The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) has continued to work its advocacy for bringing up the annual migrant intake, among its 10 goals of improving Australia’s ‘economic performance’ by 2050. With the target of 200,000 skilled migrants, not-to speak of any other kind of migrant this has once again been waved around on the basis of a labour shortage crisis and an ageing economy.
Self-evident from this target the ACCI has not considered the social impacts of such an influx of migrants. With half of NSW underwater and the other half living in caravan parks due to a critical affordability housing shortage, where do they suppose all these fresh migrants will take homes? If they are lucky enough not to live in their cars they will dogpile into a single house with people paying 300$ a week for the luxury of having a whole shower to sleep in. Anecdotally, this has already been occurring for years and years in many of Australia’s newer outer-city suburbs where you too often will see 6-7 cars piled up in a single driveway and front ‘yard’.
Let’s consider the subject of social capital also, or that valuable community ethos for trust, charity and shared identity. There has been significant academic study into the subject of social capital and diversity in recent years which has at its face shown significant decay of community and outcomes for people in culturally and ethnically diverse areas. Is it not an obvious basic truth that people of the same heritage, same outlook on life, same social and cultural practice are moreso inclined to make meaningful friendships?, assist each other in charity and form for themselves community institutions that see to the health and welfare of the community at large. The ANA holds this view strictly, that it is in the interest of constructing a national community that homogeneity is a sought-after principle at which other concerns such as GDP are made to submit.
Justice Henry Higgins in his great 1902 work ‘Australian Ideals’ recounts:
Where does Kanaka labour find it’s chief support?
Where do you find most advocates of the Chinese and Japanese Immigration?
Is it not in the bourgeois chambers of Commerce, Shire Councils, Stock Exchanges,
Agricultural Societies – bodies which throughout Australia seem to be dominated by profitmakers as against wage-earners?
It has been a perennial struggle for Australians to keep the wretched, self-serving hand of capital from flinging open the borders for migration as it is always done with no regard for the future of the nation, the preservation of a wholesome national community in which our high standards of living are protected and advanced.
John Curtin and Frank Antsey wrote in ‘The Heritage‘:
Profound as has been the ameliorating hand of Unionism on the conditions of industry generally, it is in respect to the establishment of the White Australia principle that the men and women of the present day owe an unpayable debt to the pioneers of the Labor Movement. All through the years of the infancy of the workers’ party the forces of Capitalism were militant and all-powerful. Their policy was naked and undisguised.
There was not one daily newspaper in Australia that stood for a White Policy. The daily newspapers of Australia unitedly opposed the White Australia idea, and denounced its advocates as fools and fanatics mouthing the “unworkable and impossible.” They unanimously supported the policy of coloured labor, and the most radical paper of the day, the Melbourne “Age,” on July 16. 1883, advocated the importation of Indian coolie labour.
There has been no change of policy here, other than the policy of the contemporary cosmopolitan hipster Labour party who have spat on the face of their honorable heritage. Some contemporaries, though in reserved terms of phrase still uphold something akin to the principles of the Labor movement, Daniel Walton from the Australian Workers Union touching on this very subject not long ago saying:
Can you see the cleverness of business’s play here? First you stop training apprentices and lobby your friends in government to stop spending money on TAFE. Then when the pipeline of skilled workers runs dry you start howling about a skills crisis, which is now so urgent you say there’s no time to train Australians.
You rush in more migrant workers, while another generation low training further worsens the capacity of Australians to fill skilled positions. At this point you get to cry out for yet more migrants and the cycle perpetuates. It’s human centipede-level genius.
He’s very right, and that is only on the industrial side of this issue – When people are willing to accept 47c an hour in wages, the Fair Work Act does not matter anymore, When the millions of scabs of Asia descend on this land there is no amount of enforcement activity the Government can engage in to fix the problem, it requires the courageous action of workers standing up collectively to demand a fair go. Something our unfortunate friends from impoverished and demoralised nationhoods do not understand nor are they willing to draw blood for it like our forebears did.
It stands for all nationalists to make meaningful opposition to this Government policy wherever possible, Immigration is one of those nigh-irreversible actions of Government policy that can make a once great Australia a mestizo poverty-striken slum like South America.
M. K. Grant
ANA Governor