C’mon, we’re better than this
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton made his Budget Reply speech last Thursday night. In his speech, he claimed a Coalition Government he led would have reduced permanent migration from 185,000 in the next year to 140,000. Telling ABC’s 7.30 immediately after the speech
“It’s not just housing. People know that if you move suburbs, it’s hard to get your kids into school, or into childcare. It’s hard to get into a GP because the doctors have closed their books. It’s hard to get elective surgery. These factors have all contributed to capacity constraints because of the lack of planning in the migration program.”
Dutton also would claimed he would implement a two-year ban on foreign investors and temporary residents purchasing existing homes in Australia
So, his cunning plan is to reduce demand for new homes, schools, roads, health care and so on.
Except – it won’t.
The permanent migration figure in the budget is only part of the story. In 2019, the Morrison Coalition Government – with Dutton as Home Affairs Minister (and responsible for immigration numbers) – was going to reduce the number of permanent migrants from 190,000 people per annum to 150,000 people per annum. Writing for the ABC’s website, Laura Tingle points out that
… the very same 2019 budget papers were forecasting that net overseas migration would be 271,700 in 2019 (compared to 190,000 permanent arrivals) before dropping ever so marginally to 271,300 in 2020 and then to 263,800 by 2022 (despite the cut of 30,000 permanent places a year).
But Dutton had an answer for that, according to Tingle
Dutton told Radio 2GB on Friday that “at the moment … the government’s predicting 528,000 this year” for net overseas migration.
Actually, no. That’s the figure for 2022-23 in the budget papers, which say that in the financial year just ending, net overseas migration has already fallen back to 395,000.
It is predicted to fall to 260,000 in 2024-25 (a number Dutton described as “pretty dodgy”) and then to about 235,000. (Both numbers notably also less than those forecast in 2019).
Trent Wiltshire, the deputy director of migration and labour markets at the Grattan Institute, said that if the cuts fall on the family intake it “won’t do too much to the migration numbers in the short term because they’re already here on temporary visas, and will stay on temporary visas” for longer.
Simon Kuestenmacher, writing in The New Daily also suggests a cut in the permanent migration target number won’t do much to assist the scarcity of homes for people to live in because it isn’t the problem
The narrative is simple. How foolish were we to take in record numbers of migrants during a nationwide housing shortage?
No context is provided regarding last year’s record intake. The growth was exclusively driven by international students. All other visa categories were below pre-pandemic averages.
We let in so many international students in a single year because they weren’t able to come in the years prior due to our national lockdowns and the prolonged Chinese lockdowns.
This was pent-up demand and won’t be repeated. The spots for international students are now filled and we will bit by bit, and automatically, reach pre-pandemic levels.
So – Dutton is wrong again.
There are two problems here – Dutton is using a megaphone to misrepresent facts. Reducing the permanent migrant target number in the budget will do nothing to increase the number of homes available in Australia. As a former Minister in a government, Dutton should know this. So he’s either had absolutely no clue what he was doing when he was the Home Affairs Minister (which is concerning) or cynically using the plight of certain groups of people that have chosen to hopefully call Australia home to gain an advantage (which apparently is LNP policy and racist).
As Karen Middleton suggests in The Guardian
It was all straight from focus groups and from the Howard government’s old Crosby-Textor playbook. Find out what the people are complaining about and repeat it back to them, with sympathy and volume.
It was the verbal version of a colour-coded spreadsheet, cross-referencing important constituent groups and key demographics the coalition needs to win over, with focus-group data on what people say they care about and especially what worries them.
Certainly there is a conversation to be had about migration to Australia and the effects on the provision of services to all of the community. But the conversation isn’t as easy as reduce one component of a migration policy and all our problems will be solved. While Pauline Hanson has been trading on racism since the 1990’s (and at one time the Liberal Party de-selected her as a candidate because of her stated beliefs). Dutton is attempting to ‘blow the racist dogwhistle’ by calling for simplistic solution rather than make a genuine contribution.
It seems that politics still has the mental scars from John Hewson’s attempt to introduce a GST and reform the tax system and Bill Shorten’s attempt to reduce some overly generous concessions made to investors. A case in point being the brouhaha over the $300 being given to everyone with an electricity account in the Federal Budget. There is always some example the politicians and media can expose that don’t need the handout (despite the overwhelming evidence that a lot of people do). Rather than asking question in Parliament and in the media why someone with lots of money should get the assistance – wouldn’t the better option to use the advantages of your position in life to suggest that if you don’t need the money, make a matching donation to Lifeline, Vinnies, or some other group that you believe provides genuine help to those that are less well off?
We shouldn’t be kicking the can down the road by supplying simplistic solutions to complex questions as Dutton is attempting to do here. Yes the housing shortage is real, as is the need for universities to earn research funding from international students, the need for immigrants to provide labour in those fields where there are shortages and the desire by many people (most of whom are in the country already) to settle permanently and have their own roof over their heads.
While might resonate with the ‘Sky after dark’ crowd, Dutton’s refusal to open a discussion on all the reasons for a housing shortage in his budget reply speech is telling. It generally takes longer than a 15 second news grab to explain the reasons for a problem and a preferred solution successfully. If Dutton had a real answer or a willingness to arrive at rational and responsible solutions to a host of problems in Australia he should have provided it on Thursday night instead of the speech full of marketing slogans and soundbites.
We should expect better than this.
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Return to home pagePolitical theory is old study, and good works exist to enlighten us, even the dark types like 1984 or Soylent Green, etc. But the dirty types, e g., Crosby Textor and similar, use the base of ignorant instinct to see what numbers can be conjured up to harness negative energy and get a desired result. Peter Duckwit-Futton does have negative energy, and was once a leading bumkicker, liberty depriver and well trained misfit. Can the Australian voter see more clearly on matters raised? Housing, immigration, finance, health issues, legal points, all seem to be well above his tiny ability range and achievement. He is a committed, instinctive dud, and is unfit to be in publc life. But anyone can have a go, be a front, mouthpiece, skirmisher, and, donor interest, patron recruitment, supporter enlistment, ranks and files of whiners, hansonites, haters, baiters, swamp dwelling anti-intellectuals abound. Hoo-bloody-ray. Straya wins , (but what?) If there was a devil, a cannibal type, Dutton might become a skidmark on the undies in hell.
Claiming he will stop investor funding to this Country for 2 years, is not just political, but hypocritical.
The FRIB Foreign Review investment board, who are responsible for reviewing all international purchases in this Country, which is then handed to the Treasurer of the day, to either sign off on, or stop the purchase, by deciding it’s not in Australia’s interest, at least that’s how it is meant to work.
China England America and Singapore were some of the biggest investors in this Countries infrastructure, during the Abbott Turnbull Morrison years, including Cattle Sheep and Dairy farms, as well as commercial and Residential property purchases.
Rhinehart along with a consortium of Chinese investors, win the bid for Australia’s largest Cattle Station Kidman in N Queensland. This despite a Superannuation consortium representing Australians, made a bid, but was ignored.
Darwin and Newcastle Ports have been leased to China, each for around 100 years, and 98 years, that is absolute madness by the NT CLP and NSW Liberal Government.
And now Dutton is claiming to block overseas investment, seeing it as a vote winner, it’s straight out of Howard’s focus groups and from the Howard government’s old Crosby-Textor playbook. Find out what the people are complaining about and repeat it back to them, with sympathy and volume.
It was the verbal version of a colour-coded spreadsheet, cross-referencing important constituent groups and key demographics the coalition needs to win over, with focus-group data on what people say they care about and especially what worries them.
I find it hilarious that the potato headed loud mouth describes immigration figures as “pretty dodgy” when the rest of Australia thinks he is just that!
Dutton and the LNP haven’t got a plan. Just a pile of racial prejudice and simplistic bullshit overlaid by a thick layer of desperate lazy avoidance to feed the nostalgia of the ill-informed. It would drag us to the dark ages – quickly.
P Duddy and reality are two vastly different things. The former lives in LNP fantasy land.
As we already know only too well the Lieberals have always been about the announcement and not the details. Well Dutton made his announcement with his Budget response…………so we should not worry too much about the details.
Errghh.. on LinkedIn there are many in international education sector, including UK and US, despairing at these media and political obsessions on all things ‘immigration’ and presently international education; systemic over past generation since Howard’s rise, along with Murdoch & RW MSM consolidation, fossil fuel Atlas-Koch Network i.e. IPA, CIS etc. and Tanton Network (in US shares donors with Koch) i.e. SPA, TAPRI and informing RW media.
Fact is while most in RW MSM inc ABC, are science, data and analytically illiterate, they are easily astroturfed, duped or confused on faux demographic, immigration ‘research’ or ‘analysis’ produced by others, too often with a white nativist and social Darwinist slant, using techniques of climate science denial to misrepresent data (ABS pop’n data has according to one data type ‘the integrity of custard’), and PR.
Aside from the misunderstanding and ignorance of slippery definitions, the outcome is always the same (like the UNPD), inflate headline numbers of population or immigration and temporary residents, mislabelled as ‘immigrants’ (described by some as ‘post 1970s’).
PR dog whistling tactics direct from former ZPG dec. white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton (admired white Oz etc.), personified by e.g. Bannon and Farage, who said that (paraphrasing loosely) ‘we need to get people talking about immigrants (negatively)’ and ‘we need a clear Anglo-European majority to rule’.
His publishing arm TSCP was described by SPLC as ‘John Tanton, the racist founder and principal ideologue of the modern nativist movement. TSCP puts an academic veneer of legitimacy over what are essentially racist arguments about the inferiority of today’s immigrants.’
Locally it’s targeting short term NOM temporary noise but ignoring the long term trends i.e. 7+ million boomers and oldies clearing the decks till mid century; ‘the big die off’ and ‘great replacement’ (by more diverse, urban and educated) as we become less skip and more Eurasian.
By coincidence a friend of Tanton (like he was), Peter Brimelow is also a former colleague (National Review) and friend of Tony Abbott’s boss John O’Sullivan at the Danube Inst. in Budapest (partnered with Koch’s anti-Ukraine/EU Heritage Foundation) who is also Quadrant’s Euro correspondent; according to Media Matters & NYT, Brimelow like Abbott is now, was employed by Fox News.
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/if-you-are-business-fox-news-you-are-hook-its-white-nationalism
Here’s an example of O’Sullivan’s work in Quadrant, supporting Brimelow’s webiste VDare (named after first English baby in US) under the guise of ‘freedom of speech’ and describing it as ‘small mom-and-pop business’; more diplomatic than how others in the US would describe it
The people who will vote for Dutton and the current members of the LNP are incapable of understanding this post. I doubt there is any federal labor pollie with the skills to explain 2353’s post to the autocue journalists of the morning shows.
But we can all understand dutton’s drivel.
His clear concise message is enough to make “We should expect better than this”, absolutely as silly as the two election eve idiots. hewson’s birthday cake and little billy’s tax grab.
Why would any pollie, have a read of the bandit on the budget to see what is expected, not try to take votes from Labor
LNP SOP: when all else fails, pick a scapegoat!
Alan Austin, writing in the “Independent Australian” (20/5/2024), an interesting article, “Mainstream media fabricates disgraceful lies about Labor’s Budget” blows apart the nonsense of the Opposition which is just the same old, same old small government, low taxes and lacking in details.
“The Australian Financial Review Review (AFR) was satisfied with the Budget delivered by the Coalition Treasurer Frydenberg in March 2022. The deficit was $79.8 billion, which followed the worst-ever deficit the previous year of $134.2 billion.
Net debt was $631.5 billion, which was 27.6% of GDP — close to the all-time high – and had blown out by $279.9 billion in three years, the worst result on record.”
“On the table of 116 balances monitored by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Australia ranked an appalling 91st.”
Jim Chambers’ Budget two years later – much worse?
Our Budget position was ranked by the IMF 24th – up from that humiliating 91st.
Alan Austin has a table for Australian Budget outcomes for 2016, 2022 and 22024. The Coalition’s results pale into pathetic failure compared with Labor’s strength.
Mainstream media is full of “disgraceful lies”. Read Austin’s article for details.
Angus Taylor’s reply to Labor’s Budget was pathetic.