Australia's government-sponsored immigration flood is totally irrational

By Andrew Bolt

EVEN on the day it was announced, the Rudd Government's plan to import a million extra people in just three years seemed stupid. Now, as stock markets melt and shares shrivel, it's positively dangerous. Question: Why is the Government running the biggest immigration program in our history just as the economy may be careening into a wall? Why does it plan in its first term to import the equivalent of the population of Adelaide when even Prime Minister Kevin Rudd concedes unemployment is about to climb?

Oh, sorry - you didn't know Rudd had so ramped up immigration? Don't blame yourself. He never mentioned in his campaign launch last year that he had any such intention. Shhh. So it came almost out of the blue when - after the election - he quietly opened the gates. Rudd's May Budget set a new target for permanent migrants for this financial year: 190,300 places, or 20 per cent more than last year. And it didn't stop there. Add to those migrants some 110,000 workers brought out each year now on temporary visas, or almost triple the number of just four years ago. Add also 13,500 refugees and asylum-seekers, and some 20,000 New Zealanders, and you can see we have an immigration plan that's about to smash into some nasty realities.

How could it be otherwise? That makes more than 330,000 people we'll import each year under Rudd, for a net intake each year close to Britain's 191,000, even though we have just a third of its population. This seemed even in the relative sunlight of May to be hugely ambitious, to put it kindly.

Fact is, almost all the other policies of the federal and state governments leave us totally unprepared to deal with an intake that huge. For a start, most states have got out of the habit of laying on the essential infrastructure we need for ourselves, let alone for migrants as well.

These are now green times, so they hate building dams. They despise building power stations. They shy at building city freeways. They resent releasing farmland for houses. They even want less irrigation of crops, and not more. Result? They can't even give those here already enough water. They can't unclog our roads or unjam our trains. They can't make new houses affordable or food cheaper, and soon they'll struggle even to generate enough electricity. So how are they going to offer land, water, power and transport to more than 500,000 permanent newcomers Rudd hopes to settle here permanently in just three years?

No wonder Premier John Brumby two months ago cried enough on immigration: "I think we are probably at the limits of growth." Sure, eager-to-please Rudd thought turbo-charging the intake of migrants and temporary workers would please big business. After all, importing workers thrills companies that want to keep down wages. Importing migrants puts a glint in the eye of house builders and car makers salivating to sell the new arrivals homes and wheels.

But, as the Productivity Commission warned just two years ago, for the rest of us immigration just means more competition and not much gain. Even with a modest rise in immigration of some 40,000 skilled workers each year, the commission said in Economic Impacts of Migration and Population Growth, "the impact of migration is very small compared with other drivers of per capita income growth".

Britain's House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs this year found the same was true there: "Our general conclusion is that the economic benefits of positive net immigration are small or insignificant."

In fact, thanks to the Rudd Government's manic belief in man-made global warming, a lot of migrants could actually make us a lot worse off. That's because every new migrant, with his eating, burping, driving, computering and light-switching, adds to the greenhouse gases we pump out - just when the Government is determined to bring an emissions trading scheme in 2010 to make us cut those gases. Or pay. That means the more migrants we bring in, the more the rest of us will have to cut our own emissions to make up for them and meet the cap the Government eventually sets. So importing migrants is importing carbon pain.

And remember: all this was clear even before our economy started to slide. How much dumber does it seem now to amp up immigration when we could be on the brink of mass lay-offs? Even Rudd last week conceded: "The global financial crisis is having a greater impact on economies around the world, including in Australia, and that will mean unemployment in Australia could now increase more than forecast earlier in the year." So the plan is to bring in even more migrants to compete for jobs with Australians who are now losing their own? I don't think so.

But I said Rudd's plan was not just dumb but now dangerous. Here's why. We may hate to admit it, but we today struggle to assimilate some groups of migrants as well as we once did -- especially those with poor skills and worse English. In NSW, for instance, Lebanese-born citizens are twice more likely as the rest of us to be jailed. In Melbourne, police battle ethnic gangs of African refugees. So it's important that future immigrants have the background and the skills to fit in, and especially the education they need to land good jobs and make their own way.

But the Rudd Government, crazily enough, has skewed its immigration policies to allow in more poorly skilled immigrants who may not even speak English. Only 70 per cent of the expanded immigration intake is reserved for skilled workers, and Immigration Minister Chris Evans says he wants to bring in even more migrants with minimal skills. He told The Australian in May he wanted a "great national debate" about bringing in more semi-skilled and unskilled migrants, and said his plan to import 2500 South Pacific guest workers to pick fruit was a "stalking horse" for much more of the (permanent) same. "The demand is often for truck drivers, store managers, below tradesman-level jobs in the mining industry," he said. What's more, the Government would relax tough and "clunky" rules that migrants be able to speak English, because they "actually stopped business operating".

But how are unskilled immigrants with bad English going to get on if our economy sinks into recession? Think again, Prime Minister. I love migrants, coming from a migrant family myself. But a million newcomers in three years seems much too much of a good thing in these bad times. Or even in good times, to be frank.

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Ambulance officers call for capsicum spray for violent patients

What depths Australia's socialized medicine system has fallen to!

PARAMEDICS want capsicum spray to protect themselves from violent patients, who are forced to wait for hours outside emergency departments. Ambulance union state organiser Jason Dutton said paramedics were increasingly at risk from angry and aggressive patients left waiting for hours outside crowded hospital emergency departments - a practice known as ramping. A patient assaulted an ambulance officer outside the Cairns Base Hospital's emergency department late last month.

"Paramedics are absolutely sick and tired of being used as punching bags," Mr Dutton said. "They need to be equipped appropriately. I'm not calling for ambulance officers to be allowed to carry guns, but capsicum spray could be incorporated into the training of paramedics and very clear guidelines could be used to assist them. "We're looking at arming paramedics with an appropriate tool so that when they are confronted ... they can look after themselves."

Mr Dutton, from the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Union, which represents ambulance officers, said that paramedics sometimes found themselves in situations where they feared for their safety. But unlike police, ambulance officers were not issued with handcuffs, batons, guns and capsicum spray to protect themselves. "Paramedics are expected to treat people - who will often lash out violently at whoever is closest to hand - with no self-defence at all," Mr Dutton said. "We need to give our paramedics adequate protection from violent members of the public."

Mr Dutton said paramedics in some overseas countries were equipped with flak jackets or body armour.

A spokeswoman for Emergency Services Minister Neil Roberts said supplying paramedics with capsicum spray came under the Weapons Exemptions Act, which was a matter for the Police Minister, Judy Spence.

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Australians 'bored' by climate change

AUSTRALIANS are becoming bored with the issue of climate change and many still doubt whether the phenomenon is actually happening, according to a new survey. Only 46 per cent of Australians said they would take action on climate change if they were in charge of making decisions for Australia, a dip from 55 per cent last year, according to the Ipos-Eureka Social Research Institute's third annual climate change survey. And almost one in 10 Australians (nine per cent) strongly agreed with the statement "I have serious doubts about whether climate change is occurring". A further 23 per cent agreed to some extent.

Ipos-Eureka director of Sustainable Communities and Environment Unit Jasmine Hoye believes Australians are becoming more concerned with other environmental issues that they can have more direct control over. "We believe the public is currently overwhelmed by other, more pressing environmental issues - namely water and river health - and sees climate change as something that is largely out of their control," she said. "However, there is a desire among many Australians to know how they can personally make a difference regarding climate change."

Aside from river and water health, other environmental issues of most concern to Australians included illegal waste dumping, renewable energy, litter, smoky vehicles and packaging.

But there were no real standout actions being taken by Australians to personally reduce their greenhouse emissions, said Ms Hoye. "Ipsos research has shown that recycling is a fairly generic activity that people tend to say they are doing to help the environment, and it is also something that many Australians were already doing before climate change came along," she said. "Thus, one could be justified in thinking this is a fairly glib response. "What really strikes me is that we still have so few Australians taking specific actions like substantially reducing their household energy use, driving and flying less, switching to green power, or even buying carbon offsets, especially given all of the media coverage on this critical issue," she added.

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Now, should we destroy the economy?

Astute Australian financial analyst Terry McCrann looks at the Warmist numbers

BEAUTIFUL. The release of the Garnaut report could not have been better timed. It was dead, dead, dead, before it hit the table. The dark greens and all the climate carpetbaggers and main-chancers who have sprouted like weeds at the prospect of sharing in the 21st century theological rents will come to look back wistfully at his - original - modest emission reduction targets. Hopefully, from their humpies beneath those disused windmills which had yet to be dismantled. Apart from the ones kept as a record of a crazy religious cult that infected the world in the early years of the 21st century.

There is no way even the Rudd Government is going to embrace a policy to destroy the economy, in the wake of this week's disaster on Wall St and the Hill - the US House of Representatives. What, Rudd is going to get up and announce the wrecking of the economy starts now: barely 60 weeks away on January 1 2010? Before the next election? There is no way that China and the US are going to agree to slug their economies in recession with punitive policies to send them in even deeper.

If the Prime Minister persists with his ambition for a global agreement to reduce emission, he won't be preaching to the converted but an audience which will make the one he addressed in New York last week look like the MCG last Saturday. Further, it opens the door to victory at the next election not just to the Federal Opposition but to every state opposition facing increasingly nervous Labor governments.

At the national level, Malcolm Turnbull would have two choices. Simply to argue for postponement of any emissions scheme, or the more rational and also more opportunistic: to make any reductions by us at the very least conditional on US and Chinese delivered reductions. I would prefer him to take the emissions scheme off the table entirely. To go Churchillian and announce: he does not intend to become the Queens's first minister to preside (that's a word he might like) over the impoverishing of Australia.

The idea that we should lead is beyond absurd; that the world is 'waiting on us'. Oh yeah? Just like 'the world' flocked to hear the Prime Minister's inspiring words of wisdom at the UN last week.

At the state level, oppositions have to just promise to keep the lights on. Literally. To build new coal-fired and nuclear power stations. And provide emergency defibrilators to dark and even light greens. Or recycled paper bags to breathe into.

Is the average person going to vote to go back to a Dark Age future? Words chosen very particularly; both literally and figuratively. The Garnaut report remains like its predecessor, the British Stern report, an uneasy mix of religion married to dodgy economic and statistical analysis. Garnaut claimed yesterday that "the overall cost to the Australian economy of tackling climate change under both the 450ppm and 550pm scenarios was manageable and in the order of 0.1-0.2 per cent of annual economic growth to 2020".

Rubbish. Correction. Utter rubbish. On a whole series of levels. For starters, we can't 'tackle climate change'. Taking the 'science' as read for the purposes of discussion, it is completely out of our control. We reduce our emissions by 100 per cent, we have absolutely no impact on the climate. Not just the global climate but our local climate. We reduce our emissions by zero, or indeed double them, and on either scenario we have exactly the same impact on the climate. Zero.

OK. So we have to jointly cut emissions, with everyone else? Actually, no. The only, the only emitters that matter are the US and China, and perhaps India out a few years. Only they need to cut. And if it's so Garnaut-Stern like painless, why do we have to lead? They'll unilaterally embrace cuts. Again, they cut and what we do is utterly irrelevant to any climate outcome. They don't cut, and ditto.

Now this might suggest that we have to do something in unison. But the one thing that it absolutely does announce is the pointlessness of us cutting unilaterally. Sorry, not the pointlessness, but the sheer dopey stupidity. Which is exactly what Garnaut -- still -- recommends. Explicitly. That we cut even though the world refuses to agree a global process!

Our 'fair share' of cuts that would actually achieve something is to reduce emissions by 25 per cent by 2020 and by 90 per cent by 2050, according to Garnaut. Allowing for population growth, the bigger figure is to all intents and purposes 100 per cent. I'm surprised he didn't go the whole hog and suggest 130 per cent.

His original report had some shreds of analytical credibility compared with the disgraceful Stern report. This one has none, as Garnaut combines analytical idiocy with profound theological hubris. His entire report turns on 'assuming' the mother of all can-openers. An LA the economist who, washed up on a desert island with cans and cans of food - of the old fashioned, non-self-opening variety - first assumes a can-opener. We can turn off all our existing electricity and do away with petrol. Easy. Assume a replacement.

And, as a consequence, the cost will be marginal out to 2020? Sorry, it will destroy the economy. It will destroy the economy even if everyone cuts. It will destroy the economy if we go wandering off alone like Anabaptists, in Europe in the Middle Ages, seeking some sort of salvation.

Garnaut's modelling of the economic costs comes from the same guys and the same computers that predict the budget surplus each year. Last May they predicted it would be $10.6 billion in the 2007-08 year. It came in at $27 billion, after making the necessary adjustments for new initiatives. The difference is equivalent to 1.5 per cent of GDP. So Treasury can't get a figure about a process it actually has plenty of knowledge about within 1.5 per cent of GDP, one year out. And we are expected to believe that Garnaut can get accurate within 0.1 per cent of GDP changes out 12 years?

After the imposition of trauma never previously imposed on the economy, requiring unprecedented shifts in energy use, with consequences that have never previously been experienced. This demonstrates in the most specific way how Garnaut has 'got religion'. In comparison with his report, creationism is the very font of scientific objectivity.

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