And the challenge of migration?
SMH
Paul Sheehan
August 4, 2008
Did you know the Rudd Government is implementing the biggest immigration program since the end of World War II, and the biggest intake, in absolute numbers of permanent immigrants and temporary workers, in Australia's history?
Did you know the migration program for 2008-09 has set a target of 190,300 places, a robust 20 per cent increase over the financial year just ended?
On budget night, May 13, amid the avalanche of material released by the Government, the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Senator Chris Evans, issued a press release stating, among other things: "The use of 457 visas to employ temporary skilled migrant workers has grown rapidly in recent years. A total of 39,500 subclass 457 visas was granted in 2003-04 compared with an expected 100,000 places in each of 2007-08 and 2008-09." That is a 150 per cent increase in four years.
Did you know the number of overseas students coming to Australia is also at a record high, with 228,592 student visas granted in 2006-07, a 20 per cent increase over the previous year?
Under the Rudd Government, Australia's net immigration intake is now larger than Britain's, even though it has almost three times the population of Australia. To put all this in perspective, the immigration program in the Rudd Government's first year is 150 per cent bigger than it was in the Howard government's first year. The immigration intake is running almost 60 per cent higher than it was three years ago.
On November 14 last year, when Kevin Rudd launched Labor's election campaign, he mentioned at length the challenges of climate change and water shortages: "It is irresponsible for any national government of Australia to stand idly by while our major cities are threatened by the insecurity of water supply." While presenting a commendable shift away from John Howard's inertia on these issues, his policy is breathtakingly inconsistent. Not only did Rudd commit to a policy of building high-energy desalination plants for Australia's main cities, he has also committed Australia to record levels of immigration.
Talk about shifting sands. To quote Rudd in this same keynote speech: "Mr Howard lacked the decency to even mention Work Choices at all during his 4400-word policy speech on Monday. Work Choices has become the industrial relations law that now dare not speak its name."
Rudd did not have the decency to mention immigration once in his 4300-word campaign launch. It is the most glaring inconsistency of his Government.
The immigration figures quoted above do not even include New Zealanders, who are not counted as part of Australia's annual migration program, nor do they include people who have overstayed their visas. Add another 50,000 or so people to an equation which will see a million people added to the population during the three-year term of the Rudd Government. The only element in Australia's immigration program that is not going gangbusters is the refugee and humanitarian intake, which remains static at 13,500 places a year.
It was not until Evans made his first key policy speech last week that I began to appreciate the scale of the Government's selective silences. He began with a ritual bashing of his Liberal predecessor as minister, Kevin Andrews, who is now not even in the Opposition shadow outer ministry and would do his party a favour if he retired.
After the point-scoring Evans got to the essence: "Today I want to announce … [that] mandatory detention is an essential component of strong border control … [but] children and, where possible, their families, will not be detained in an immigration detention centre … Detention that is indefinite or otherwise arbitrary is not acceptable … Detention in immigration detention centres is only to be used as a last resort and for the shortest practicable time …"
It was not until the last paragraph of his long speech that Evans got to the core point: "In the future, the immigration system will be characterised by strong border security, firm deterrence of unauthorised arrivals, effective and robust immigration processes and respect for the rule of law and the humanity of those seeking migration outcomes."
Sounds like Howard. In other words, the fundamentals of the system are not going to be changed. The Rudd Labor Government is not dismantling the detention system first set up by the Keating Labor. It is not ending the excision of Australian territory from the Immigration Act, which prevents asylum-seekers from entering Australian territory via offshore islands. It is not ending the detention of adults until security and health checks are completed. It is not cutting funding for navy border patrols. It is maintaining the new
, far from Australia's shores, and capable of housing 800 people short-term, as a place to warehouse any new wave of boat people.
The fundamentals have not changed because they cannot change. The electorate holds dear the principle that people cannot determine when and how they will move to a new country, bypassing immigration controls or refugee programs. This is elementary to a nation's sovereignty.
The hysterics in the refugee and mandatory detention debates have always thrown around words like "shame" and "gulags" and engaged in moral relativism, comparing Howard to Saddam Hussein, while refusing to recognise that there are real consequences of failures of immigration policy. Thousands of Australian have paid a heavy price for the failed refugee-vetting processes in the 1970s and 1980s, when many people who should never have been allowed into the country were approved. We are still paying the price.
Labor learned the hard way that to compromise border security is to invite political disaster. This is why the Rudd Government is still talking tough on border security, and has a major immigration policy but dare not speak its name.
AND……
Comrade Rudd's great con game
SMH
Paul Sheehan
March 9, 2009
It is going to be fascinating to see how long Kevin Rudd, the greatest illusionist ever to become prime minister of Australia, can maintain this illusion of omnipresent leadership created by his energy, his ubiquity and his hypocrisy. Underline hypocrisy.
Rudd is on course to become the next Gough Whitlam, but Whitlam without the wit. Like Whitlam, he may win a second election before the electorate wakes up. At least Comrade Whitlam was stuck with a claque of criminals in his ministry - Al Grassby, Jim Cairns, Rex Connor - whereas Rudd has no such impediment.
So remember the words, uttered last night, by Rudd on Channel Seven: "Any person's job loss through no fault of their own is a lost job too many when it comes to me. I'm the Prime Minister of the country, the buck stops with me."
Was Rudd able to save a single one of the 2000 manufacturing jobs lost at Pacific Brands last week? No, the buck stopped with the workers. This is the man who increased the immigration program to the largest annual intake in Australia's history, and it is now swelling the ranks of job seekers. This is the man whose Government will, tomorrow, introduce workplace legislation which will increase the power of unions, and give pause to job creators. This is the man who has offered no structural relief to the great job-creating engine of the economy - small business. And this is the man who panicked at the first sign of danger and sprayed the entire $20 billion budget surplus he inherited up against a wall.
If Rudd wants to be Everywhere Man, then let him play the role and bear the consequences. Like most other Western leaders responding to the global financial freeze, he is making it up as he goes along, because we are in uncharted territory. Global industrial output has fallen faster in the past six months than it did at the advent of the Great Depression in 1929-30.
The response of policymakers has been to pump a massive increase in liquidity and government debt obligations into the system. But as the eminent economic historian Professor Niall Ferguson, of Harvard and Oxford, recently warned on his website: "The general assumption seemed to be that practically any kind of government expenditure would be beneficial, provided it was financed by a really big deficit."
Sound familiar? Ferguson continued: "There is something desperate about the way people are clinging to their dog-eared copies of John Maynard Keynes's General Theory. Uneasily aware that their discipline almost entirely failed to anticipate the current crisis, economists seemed to be regressing to macroeconomic childhood, clutching the multiplier like an old teddy bear.
"The harsh reality that is being repressed is this: the Western world is suffering a crisis of excessive indebtedness. Many governments are too highly leveraged, as are many corporations. More importantly, households are groaning under unprecedented debt burdens. Worst of all are the banks. Some of the best-known names in American and European finance have balance sheets 40, 60 or even 100 times the size of their capital …
"The delusion is that a crisis of excess debt can be solved by creating more debt. Yet that is precisely what most governments currently propose to do." Space precludes listing Ferguson's prescriptions but they can be found on his website, and summed up with this sentence: "The solution to the debt crisis is not more debt but less debt."
Tell that to Kevin Keynes. In opposition, Rudd opposed the GST, which in retrospect has been a tremendous stabilising influence in the economy, thanks to John Howard. During the last election, Rudd campaigned as an "economic conservative". Upon winning office, and inheriting a $90 billion financial buffer from outgoing treasurer Peter Costello, he accused the previous government of creating a dangerous inflation threat. It was a fabrication.
After the global financial storm broke, Rudd attacked the excesses of neo-liberal market capitalism even as he spent the entire $20 billion budget surplus he had inherited from the neo-liberals in an absurd attempt to claim he had kept Australia out of recession. The evolution of his economic position has been an opportunistic fraud, exposed by those on his own side of politics.
As the former Labor leader Mark Latham wrote on February 20, in The Australian Financial Review: "When Kevin Rudd lobbied me in October 2004 to become Labor's shadow treasurer, his sales pitch was straight from the neo-liberal playbook. He was enthusiastic about pro-market policies such as deregulation and reducing the size of the state. [As leader] he went to the polls as Howard-lite."
Michael Costa, former Labor treasurer of NSW, dismissed Rudd's recent attack on the excesses of market capitalism, in a critique in The Australian on February 6 as "rambling and selective" and warned that Rudd's response to the global crisis "is likely to do more damage to the economy".
As Niall Ferguson has also warned. When the recession in Australia gets worse, and Rudd's Keynesian cliches have increased the long-term cost of the government intervention, Labor will run a diversionary personal campaign against the Leader of the Opposition, simply because Malcolm Turnbull is a wealthy former merchant banker.
What, you may ask, about the multi-millions the Rudd family has made from neo-liberal policies of the Howard years? Latham had something to say about this, too: "Rudd's wife created an impressive business network and fortune from the Howard government's privatisation of labour market programs."
Rudd can trim his economic sails to pick up whatever political wind he can find because he embodies the hollowness of the pursuit of power before principle.
And Piers Akerman
Open-door policy on unwanted guests
Piers Akerman
News.com.au
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
THREE boats carrying asylum seekers arrived illegally in Australian waters over the past week, making a mockery of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s pre-election pledge that he would “turn them back”.
That promise, made during an interview with The Australian’s senior political staffers Paul Kelly and Dennis Shanahan, was rushed into print on Friday, November 23, 2007, the day before the last federal election.
It was an attempt to reassure voters that, on border security as with economic issues, Rudd Labor would not depart from the sound course set by the Howard government.
Every promise made in that interview has been dishonoured.
Rudd said his approach to border security was based on “effective laws, effective detention arrangements, effective deterrent posture vis-a-vis vessels approaching Australian waters”.
Nearly two years later, the effective laws have been rendered ineffectual, the effective detention arrangements need supplementing with portable cabins and, as we saw recently, have been removed entirely for a particular group of asylum seekers, and the effective deterrent posture vis-a-vis vessels approaching our waters has been weakened to the point of non-existence.
Further, Rudd said Labor would take asylum seekers rescued from leaky boats to Christmas Island and would turn back seaworthy vessels on the high seas.
“You’d turn them back. You cannot have anything that is orderly if you allow people who do not have a lawful visa in this country to roam free,” he said.
“That’s why you need a detention system. I know that’s politically contentious, but one follows from the other. Deterrence is effective through the detention system but also your preparedness to take appropriate action as the vessels approach Australian waters.”
It was complete and utter garbage. Rudd Labor has not only weakened and undermined what was very strong border protection but has diminished the deterrence aspects to the point that the policy now actively encourages asylum seekers already in the queue, determined by the UN and bodies such as the International Organisation for Migration, to pay thousands of dollars to people smugglers to encourage them to break Australian law.
In effect, these asylum seekers are no more than co-conspirators with the people smugglers, but the Rudd Labor Government chooses to ignore the apparent hypocrisy of its position on border security.
In just over a year, Rudd Labor has scrapped the Pacific Solution, which effectively deterred people from seeking out people smugglers to bring them to Australia.
Labor has abolished Temporary Protection Visas, giving permanent residency to more than 1000 people who had been on TPVs and it has dumped the 45-day rule which helped ensure Medicare and other benefits funded by taxpayers were not rorted.
This week the Rudd Labor Government will further erode border protection safeguards by introducing a new form of “complementary” protection visas that will give those currently ineligible to claim protection visas wider scope to claim refugee status when they do not meet the existing refugee criteria.
Since Rudd Labor softened border protection policies in the past 13 months, 31 boats carrying some 1456 asylum seekers have reached Australia.
After six years of extremely little illegal people smuggling traffic, the profiteers are back in business - and people are dying in Australian waters.
Rudd’s election eve interview is a constant reminder of his penchant for perfidy and the sad gullibility of a chunk of the electorate.
Australia's population balloons to 21.8m
By Cathy Alexander,
AAP
September 22, 2009,
Australia s population soared by almost half a million people in the year to March, figures show.
Australia's population soared by almost half a million people in the year to March - a boom not seen since the 1960s.
A green group says that's no cause for celebration and has called for immigration to be cut to protect the environment.
Australian Bureau of Statistics data released on Tuesday shows the population increased by just over two per cent - or 439,000 people - in the year to March.
There are now 21.8 million of us.
Most of the recent increase - almost 300,000 people - was due to immigration.
But there's also a mini-baby boom, with 160,000 babies entering the world during the year.
Recent research showed Australia's population would balloon to 35 million - seven million more than previously thought - on the strength of immigration and births over the next 40 years.
The government says the population boom is great news because it means the economy will keep growing.
But some green groups say enough is enough.
Australian Conservation Foundation spokesman Charles Berger said the growing population was on a collision course with the environment.
More people - as outlined in the ABS data - meant more greenhouse pollution, poorer river health and struggling infrastructure.
Every extra million people added 25 million tonnes of greenhouse pollution, Mr Berger said.
He called for migration to be cut to "more sustainable levels".
"We cannot continue to add the equivalent of a city larger than Canberra every year to Australia's population and still expect to maintain the health of our environment and our quality of life."
Immigration Minister Chris Evans said the government could adjust the immigration intake to suit the economy.
The Rudd government had cut the permanent skilled migration twice since last year, a spokesman for Senator Evans said.
He also pointed out the ABS data included temporary skilled workers from overseas and international students, most of whom would return home.
Clearly Rudd’s immigration policies are working,if only this promise of the Rudd Socialist Labor government had been broken rather than some of the others, such as….
“"Any person's job loss through no fault of their own is a lost job too many when it comes to me. I'm the Prime Minister of the country, the buck stops with me." ……..
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