On October 12, I rang Jacob Greber and spoke to him over his piece in the Financial Review: “Migrant boost to stir recovery”.
The heading makes it abundantly clear that the Big Australia brigade is once more hell-bent upon buttressing their economic strategies upon the planks of mass immigration. This is obvious with the bureaucrats at the (NSW) Department of Premier and Cabinet pushing for a “doubling of the pre-2019 immigrant intakes (nationally) to 400,000 per year in the next five years”. On past experiences between 2014-19, this would result in at least 40% of that number swarming each into Greater Sydney and Greater Melbourne. If this proposal eventuated it would push Australia’s population to about 27.3 million.
Greber quotes the vice-chancellor of Western Sydney University, Professor Peter Shergold, who proffers three points, which I will take him to task on. They are with the “need to discuss what balance we want to strike between permanent and temporary settlers” and “to trigger a fresh debate about the need for more people to settle in regional NSW where labour shortages are more acute.” But the most perplexing matter is: “the Productivity Commission and other independent economic experts say migrants arriving into Australia create demand, stimulate growth and (they) “do not restrain wage growth.”
I was astounded to read Shergold’s notion that migrants “do not restrain wage growth” because it is unmitigated sycophancy.
Tragically, migrants particularly those temporary ones, like international students (ISs) were a primary reason why wages growth was restrained to about 1.25% from 2014, until COVID 19 emerged in February 2020.
The reality is because international students are only permitted to work 20pw during their semesters, they can ONLY earn about $400 – assuming they get $20ph. Of course, it is an absolute impossibility for an adult living in Sydney or Melbourne to survive on $400 a week.
To counter this meant ISs had to work illegally for cash-in-the-hand. This culminated in them being paid lousy rates of pay at about $13-15ph and secondly paying no taxes on this income. So, taking into account that there would have been a minimum of 400,000 ISs working illegally in 2019, means this black economy ran into the billions of dollars. Using a figure of 400,000 ISs working illegally earning just $350pw = $140m per week. And then multiplying that figure by 42 weeks comes to $5.88bn.
However, if all of the categories of people in Australia on temporary visas (in December 2019, there were 1.9 million) working for illicit cash-in-the-hand payments were added together, the accrued amount of money in the shadow economy would be well into the double digits.
Another element in the mix of temp-migrants who were exploiting the system in Australia’s shadow economy is the daigous.
A daigou is it is a person who buys something on behalf of another party. These people are Chinese in Australia on a temp-visa purchasing on behalf of those in China. In 2018, an estimated 30,000 people made money from the daigou trade. They made on average $35k, which accrues to over $1bn dollars. However, some of those controlling those operations made $100k-150k, tax-free.
Of course, Shergold is fully aware of these realities. But apart from having, perhaps, as many as 1 million (of the 1.9 million people) in Australia working for low wages and cash in hand, the great detriment is with having hundreds of thousands of Australians being cut out of employment opportunities at the low-skilled echelons because of a compliant army of desperate people to work cheaply.
The Productivity Commission has rebuked temporary migration as a bane, saying it has restricted growth in wages. There are at least four reputable sources I know of who have reported the PCs findings on this matter. They are Dr Bob Birrell, Prof. Judith Sloan, Henry Ergas and Leith van Onselen.
Someone here on a student temp-visa will have very limited qualifications or work experience. Hence, they will work for pittance payments at any job to survive. Unscrupulous employers know this and ruthlessly exploit these workers. Conversely, it is almost a certainty that every employer who exploits these vulnerable workers just happens to be a member of the same ethnocultural group as the person he robs.
(Actually, Jacob Greber should consult the former Deputy Head of Immigration, Abdul Rizvi. He has been on The Drum on three occasions in recent months scolding employers underpaying immigrant workers. Moreover, he has cited the government for pushing through the new agricultural visas.)
Alas, Australia is riddled with melons such as Shergold who are intransigent economic-rationalists. In their cloistered, bean-counting mindsets, they imagine that unrelenting growth can only be achieved through mass migration.
Of course, it is an incongruity in the extreme that, on the one page, they champion intemperate consumption (fuelled by mass immigration) of tangible goods and services – and, indeed constructing houses and apartments for people to live in. But, on another page, they might well advocate cutting carbon dioxide emissions, too. The conflicting aspect is that continually increasing the population leads to increased consumption of all the quantifiable aspects that a city needs to be able to function.
Just let me tackle that, regardless of whether carbon dioxide is the culprit in climate fluctuations.
The amount of CO2 that will be emitted to build either a cottage or an apartment with just two bedrooms, is estimated to be 80 tonnes. Greber quotes another rabid open-borders, economic-rationalist, Chris Richardson. Richardson is associated with the economics advisory institution Deloitte Access Economics. In the final sentence of Greber’s article, he quotes Richardson saying that COVID has generated a shortfall of 350,000 houses and apartments being built because of the borders being closed. So, if we multiply 80 tonnes of CO2 x 350,000 (houses and apartments that have not been built because borders were closed) = 28,000,000 tonnes of CO2. So, what sort of a contradiction is this?
Effectively, a major reason as to why Australia, proportionally speaking, is deemed to be a high-emitter of CO2, is because of our high immigration intake. In 2018, Australia’s intake of immigrants was, comparatively, one and a quarter times more than that of the legal intakes of the United States. One ‘climate activist’, Kate Blenheim, who I stumbled across at a meeting at UNSW in October 2018, went into a meltdown when I pushed her on this matter of overpopulation being the catalyst for increasing CO2 emissions? I remember she glibly looked me in the eye then walked away without responding because she realised it was correct. However, it conflicted with her anti-racist thinking.
Professor Shergold and the mandarins from the Department of the Premier and Cabinet are bereft of mental balance at not having 350,000 houses and apartments being built, due to the borders being closed. All of which would have bolstered the already obscene wealth of the likes of Harry Triguboff. The link between money and immigration is clear!
But all this makes me a xenophobe/racist because I am so angry by seeing my culture and our traditional working conditions eradicated by mass-intakes of immigrants.
And now, the system wants to go for broke and ramp it all up to impossible limits.
But whether it is a colony of ISs in the CBD of Melbourne or, the one out at Caulfield; or in the strip from Wooli Creek to Hurstville; or at Kensington and Kingsford in Sydney at UNSW; or the horrifying transmogrification of the Parramatta area etc, the harrowing reality is that both Sydney and Melbourne are now fractured into being zones for non-Anglo-Celtic-European ethnic groups who are in such numbers that, they hardly ever need to interact outside of their cultural enclaves. Hence, they share nothing in common, let alone do they have an allegiance to Australia. The millions planned, for now, will blow our country apart.