Australian Politics

Dire immigration warning as overseas arrivals soar in Australia

The Albanese government's immigration targets for the last financial year could be exceeded by as much as 100,000 people.

Corinna Economic Advisory's Saul Eslake forecast the 2023-23 financial year intake would be 495,000 people, 'if not more', reported The Australian.

The government had settled on a net overseas migration (NOM) intake target of 395,000 for the same period, down from 518,000 the previous year.

Abdul Rizvi, former immigration department deputy secretary, estimated the number would be around 450,000 to 475,000 people and added that Australia's robust jobs market was keeping people here and attracting those from overseas.

'Especially people in Europe and China and in Southeast Asia, where the labour market has weakened more quickly than in Australia,' Mr Rizvi said.

'What we had was a higher-than-expected return of Australian citizens, and we also had a higher-than-expected net arrival of Kiwis.'

The government has already revised their numbers twice.

In last year's May budget it forecast the number of foreigners moving to the country would drop to 315,000 in the 12 months to June under new measures it introduced - though this was revised to 375,000 in December and 395,000 earlier this year.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton previously said the influx of new residents vying for places to live was why property prices remain at record highs.

'This is why Australians can't afford to buy a home, it's why the rents have gone through the roof and it's why we find ourselves in a position that we do today with people living without secure accommodation,' he said.

Minister for Employment Affairs Murray Watt said migration had slowed under the government's measures it had introduced progressively over the last two years.

'We recognise that we need to make sure that the numbers of migrants that we have coming to Australia is sustainable, and that's exactly why we've taken a range of actions to bring that number down,' he said.

Mr Eslake said the makeup of migrants coming to Australia was as important as the overall numbers and that the Coalition was correct to call for more construction workers to be allowed in.

Dozens of building companies have collapsed in recent months courtesy of a surge in material and labour costs.

It is one of the reasons the Master Builders Association estimates Australia will not meet a target of 1.2million new homes built over the next five years to ease the housing crisis.

Mr Rizvi said along with the nation's low unemployment rate - 4.1 per cent, compared to 6 per cent in the EU and 5.2 per cent in China - attracting new immigrants, there was also a slower-than-anticipated decline in foreign student numbers.

He also said the conditions for working holiday visa holders had 'not really tightened at all'.

'Arrivals have not declined as they [the government] expected, departures have not increased as they expected.'

Official immigration figures for the 12 months to July will not be released until later this year.

Looking ahead to the target for this financial year of a net overseas migration intake of 260,000 people, Mr Rizvi said it too would likely be well exceeded unless the government quickly introduced more measures.

NOM is the difference between arrivals to Australia and departures from Australia and includes both migrants and Australians.

Migrant arrivals to Australia are counted in NOM if they are in Australia for a total of 12 months or more during a 16-month period.

Temporary visa holders are the largest contributing group to migrant numbers and most temporary visa categories are demand-driven and not capped.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13934653/Australia-immigration-politics-Albanese.html

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Why didn’t Victorian Police arrest Hezbollah sympathisers?

There was a group of people protesting in Melbourne and Sydney over the weekend, clutching photos of assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as part of the so-called ‘National Day of Action for Gaza’ that looked more like a march in solidarity with the Middle East’s most notorious terrorists.

While citizens in Lebanon cheered the demise of Nasrallah, our streets were full of people waving internationally recognised terror flags. They did so with their faces covered.

The ABC idiotically called the dead terrorist a ‘longtime militia leader’. Why? Is denying his life’s work as a proud ‘terrorist’ part of the ABC’s ‘balanced’ reporting charter? Who made that editorial decision, I wonder. The sympathetic article did its best to paint the protesters as supporters of peace while video footage shows hateful chants against the backdrop of Australia’s beautiful cities of Sydney and Melbourne.

It is with fury that I ask, where are the Australian Federal Police?

There are over a thousand people, many identifiable, caught on camera committing terror offenses in broad daylight.

Last time I checked, it is against the law in this country to engage in public solidarity with terror groups.

There wasn’t one Hezbollah flag flying – there were many. It was not an accident, it was a trend. They were not there in solidarity for Lebanon or Gaza – but for Hezbollah and Hamas.

As Senator James Paterson tweeted:

‘Disturbing to see symbols of a listed terrorist organisation, Hezbollah, prominently displayed on the streets of Melbourne and Sydney today. This is a clear contravention of 80.2HA of the Commonwealth Criminal Code. It’s time for police to enforce the law.’

Again – why wasn’t the law enforced?

The softest of flimsy and pitiful replies came from Home Affairs Minister, Tony Burke, who said the presence of the Hezbollah flag would draw ‘immediate attention’ from security agencies.

Oh really? Could he please define attention? Was it my imagination or did we see people flying the flag of Israel dragged off our city streets by thuggish police in previous months? You are safer flying a terrorist flag in this country than you are our national flag or a flag of an ally.

‘Any indication of support for a terrorist organisation is unequivocally condemned,’ added Mr Burke.

Condemned?

If you travel 2km/h over the speed limit or glance at your phone, you’re not ‘condemned’ – you’re arrested and fined.

Where are the fines and where are the arrests? Or is the law turning a blind eye so as not to upset certain voting blocs sensitive to Labor’s power?

‘There is a higher level of scrutiny if anyone is on a visa. I have made clear from day one, that I will consider refusing and cancelling visas for anyone who seeks to incite discord in Australia.’

Mr Burke, how many of these rally attendees are on visas that you intend to cancel? I’m betting Mr Burke has no idea because police did not detain anyone. You cannot cancel visas if you do not know who these people are. There should have been a police van with open doors parked in front of the rally.

Attorney General Mark Dreyfus confirmed that:

‘The new laws also ensure that glorifying and praising acts of terrorism are criminal offences under Commonwealth law.’

Are there? If they are criminal offences we have seen no evidence of it. At this point, the law exists purely so that politicians can give lip service to the public without actually doing anything to get terror sympathisers off the street or out of the country.

It is not as if there was a ‘blink and you missed it’ moment. The police have confirmed they saw the flags.

Victoria Police released a statement saying they were ‘aware prohibited flags were seen at a demonstration in the Melbourne CBD’ but that ‘Victoria Police supports the right to protest peacefully and had a visible presence at the protest to ensure public safety’.

What a cop-out. If Victoria Police were protecting public safety they’d be rounding up people carrying Hezbollah flags.

It’s not about ‘safety at the rally’ it’s about the safety of the country and ensuring people who sympathise with terrorist groups are not wandering around free or living here on visas they are not entitled to hold.

The Victorian Police set up an entire ‘snitching’ database to comb through images of the Freedom Rally to arrest individuals during Covid – where is that enthusiasm for actual terror groups? Where?

There were no arrests at that rally, allowing police to call it ‘peaceful’. It is like failing to arrest petty thieves and saying crime has fallen. The comments are a fabrication of reality, and the public know it.

These marches were not peaceful, they were hateful.

Members of the group were chanting, ‘At your service, Nasrallah…’

Any individual who says that is not an Australian, they are a Hezbollah separatist.

Everyone, from the rally organisers to the Islamic Council of Australia, has claimed that these individuals do not represent them – but how can we know if they are not detained, named, and investigated?

It is not as if they were kicked out, shouted down, or heckled by their fellow protesters.

There did not appear to be any dissent toward the Hezbollah symbols. If they were not welcome at the rally, why did none of their peers confront them? Watch the footage, look at the photographs. Do you see anyone side-eyeing the Hezbollah flag with disgust?

If someone walked up to a Freedom Rally flying a Nazi flag they would be confronted, shouted down, and kicked out.

In previous pro-Palestinian rallies, particularly in England, some have proved the point by shouting slogans against Hamas only for the crowd to turn on them and angrily defend the terror group. In the case of pro-Palestinian events, there is little, if any, evidence that supporters denounce Hamas just as the vast majority of all Palestinians support the Hamas regime.

The Chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission, Dr Dvir Abramovich, had the strongest words.

‘Hezbollah, responsible for countless civilian deaths, has no place in “peaceful” protest. The display of their flag at this demonstration is a glorification of violence and terror that undermines the values of our diverse and democratic society. This is not who we are as a nation and let’s not confuse freedom with the promotion of terror. We call on all community leaders and elected officials to unequivocally denounce this act.’

Most Australians would rather see them in jail or deported instead of ‘denounced’.

At least Opposition Leader Peter Dutton had something to say about what happened.

‘We’ve got Jewish schools where we’ve got armed guards out the front of, there are people who are living in the Jewish community in fear and there is an absolute outrage in relation to the glorification of a terrorist leader, which surely must be against the Australian law; and if it’s not, the Parliament should be recalled to pass a law that prohibits that from happening.

‘Now, of course, the laws do provide for an offence in that regard, and the law should be enforced.

‘I find it completely unacceptable that the government wouldn’t be arresting people already, or cancelling visas of people who are glorifying Hezbollah and Hamas and others.’

It’s time to remember that this is a Christian and secular country based on the values of the Enlightenment. It is a Western country that has no place for imported Middle Eastern conflicts or the violence in those regions that have been ongoing for thousands of years.

Nothing will come of spreading this hateful ideology on Australian streets other than turning Australia into the same mess we see around the world. It is poison to our democracy.

Australians did not ask for this and we have laws to prevent this.

Use the laws or explain why we shouldn’t charge our political leaders with treason.

Who is coming into this country?

How safe to Australians feel walking the streets with these people as their neighbours?

If Melbourne Police can arrest hundreds of freedom protesters with anti-terror units, there is no excuse for these people to walk free. Support for a terror group is not an accepted form of protest in the country. It is against the law.

We talk about Keir Starmer having a two-tiered system of policing, but for the Albanese government and specifically the state government of Jacinta Allan and Chris Minns, it’s one rule for Australian-loving freedom fighters and another for Hezbollah-loving terror sympathisers.

Make it make sense.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/why-didnt-victorian-police-arrest-hezbollah-sympathisers/

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Monopolies in the labour market

See Saw Margery Daw,

Jacky shall have a new master;

Jacky shall earn but a penny a day,

Because he can’t work any faster.

The first reference to this rhyme is 1640. It describes an iron law that payment must be related to productivity. This is inevitably so for the economy as a whole, and is even conceded by many of the politicians and IR experts who foster legal machinery to boost workers’ earnings above those that would emerge in a competitive market.

The case rests on ‘market failure’.

The term is bandied about regularly by those who see imperfect outcomes and those who want to change the benefits different parties obtain from market transactions. But this fails to recognise the ‘government failures’ that emerge from alternative approaches.

In fact, labour market failure only truly occurs when there is a form of monopoly in place. Given the hundreds of thousands of different hirers and millions of workers there are very few areas of natural monopoly. These are confined to the labour supply where workers with highly specific skills or talents like rock stars, pipeline welders, and IT systems engineers, (all of whom generally command high remuneration levels). There are however areas where monopolies can be fashioned by preventing market entry, but this requires government policy or acquiescence.

The most notorious area of effective monopoly restraint is in building and construction where violence is used to prevent non-unionised workers offering their services and standover tactics are used against employers who seek to break the union-imposed monopoly. The elevated level of wages and other costs creates a 30 per cent cost premium, a premium that is absent from the non-unionised house building sector.

Under Australia’s IR system, thousands of ‘awards’ determine the remuneration of about 20 per cent of employees (30 years ago it was 80 per cent); registered collective agreements set the wages for a further 40 per cent with individual agreements covering the remaining 40 per cent. Although the average employee earns about a third more than the Award rates, in many areas the Award is the paid rate.

Political attention has focused on different payments for the same job. A union campaign pointed to some airline cabin staff doing the same job on the same plane as others but earning only half as much. Senator Roberts cited mining workers getting paid a $40,000-a-year difference depending on whether they were employed directly or through labour hire. Describing this as ‘wage theft’, he introduced the Fair Work Amendment in 2022 to bring labour hire workers pay levels to the same or greater than directly employed workers. His objective was to overcome ‘a failure of balanced market power’.

These are among countless other examples of apparently anomalous wage outcomes but in all cases the parties involved accepted the contracts willingly. Criticism is targeted at the employer paying some workers less than others – in no cases is there a suggestion that the higher earners are ripping off the employer!

The firm doing the hiring will seek to minimise its outlays. If it is cheaper to do so through contractors that will be the preferred route. In practice, most firms would want a balance between ‘permanent’ employees and workers hired under more flexible contracts. If the contractors do not obtain a premium wage to compensate for losing out on holiday pay loadings and other benefits this means the ‘permanent’ employees’ wages have been pushed above their market rate. Naturally, the workers getting lower remuneration will be envious of their more fortunate fellow workers

The government has now passed the two ‘Closing Loopholes’ Acts. Central to them is ‘same job, same pay’ for labour hire workers and enhanced workplace delegate rights including rights over prospective union members. Yielding to pressures, Qantas is levelling up its different wage settings at a reported annual cost to profits of $60 million.

Aside from loading the dice against employers, the Act introduces additional costs of complexity. In this respect, Freehills quips, ‘Make friends with a good IR lawyer – you will need them.’ The additional costs bring no corresponding economy-wide benefits.

And the ACTU is moving to its next agenda item: scrapping youth wages, illustrating a mindset that the level of wages has no effect on employment levels and no relationship to the productivity of those receiving them.

As the Closing Loopholes Act cannot conceivably have a positive effect on productivity, its goal of re-weighing the labour market outcomes can only be brought about by lowering profits. To the extent that this is successful, it would mean lower new investment levels and further reducing productivity.

For the ALP politicians and the unions, the key issue is to reverse the decline in union membership – down to about 8 per cent in the private sector – by forcing a de facto unionisation of the gig/contractor workforce. Union funding of the ALP, directly and indirectly, gives it a commanding advantage in terms of electoral marketing and one that is being eroded.

Labor’s IR policy adds to other productivity-suppressing economic policies put in place to foster support amongst sections of the economy. These include weaponising environmental regulations to prevent new mining, (while emasculating environmental protections in the case of wind and solar energy); subsidising wind, solar and green hydrogen; and squeezing irrigators’ water availability. The early outcome has been six quarters of declining national productivity.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/monopolies-in-the-labour-market/

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Wong’s lopsided moral values

‘Wong’s Palestine Deadline’ grandly announced the headline in the Australian. That sounds like a global ground-breaking development. A line in the sand, perhaps? Wong, of course, is our Foreign Minister.

A foreign minister has a formidable arsenal of diplomatic weapons at his or her disposal. Suppose, for example, a fighter jet from another country deploys chaff in front of one of our maritime patrol aircraft in international waters. The foreign minister could summon that country’s ambassador for a dressing-down. Or when confronted by an essentially anti-Semitic resolution at the UN he or she could vote against it. Or he or she could choose to withdraw funding to a putative aid organisation that is alleged to be assisting a terrorist group.

And then there is the powerful last resort option – the MOAB of diplomatic strategies, if you like. The foreign minister can ‘call for’ things. Our Foreign Minister is trigger-happy to resort to this option. Hardly a week goes by without her ‘calling for’ a Palestinian state or a ceasefire in Gaza or Lebanon. And the best part about ‘calling for’ things is that you only have to specify an outcome. You don’t need to worry about how it might be achieved or at what cost. But it does show you really mean business.

In commerce there is a concept called ‘the cost of doing business’. It refers to impositions that you would rather not have imposed upon you but there is little you can do about. For example, in certain countries paying bribes to government officials is regarded as part of the ‘cost of doing business’. A similar concept applies in geopolitics but only to one country. It is termed the ‘cost of being Israel’. Thus, when our increasingly disingenuous Foreign Minister calls for ‘both sides to de-escalate’, knowing full well that Hezbollah and Hamas have no intention of doing so, what she is saying is that Israel must defend itself only to the extent that things can quickly return to the pre-7 October status quo. In other words, business as usual, where Israel is expected to endure constant threat and denigration, and frequent attack, respond ‘proportionately’ and then retire to prepare for the next fixture in some kind of dystopian and deadly parody of a sporting competition They have been doing this for 75 years. Would we accept such a precarious existence for even ten?

Wong quotes the figures of dead in Gaza and Lebanon as if they override every other consideration. Setting aside the fact that the numbers widely accepted are almost certainly exaggerated, I wonder if she’s heard of the civil war in Syria, which has claimed the lives of over 600,000 people, including an estimated 300,000 civilians, since 2011. Muslims killing Muslims, even on this scale, is little more than regrettable apparently. But that Israel should take the lives of any more than, say, 1,200 Palestinians – that would have been a proportional response and probably only barely tolerable to our intrepid Foreign Minister – is absolutely beyond the pale.

Wong pays lip service to the fact that Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorist organisations. But she never mentions the fact that they started this war.

The moral equivalence is off the scale.

She says that Israel must abide by the rules of war. Memo to Wong, the rules of war do not dictate that civilians must not be killed. Merely that belligerent states must make every effort to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties. Israel has set the standard in this respect, even to the extent of sending warning to civilians of impending attacks, wherever possible. Warnings which must inevitably come to the notice of the enemy, and which must also inevitably increase the risk to Israeli soldiers.

Ms Wong says Lebanon must not become the next Gaza, without ever mentioning the name Najib Makati. Who’s he?, I hear you ask. Well, he’s been the Prime Minister of Lebanon since 2021. Does he bear any responsibility for these events? Has Wong ever called upon him to expel Hezbollah? Or if that’s not possible, to insist that Hezbollah withdraw its forces behind the Litani River as required by Security Council Resolution 1701. That resolution, from 2006, also required Israel to withdraw from Lebanon, which it has done, although Lebanon has accused it of frequently violating Lebanese airspace. But in 2018, the Israeli Defense Forces uncovered miles of secret Hezbollah tunnels into Israel from southern Lebanon. Recently retrenched Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah (may he discover there are no virgins), in 2019, said, ‘Part of our plan in the next war is to enter into Galilee, a part of our plan we are capable of, God willing. The important thing is that we have this capability and we have had it for years’.

Wong frequently quotes UN resolutions imposing some restriction on Israel.

Does anyone remember the last time she ‘called on’ Najib Makati to enforce Resolution 1701 within his own borders? Has she called on Makati to even denounce the actions of Hezbollah? I thought not. That’s just the cost of being Israel.

And incidentally, Lebanon has a standing army of 80,000. If the majority of Lebanese people really despise Hezbollah, as we are told, then what better opportunity could they have to rid themselves of this pestilence than by deploying that army in concert with the IDF?

According to some experts, Hamas now has two firm allies, Qatar and Turkey. Both give Hamas public and financial assistance estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Qatar has transferred more than $1.8 billion to Hamas. Shashank Joshi, senior research fellow at the Royal Services Institute, says that, ‘Qatar also hosts Hamas’s political bureau which includes Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal.’ His Excellency Mr Ali Saad M.H. Al-Hajr is Qatar’s Ambassador to Australia. Has Wong ever called him in to explain Qatar’s support for a terrorist organisation intent on destroying one of our oldest allies? Has she ever called on Qatar to disassociate itself from Hamas? I thought not.

As a senior cabinet minister whose portfolio encompasses the issue of national security, Wong cannot escape a share of the opprobrium which should rightly attend the farcical appointment of Labor’s special envoy to combat Islamophobia. This envoy, Aftab Malik, is quoted as saying, ‘Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are not mutually exclusive: where there is one, you most likely will find the other lurking’. ‘Lurking’ being the operative word. In Australia, Islamophobia is lurking so effectively it is pretty well indiscernible.

As Labor leader in the Senate, Wong also shares the blame for the Senate disgracefully rejecting the proposed judicial inquiry into ant-Semitism in Australian universities.

Penny Wong now firmly joins Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen on the podium of ineptitude and duplicity, having displaced the hapless Andrew Giles. Who gets gold, silver and bronze is still up for grabs.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/pennywise/