclear scientists or neurosurgeons, the reality is that the majority of our migrants are poorly skilled.

As recent figures show, about three quarters of our migrants are low skilled. Or to put it in numerical terms, of the two million or so visas handed out over the last decade, around 1.4 million of them were low-skilled. This mere fact is a major reason why real wages have declined and why there’s an increasing third-world ambience of incompetence and decline.

Yet even skilled migrants pose problems. To quote Credlin again, the reality of our migration system is: “that most so-called skilled migrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds are not working in their area of supposed skills five years after arriving; once here, they often end up working as cleaners, carers, waiters and drivers.”

If our migrants aren’t in work, they’re on welfare. As is noted above, our immigration program costs the taxpayer over $13 billion per year. A figure which is most heavily borne by our two most populous states and which worsens the further each migrant is from our Anglo-European core. Humanitarian visas, for instance, cost the country more than four times the amount that partner visas do.

This is a common sense and historically-accurate observation, yet it’s one that’s now taboo. Nevertheless, it is the reality and it’s noted overseas as well. Denmark, for instance, tightened its migration regime in large part because of what a fiscal drain it was. As this 2021 article notes, in contrast to Western migrants - who are a fiscal positive - non-Western migrants are a negative for the Danes, draining “31bn kroner ($4.9bn)” from the Danish treasury or 1.4% of GDP.

Islamic immigrants are particularly penurious: with Migrants “from 24 Muslim countries” accounting “for 50% of the non-Westerners, but 77% of the drain.” This is also without considering the social impact that Islamic immigration brings, as nearby Sweden - the Rape Capital of Europe - has come to learn.  

The effects of immigration on education are another undeniable ill. Not only is there the well-known story of our declining results, with our shrinking NAPLAN scores and PISA drop there for all to see, there are the subsidiary impacts it has as well.

Australia, for example, now has some of the least-disciplined classrooms in the world. A phenomenon that has led to widespread teacher burnout, the noted drop in results, and a mass exodus from the profession. Teachers are even assaulted now in our schools. A result of which, of course, are the teacher shortage seen across our states.

Things aren’t any better in the schoolyard either. Indeed, schools are now the site of knife possession and the associated stabbings. A problem that continues outside the school gates as a growing cohort of children engage in inter-ethnic violence out in the community. The killing of Pasawm Lyhym, stabbed to death outside a bus stop, is just the latest in a series of such incidents in Melbourne alone. 

As all this shows, demographic diversity - our ostensible greatest strength - is a failure on any number of levels. It increases crime. It enables inter-ethnic violence. It assaults our teachers and stupefies our school. It even destroys productivity. In fact, indiscriminate immigration is the source of almost all our maladies, yet is never reported as such.

An obvious solution would be the reprioritisation of homogeneity. This does not mean an explicit return to the White Australia Policy - those days are long gone - but it does mean a largely Eurocentric immigration program and an end to the lie that what we now have is any way good.

For those who query such a move, how can anyone not view modern Australia as a disaster? How is life in the heterogeneous West in any way better than homogenous Japan or Hungary? How is our liberal order anything other than a failed program that’s increasingly dangerous and an obvious example of a decline?

As for the practicalities, the required reforms are surely not beyond the wit of our better minds. And with nations such as Hungary and Japan, we have extant examples from whom we can learn.

What we can’t afford though is to continue as we are. We can no longer be a nation in which the common good is held hostage to a cadre of cynical elites. We can’t be a country where pedestrians are run over by an imported element brought in to boost the profits of certain sectors. The days of citizens being collateral damage for a political elite that views our society through the narrow lens of GDP clearly have to end.