Ausbuy

Thinking Strategically About Immigration & Australia’s Future

October 31st, 2008

Australia has always been a country of immigrants. Even the aborigines were originally immigrants but in recent times the rate has increased as we move towards creating a modern progressive society. These immigrants brought with them a willingness to work but above all knowledge and skills from their country of origin. As a result of this influx Australia has never felt the need to invest the same amount in training as the other developed economies. Many will point to what we spend on education and dispute my statement. However, this confuses skills and education. You don’t learn toolmaking at university.

After World War II Australia built up a manufacturing industry based on immigrants leaving war-torn Europe. The £10 tourists were an investment in the future of Australia. Over the ensuring years this programme continued but despite this influx we still suffered from skills shortages as our major companies reduced their training budget and increasingly relied on migration into a fast-growing economy bringing the necessary skills. Unfortunately the growth in the mining industry and a worldwide shortage of certain skills highlighted problems. The critical importance of resources to the Australian economy was recognised and increases in skilled migration authorised.

The mining boom is now flattening and unemployment rearing its head. The cry for a reduction in immigration is growing among some politicians and media commentators as if skill shortages had suddenly vanished. In fact, the present economic turmoil makes some of these skills more important than ever. We must also remember that all recessions come to an end.

We can however question the skilled immigration programme and how it is applied. We do not seem to evaluate the true economic importance of the skills. Many companies regard the programme as a means of importing cheap labour from overseas and using them to beat down local wage rates. A recent article left me trying to work out the economic importance to Australia of Indian pastry chefs. We also do not want to add to Australia’s unemployment and welfare bill, which will rise anyway. We would therefore suggest the following:

• Reduce temporarily Australia’s non-skilled immigration.
• Redefine skills that are, even in today’s tough economic climate, necessary for Australia’s economy.
• Emphasise the importance of English skills. Many of our skilled immigrants are not able to use their skills through inability to communicate.
• Introduce and police a training levy to force major companies to invest in structured training. They complain but do little to help themselves. Our first duty is to Australians.
• Make increasing use of short-term visas with no automatic renewal. Many countries (including USA) use these.

We must recognise the importance of immigration to Australia, both historically and in the future, but it must be managed in Australia’s best interests. A falling Australian dollar may lead to a resurgence in the demand for Australian made products but we will need not only new technologies but also skills that we do not have. We must train our own citizens but we will also need people to do the training.

© Copyright - This document cannot be used without our express permission

These are Hot press! 3 comments.(View comments) Tell a friend

3 Comments »

1. i am also fustrated with not being able to buy Aussie made clothes. every thing is made in China these days and the quality is just cheap and nasty.
   no wonder we have become a throw away society.
   china is increasing it’s hold on everything aussie and our weak politicains will stand by and let it happen.
   we need a strong leader and one who is actually concerned for the average aussie family who is the back bone of the country today.i get continually fustrated with the way the country is heading, immigration,violence drugs alcohol etc it’s just getting out of control.

   Comment by fed up — April 10, 2009 @ 11:13 pm

2. Mass immigration has social, environmental and economic consequences for Australia.

   And while the social and environmental impacts have been widely commented on, the alleged economic benefits have carried the argument for bigger and bigger immigrant intakes.

   But are these benefits real - and do they flow to all Australians, or just a handful?

   Liberal and ALP governments have been assuring us for ever that economic growth will provide the answers. Growth will provide jobs and wealth for all Australians. Growth will allow us to afford environmental initiatives.

   But the reality is that economic growth can be achieved in any number of ways. All will deliver a growing GDP. After that, their effects differ dramatically.

   One of the easiest ways to boost GDP is to simply raise the population. This approach has the additional, dubious benefit of ‘dampening wages pressure’ - ie keeping wages low. No wonder it’s so widely supported by employer lobby groups.

   But it has drawbacks too. Spiralling house costs, overcrowding, environmental damage and reduced quality of life can all be directly attibuted to running immigration programs at unsustainably high levels.

   It’s time Australians recognised that true economic growth comes from technological and managerial innovation. This can achieve a steady improvement in living conditions without relying on population growth, but Liberal and ALP governments have found it easier to capitalise on population growth since the early 70’s.

   The CSIRO’s Professor Doug Cocks has estimated that Australia could sustainably run immigration programs with intakes of around 40,000 per annum. Contrast this to the recent 300,000 plus intakes run by Howard and Rudd. An intake of 40,000 would permit Australia to meet it’s international obligations with regard to refugees, bring in people with skills we genuinely need and still have some room for family re-unions.

   For far too long, immigration has been hi-jacked by special interest groups with agendas divorced from Australia’s national interest. Perhaps we should start listening to our scientists, rather than partisan lobby groups when we consider future intakes..
   .

   Comment by jingelic — November 11, 2008 @ 12:31 pm

3. I always become concerned when I see arguments for increasing the population of Australia, or any country for that matter. What is always forgotten is that we have already stripped the environment to the point where it cannot sustain itself and it bodes ill for humanity’s future. The Sustainable Population Australia newsletters are well worth reading in this regard and I put some views forward in these extracts from recent issues: -

   The latest projections from the Bureau of Statistics
   The latest population projections for Australia from the Bureau of Statistics. based on 2006 \ Census data are not encouraging. These projections show the changes in population that would occur if certain assumptions based on recent trends apply.. Three sets of assumptions have been modelled and the results indicate the population if these assumptions hold true. Model A uses a higher net overseas migration (220,000) than our latest figures (184,000)
   and a higher fertility rate (2.0) than we have today with raised life expectancy at birth values.

   These estimates of Australia’s population at year 2056 range from 30.9 million to 42.5 million.
   From the viewpoint of this organization, Series A projections are our worst nightmare with a population of 42.5 million in 2056. Series B reflects more closely current trends in fertility, life expectancy at birth and net migration. This could be described as ‘the Business as Usual Model’. Series C uses a lower Fertility rate and lower net migration with life expectancy values meeting current trends. Obviously this would be our preferred option. In the last two years Australia‘s growth rate increased from its average 1.3% to 1.5% with Net Overseas Migration overtaking Natural Increase as the major contributor, but both contributors to growth have increased. In 2006-07, there were 274,300 births and 134,800 deaths in Australia. This resulted in a natural increase of 139,500 people, while NOM contributed 177,600 people to Australia’s population.
   In contrast to the previous (2004) projections, no series shows a decline in Australia’s population before the end of the century. For Series C, deaths would outnumber births by 2048 giving a natural decrease in population but immigration more than makes up the decline and population growth simply increases at a slower rate. Natural decrease in Series B is only reached in the year 2101. The message is clear. Without a change in government policies or some natural calamity, Australia’s population growth is set to continue for a long time.
   Deniers of the Population Holocaust:
   The Monbiot Fallacy
   Extracted from Chapter 17 of Mark O’connor’s and Bill Lines forthcoming Book
   “Overloading Australia”.
   Related to denial is population-blindness. In early 2008 the British environmentalist, George Monbiot invented the Monbiot Fallacy. As a man who prides himself on recognising that economic growth is incompatible with preserving environments, Monbiot has long argued that
   total economic growth is a good surrogate for total environmental destruction. Granted that economists demand a minimum of 3% growth per year, he predicts massive destruction of the natural world by the year 2100. This seems right, since at that 3% rate we will see the world’s
   economy double four times — grow 16-fold. Yet current projections are that in that time the world’s population will only increase by half. Therefore, Monbiot suggests, that ‘economic growth this century could be 32 times as big an environmental issue as population growth.’ He thus feels justified in not being too bothered about Britain’s rapid population growth — and in hinting at unpleasant views of those environmentalists who are.

   Yet as we saw at the end of Chapter 5, even if the planet could provide such a quantity of services and products, there is no precedent for assuming that economic growth can owe so little to population growth. Existing statistics show population growth and growth in per capita consumption as almost equally important. In Australia for instance ― as John Coulter (President
   of SPA) pointed out to Monbiot ― over the past 25 years the economy has been growing at 3.2% while the growth of per capita GDP has averaged 1.9%. This indicates that, in terms of growth in environmental impact, 60% of the growth is due to rising per capita demand and 40% to increase in population. Monbiot has also scrambled the maths. Even on his figures, 16-fold economic growth divided by 1.5-fold population growth, means about 11-fold per capita growth: a ratio of about 1 to 7 between the two factors, not 1 to 32!

   A better way out of the Monbiot Fallacy is to argue thus: If the nature of our economy ensures a doubling of total consumption every 20 years or so for ever, then most hopes of saving the environment and warding off climate change are lost. The present population of the Earth, plus
   the increases in per capita consumption that economists will demand of them, is enough to doom the Earth. However if we are serious about fighting such runaway growth, then both the factors that drive it (population and per capita consumption) must be kept as low as possible. Granted that per capita consumption, even of necessities like energy and food, may need to be voluntarily pinched in, the larger the number of individuals to be supplied and fed, the less chance there will be of them agreeing to do so.

   Monbiot should also have considered the scenario where nature or lack of resources does the job for us — relieving the pressure on the environment but giving us the problem of human misery to alleviate. Imagine that peak oil bites sooner than expected, the economy goes into recession, there is so little fuel oil that private cars can run only by permit and homes can be heated only a few hours a day. Will not these privations be crueller for an expanded population than for a smaller one?
   Numbers matter.

   With my regards

   Arnold Ward

   Comment by Arnoldward — November 1, 2008 @ 12:13 pm

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL