Australian Industry Group chief executive officer, Innes Willox, got it right this week: “We’ve done an abysmal job (on population growth); there has been really no serious integrated debate around all the key factors that population growth brings to our economy and national way of life”.
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As the excellent Four Corners program on ABC Television this week, headed by journalist Ben Knight, highlighted: We don’t have a national population policy or a population minister.
Worse, nothing looks like changing for the better under the current Federal Government and certainly not under most state jurisdictions. The only “policies” - if you could describe them as such - and from what were revealed on Monday night, is to shove more people into Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth.
Former NSW Premier, Bob Carr, said 18 years ago, “Sydney is full”. He was right; but his government didn’t stop the rot, nor did his fellow premiers in the other capital cities. Now, all of them want to blame it on immigration.
What absolute rot! Australian politicians should start listening not preaching on the subject of immigration. Journalist and winner of the 2013 PM”s Literary Award, George Megaloginos, wrote: “Immigration is the greatest compliment that can be paid to a country”. He wrote as late as last week ”a significant share” of skilled arrivals are choosing Australia over the US for only the second time in history.
Fairfax columnist and great Australian businessman, Harold Mitchell, wrote in his column last Friday, “we couldn’t have built the Snowy Mountains Scheme without our great migration scheme”; likewise, as Mitchell also observed, PM Malcolm Fraser “didn’t stop the boats, he welcomed them, and thousands of Vietnamese citizens have become great Australian citizens”.
It’s not just great Australians who think positively about immigration. This from American President, John F Kennedy: “Everywhere immigrants have enriched and strengthened the fabric of American life”.
Madeleine Albright, the first woman to become the US Secretary of State, and who as a young girl fled the Czech Republic with her family to settle in the US when the Communists took control in 1948, wrote recently: “I am a beneficiary of the American people’s generosity, and I hope we can have comprehensive immigration legislation that allows this country to continue to be enriched by those who were not born here”.
Four Corners talked about our population growing another 15 million by the middle of the century with Melbourne and Sydney reaching eight million each; the answer, according to one muddle-headed Victorian minister, is to go up - build multi-storey “vertical schools”. With that logic no wonder where in a political mess in this nation.
The future is in creating a multi-diversified nation using our vast rural and regional resources and spaces. A reader reminds us, in 1982 Alvin Toffler wrote: “You can’t trust those who got us into the mess to get us out of it, they either don’t want to or are incapable of doing so”. He added: “Imagine if we had what the American futurist Faith Popcorn calls her Brain Reserve, a group upon which she can call to solve pretty well anything and not a politician in sight”.
I agree with our reader’s final comment: “There is much that could be done if we really believed in the common good, but who is going to lead the charge”. Ready for the challenge, Deputy PM, Michael McCormack?