Wow. And you thought the punters had no political power. Scott Morrison’s change of tune on population growth – following on the heels of NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian – will please a lot of ordinary voters and enrage big business.
Be clear on this: almost to a man or woman, the nation’s business people, economists, Coalition politicians and Labor politicians have long believed in high rates of immigration, going back to the days of “populate or perish”.
They still do. They’ll have one dismissive, contemptuous word for the Liberal Party’s seeming backflip – “populism”.
By contrast, the public has long had reservations about immigration, going back to Chinese joining the gold rush and, as the movie Ladies in Black reminds us, to post-war resentment of “reffos” (not to mention dagoes and wogs).
It’s quite possible Gladys had a word in the ear of Scott, but I have no doubt both are reacting to results from their party’s private polling and focus groups. (If so, Labor politicians would be getting a similar message.)
That would explain their changed thinking on the topic. Their sudden sensitivity to popular opinion may be explained also by the proximity of elections in Victoria, NSW and federally.
Morrison is nothing if not direct. He’s left no doubt that this is a Sydney and Melbourne special. In the reduction in the size of the annual national permanent migration program he says he expects to emerge from the review, NSW and Victoria may wish to have fewer migrants, while other states may wish to have more.
Whether such picking-and-choosing is practically possible will be a matter for the experts to debate. Sydney and Melbourne are natural entry points of migrants. They have more jobs going, and immigrants are more likely to have relatives, friends and communities already established there. The two big cities’ businesses are likely to want to sponsor more skilled workers.
Before we leave elections, a cautionary tale from the 2010 federal election. Early that year, Kevin Rudd brought forward the next Intergenerational Report, showing the population was projected to reach 36 million by 2050. Rudd proudly proclaimed himself a Big Australia man – which, among other benefits, would give Australia (and him) more clout at international forums.
Then came the backlash. By the time of the election in July, both Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott were loudly proclaiming their opposition to Big Australia.
But here’s the point: after Gillard’s election in 2010 and Abbott’s in 2013, nothing was heard again about the evils of Big Australia. Immigration continued on its merry way.
If the public has always had reservations about immigration, what’s brought matters to a head?
Again, Morrison is direct. Though population growth has played a key role in our economic success, he says, “I also know that Australians in our biggest cities are concerned about population. They are saying: enough, enough, enough.
“The roads are clogged, the buses and trains are full. The schools are taking no more enrolments. I hear what you are saying. I hear you loud and clear.”
So, in a word, resentment over congestion has brought simmering disapproval to a rolling boil.
But I suspect there’s a further factor.
Because the establishment’s enthusiasm for high immigration has always been at odds with the public’s instincts, there was for many years a tacit agreement between both sides of politics not to wake up the question of immigration.
Want to know why this nation of immigrants has never had a formally established population policy? That’s why. (I know because once, during the Fraser government’s time, I wrote in my naivety that we needed a great big debate about immigration and population. The immigration minister immediately slapped me down, almost accusing me of racism.)
That bipartisanship has broken down as politicians realised there were cheap votes to be had by echoing the public’s objection to “too many Asians”. When asylum seekers started arriving by boat, it was on for young and old between the parties.
John Howard allowed very high levels of immigration during his almost 12 years in office – the population was growing by 2 per cent a year at the end of his reign – but the public’s disapproval never boiled over.
Why not? Perhaps because traffic congestion wasn’t as bad as it is today. But my theory is that, while coping with the genuine problem of boat people, Howard also used them to draw the public’s attention away from high levels of conventional immigration. Sometimes you even hear political candidates claiming its boat people who are clogging the roads.
But now there are no boat people arriving – not, we belatedly discover, because none are setting out, but because of our navy’s success in turning them back – this diversionary tactic is no longer available. The voters’ ire turns back to ordinary immigrants.
But what of the much-touted economic benefits of immigration? Business people want a bigger population because having more people to sell to is the easiest way to increase their profits. But that doesn’t necessarily leave you and me better off.
The traditional fear that immigrants take our jobs is wrong – they add about as much to the demand for labour as to its supply.
Immigration does slow down the ageing of our population, but most of the other efforts to show how much benefit it brings the rest of us rest on economic modelling exercises using convenient assumptions. I hae ma doots.