In 1984, during the tenure of the Hawke Government, was when the agenda to both de-Europeanise and re-colonise Australia took flight. However, it wasn’t until the LNP won office in 2013, under Tony Abbott, that the concerted program of re-colonisation was significantly increased. Now, in 2023, under the Albanese government, it’s boosting matters further.
On February 18, 2022, I came across a small piece in The Australian by Jess Malcolm, informing us about an upcoming seminar to be conducted on March 8, in the regional Victorian town of Shepparton. Its purpose was to lay down the grand plans to “develop 20 places across regional Australia, into becoming thriving commercial hubs.” Those pushing this massive agenda were a high-powered collective of business entities, two states, and one federal politician. The latter was the then federal Minister for Regionalisation, Bridget McKenzie.
The key-business advocate attending that forum was the incorrigible and, indeed, treacherous bean-counting, economic rationalist, Jennifer Westacott, the CEO of the Business Council of Australia [BCA]. Representatives from other major business proponents in attendance were the Regional Australia Institute; Australia Food and Grocery Council, and Regional Capitals Australia.
Malcolm quotes Westacott saying, “You can’t have a strong Australia without strong regions. This means unlocking the untapped potential in the regions.”
However, the intrinsic element required to “untap this potential of developing regional Australia” requires importing millions of immigrants to fulfil this schedule. But, due to the tyranny of distance, where these places happen to be situated across this vast continent irrefutably means that, virtually all of the people who’ll apply for visas, which designate they must work in regional Australia, can only be second and third tier immigrants with low-skill levels.
This must be so, because there’s only a minuscule hope that, too many well-educated and highly-skilled immigrants (who emanate from bustling metropolises in Asia or the Subcontinent) will be remotely interested in settling in a small town like Parkes, Mildura or, God forbid, somewhere across the Top End of Australia.
Around 2012, backpackers from Europe, and Britain were first being appropriated by workers from Asia, and the Subcontinent, to undertake vital labour schedules to harvest crops in regional Australia. Two distinct facets of migrants are needed to facilitate Westacott and Co’s proposal at Shepparton to develop these 20 locations across regional Australia. One category is temporary migrants to work as farm labourers to harvest and pack crops.
From around 1980, until 2012, this catchment of workers fulfilling the vital labour requirements was aged between 19-26 and arrived from Europe, Britain and Ireland. They were otherwise referred to as backpackers.
However, over the past decade, working-visa arrivals in regional Australia are now overwhelmingly drawn from Asia and the Subcontinent. But these don’t compare to backpackers from bygone times. Hitherto, the legions of young people arriving from the UK and across Europe had pre-designated plans to travel the country and pay their way by fruit picking or the like. Their itinerary included a string of regional districts according to seasonal produce. This could be anywhere from Townsville in the north, to Toowoomba in the southeast of QLD, and down to the Riverina or across to Mildura. After working and travelling to different parts of Australia in three-to-twelve-month durations, they’d return home. Now, these ‘visitors’ stay indefinitely.
This situation came to pass under the former federal government generating a visa that designates that if someone was prepared to work 88 days in regional Australia meant they could then apply for their visas to be extended to stay on, and work in Australia for two years.
THE 88-STAYERS
In late 2012, ‘genuine’ backpackers from Britain and Europe were usurped by droves of South East Asians, Chinese, sub-continentals, and, South Pacific islanders. Their visa rules stated that if they worked for 88 days in regional districts, they could apply for a two-year extension. When they fulfilled their obligatory 88 days, they fled the farm districts and migrated to the big cities seeking employment.
Alas, these low-skilled migrants could only access the gig economy, working in nail salons, cleaning, or delivering food. Therefore, with odd exceptions, they’d always be impoverished earning merged incomes in the gig economy.
Westacott and Co now want families settling in regional Australia. The idea is that they’ll become economically bound to the regional areas, making it difficult to afford the high cost of city living. By cultivating them as ‘wage labour’ they are, to put it bluntly, indentured to the outlier towns and regions. Yet, the reasoning is even more exploitative, since it counts on their circumstance being an improvement from what they’ve left behind in the Punjab or the suburbs of south-east Asia. They’ll accept being shackled in a secluded regional Australian town with all its harsh realities.
Jennifer Westacott first uttered the term ‘Frontier Immigration’ in Shepparton on March 8, 2022, and has repeated it on several occasions.
Westacott is advocating for Australia to emulate the reconstruction program the United States initiated in the years following the Civil War. At that juncture, at least half the arrivals at Ellis Island and elsewhere were dispatched to the boondocks and hinterlands to establish communities; eventually giving rise to towns and cities that still exist today.
The indentured labour will be sourced from the subcontinent, and our neighbours to the north. Consequently, they will bring their diverse ethnocultural and non-Christian backgrounds to the fore, radically transforming our peripheral communities. Or, to put it another way, our regional centres will resemble Asian colonies.
Of course, the agenda to de-Europeanise Australia has already transpired and is vividly conspicuous in swathes of suburbs across Sydney and Melbourne. Collectively, non-Whites account for anything between 40 to a whopping 80 per cent of the residents in a collective of 120 suburbs, in the two largest metropolises of Australia. One of the most disquieting examples of transmogrification prevails in the suburb of Harris Park, in western Sydney.
The 2006 Census revealed the number of people claiming Indian heritage residing in Harris Park at 1.5 per cent. By 2019, this percentage had skyrocketed to become 60 per cent, and that number remained constant during Covid. However, since Australia’s borders were reopened nearly 18 months ago on November 3, 2021, the percentage of Indians residing in Harris Park has risen to now be more than 70 per cent.
In 2021, Parramatta Council ran a test by dubbing three streets in Harris Park “Little India”. Now, the Indians want the change to be permanent, as they’ve claimed the area as theirs. As such, they’re also campaigning to rename a dozen streets and parks across Parramatta City Council to reflect their Indian colony.
THE INLAND RAIL
In the first stage of this ambitious scheme to develop provinces in regional Australia, one million immigrants are mooted to arrive between 2024-2030. The bulk of the initial influx is destined for south-eastern Australia, on the Great Dividing Range. This will primarily be somewhere within the 1300 km corridor encompassing towns stretching from Toowoomba, Parkes, Wagga, Albury, and Shepparton. All of these areas are tethered directly or, indirectly, to the Inland Rail. Northern Australia is destined to become a massive renewable energy hub.
As for the Top End, stretching from Port Headland, to the Ord River-Lake Argyle region, and across into the NT, the Big Australia brigade aspires to establish six towns, to align with the massive renewable energy schemes. However, these endeavours won’t get going until at least 2027, which will eventually draw in hundreds of thousands of immigrants (along with their wives and children) to work in the massive solar-farm renewable energy schemes planned for the region. And, in the event, it becomes economically, and technically feasible to produce green hydrogen from fresh water, then the massive reserves of the Ord River-Lake Argyle will be exploited for this purpose. Additionally, agricultural ventures are also very much in the offing for the Ord region, too.
By 2035, the number of immigrants the Big Australia advocates are aspiring to draw into the country will exceed 2.5 million. References to this can be found in an article by the SMH’s Chief political correspondent, David Crowe on April 10, titled, ‘Labor doubles approvals of clean energy projects.’
Therein, Crowe tells us about several “clean energy projects” the Albanese government plans to subsidise in 5 states.
The most ruthless tale of re-colonisation prevails with what’s in store for the emerging Third City, in southwestern Sydney.
But the piece-de-resistance is very much ‘separate’ from the plans of developing regional Australia, earmarks the emerging Third City in southwestern Sydney. Essentially, the Third City will stretch along a 23 km corridor running up from the airport currently under construction at Badgerys Creek, to Penrith. The objectives for the Third City are for it to become a Multi-Function Polis [MFP]. It’ll be a minor rendition of Silicon Valley, with the mainstay industries being IT and high-tech manufacturing. Additionally, there are also plans to establish two pharmaceutical manufacturing concerns
That all sounds so grand, and members of the Morrison, and NSW governments perpetually gloated throughout 2021, and up until the federal election in May 2022, about the “200,000 jobs that will be created in the Third City”. However, the grave ‘catch with all of this is that the good preponderance of the capital to impel these ventures will be sourced from India. Moreover, the great majority of employees working in these will be immigrants from the Subcontinent.
To gauge the enormity of the agenda to establish an Indian colony in the Third City can be indisputably garnered in an article by Julie Hare in the Financial Review quoting Jennifer Westcott’s vision titled, ‘An emerging metropolis reverses the trend in planning
The sub-heading is Bradfield, which is named after John Bradfield, an urban planner, considered the planner of modern Sydney. This article is concise and contains something in the vicinity of 900 words.
What’s conveyed therein extols the horrors of the Third City. With that being, as I have been predicting for over five years is that it’s to be colonised by people from the subcontinent: ostensibly Indians. But so disturbing is what’s reported in this article that it requires a separate and detailed analysis, which I will undertake soon. ■