Albanese's open door

The Albanese Labor government has been in power barely three months and already one can discern the vast gulf between its words and actions.

Listen to the Albanese government's rhetoric on wages, housing affordability and the environment and then consider its plan to massively expand immigration.

The Albanese government has signalled that it may increase the permanent immigration intake from 160,000 to up to 200,000 per annum – almost the equivalent of a new city the size of Hobart in a single year. An agreement on higher immigration numbers will reportedly be a focus of Labor's Jobs and Skills Summit this week.

If Labor does indeed increase the permanent intake to 200,000 a year, it will represent the biggest immigration surge in Australia's history, surpassing the record set by Kevin Rudd. Add to this the humanitarian intake of around 14,000, an uncapped number of temporary overseas workers, and an influx of foreign students with untrammelled working rights. There are already an astonishing 570,000 temporary visa applications that the Albanese government has pledged to fast track. It is not fanciful to foresee net overseas migration (NOM) surging toward half a million next year. All of this amounts to a revived Big Australia program on steroids.

In the lead up to the 2022 federal election, Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers made a big deal about the lack of real wage growth in Australia. "The truth is if you want real, permanent, meaningful help with the cost of living, you need a plan to get wages growing again," Albanese said in March this year. Chalmers the other week claimed that "a key focus of the jobs and skills summit will be how do we get wages growing at a sustainable rate again, so that Australians aren't falling further and further behind."

Yet Albanese and Chalmers would have us believe that the mass importation of overseas workers has absolutely no effect on the earnings of the people already here. The PM and the Treasurer clearly didn't heed the advice of one of Labor's favourite economists, Ross Garnaut. In his most recent book, Garnaut writes that the overall effect of the mid-2000s ramp-up in immigration "was to integrate much of the Australian labour market into a global labour market for the first time." According to Garnaut:

"Integration into a global labour market held down wages… It contributed to persistent unemployment, rising underemployment and stagnant real wages during the expansion of total economic activity during the Dog Days [the 2010s]. It contributed to a historic shift in the distribution of incomes from wages to profits. Increased immigration contributed to total GDP growth, but detracted from the living standards of many Australian working families."

It's not hard to fathom that allowing employers easy access to cheaper foreign labour abrogates any need to offer higher pay, improve conditions and invest in training. A return to Big Australia mass immigration means continued wage stagnation or decline for Australian workers. It also means soaring housing costs.

It would be nice if a journalist asked the Albanese government the glaringly obvious question: where are all these extra migrants going to live? With rental vacancy rates already at record lows and rents exploding across the country, the Albanese government is about to unleash the mother of all housing crises, inflicting unnecessary pain on legacy Australians and recent arrivals alike. Perhaps the government can ask new migrants to bring their own tents.

"Australians who work-full time should be able to afford a house or cover the rent," tweeted Albanese last year. "We need to tackle housing affordability." Pity the poor fools who were actually convinced by these crocodile tears.

And what about Labor's much-vaunted emissions reduction targets? As a 2016 University of Adelaide-led study observed, Australia's future greenhouse gas emissions are, in part, tied to the country's immigration policy. The study concluded: "More population growth driven by immigration will hamper Australia's ability to meet its future climate change mitigation commitments and worsen its already stressed ecosystems, unless a massive technological transformation of Australia's energy sector is immediately forthcoming." Such a technological transformation, the study noted, would require the prompt adoption of nuclear energy – an energy source vehemently opposed by the Albanese government. Again, it would be great if a journalist could ask Albanese how he intends to reach 'net zero' under his non-nuclear, Big Australia scenario.

After a pause in immigration due to the Covid-19 pandemic, business groups are very eager to see a return to Big Australia immigration levels. That's hardly surprising given that high immigration effectively serves as a big, fat, juicy subsidy to lazy businesses in the form of cheaper labour and more customers. But it is ordinary Australians who bear the costs in a variety of ways, including lower wages, more expensive housing, clogged cities, overloaded infrastructure and services, environmental deterioration, diminished social cohesion, and cultural disruption.