Do you get the feeling we're becoming a more selfish nation? While other
countries were pitching in, we hesitated until this week to send
experts to help stem the outbreak of Ebola. Sending people to risk their
lives in wars doesn't seem a problem, but to send people for
humanitarian reasons is asking too much when their personal safety can't
be guaranteed.
This comes on top of our decision to slash the planned
increase in official overseas aid. Sorry, but we just can't afford to
be so generous. Others may look on Australia as among the richest
countries in the world, but they don't understand we have our own
problems.
We're running a budget deficit, and will be for many
years yet. Borrowing money to cover gifts to poor foreigners hardly
makes sense. And don't try telling me there are other, less-deserving
people whose assistance could be cut.
As Joe Hockey has explained,
our top income-earners are already being taxed too heavily to cover our
bloated and unsustainable government spending, so this budget was
designed to spare the lifters and require the leaners to bear a fairer
share of the burden. And how could we make our own pensioners and sick
people tighten their belts while we're being so generous to foreigners?
Hugh
Mackay, the social commentator, tells us we've reversed the original
meaning of the saying that charity begins at home. It used to mean don't
demand charity of others until your own giving is up to scratch, but
now it means we shouldn't be helping outsiders while any of our own
remain in need.
But nowhere is our lack of charity more evident
than in our hard hearts towards boatpeople. How dare they turn up on our
doorstep uninvited, expecting us to put them up?
In the past, when
asylum seekers were found to be genuine refugees, with a "well-founded
fear of persecution" should they return to their own country, they were
allowed to stay and included in our annual quota for "humanitarian"
immigration.
For years we've discharged our obligation to help
with the world's asylum problem by accepting just under 14,000 refugees a
year for settlement in Australia. If that sounds like a lot, it
represents 0.06 per cent of our population of 23.7 million. It's little
more than 7 per cent of our total permanent settler intake of 190,000 a
year.
For some reason - troubled conscience, perhaps - the Gillard
government upped the humanitarian intake to 20,000 a year in 2012-13,
but fortunately the Abbott government has returned it to fewer than
14,000.
Much more affordable. Our loathing of boatpeople is so
intense that we tend to think of them as nothing more than a drain on
the public purse. And for the first few years that's true.
But in a
speech Professor Graeme Hugo, a demographer from the University of
Adelaide, delivered to the annual conference of the Kaldor Centre for
International Refugee Law in Sydney on Monday, he argued that
humanitarian settlers eventually make a significant economic
contribution.
Consistent with our more self-interested approach to
immigration, these days we favour those who possess the skills -
including language skills - of which we're most in need. Compared with
these people, refugees are unpromising material for building the
economy.
Some may have mental health issues arising from their
treatment in their home countries, their experiences in transit or the
kindly reception they receive from us. Many have low levels of literacy
and limited skills and qualifications; few have great proficiency in
English.
Those who do have qualifications will have lost their
documentation, or won't have them recognised. They know little about our
labour market, they often lack family networks in Australia, their
family is split up and they bring no savings with them.
So, yes,
in their early years many refugees aren't in the labour force and, among
those who are, unemployment is high - higher than for other immigrants.
Many of the younger ones you may expect to be working are still in the
education system, catching up.
And yet their participation in the
labour force rises with the length of time they've been here, converging
towards the participation rate of the Australia-born, Hugo says. And
their second generation end up having higher participation levels than
Australia-born. They're also more highly qualified than Australia-born.
The
humanitarian intake has other attractions. Refugees tend to be younger
than other migrant groups, with a higher proportion of children, meaning
they make a greater contribution to slowing the ageing of the
population.
Their fertility is slightly higher. Predictably, their
rate of returning home is very low compared with other migrants, and
the proportion willing to settle in regional areas - almost 18 per cent -
is high and rising.
Personal experience and common sense suggests
all migrants who uproot themselves to move to Australia have a fair bit
of get-up-and-go, with a determination to make the most of the new
opportunities for themselves and, particularly, their kids. Hugo says
people who move tend to be among the risk-takers.
Migrants tend to
be more entrepreneurial - more likely to start their own businesses -
and there's increasing evidence humanitarian settlers contain a
disproportionate share of entrepreneurs.
On the BRW Rich List in
2000, five of the eight billionaires came from a refugee background. I
wonder how generously they gave to charity.
