The Federal Government should have been more cautious in its change to immigration policy. It has decided toincrease the intake by 12,000 to above the 100,000 mark for each of the next four years. The emphasis is to be on skilled immigration. Indeed, the program for people applying for permanent residency from within Australia as refugees has been cut from 5600 to 2000 though the humanitarian program overall will continue with the 12,000 places of each of the past five years.
The increase in the skilled program means that Australia’s population will be 27 million in 2050 instead of 25 million. Given the state of thingslike salinity, land-clearing, endagenred species and the like, the wisdom of the increase must be questioned. Moreover, as NSW Premier Bob Carr never tires of pointing out, the major burden of immigration is borne by Sydney, a city whose infrastructure is straining under population growth. Traffic problems, housing shortages and impossible prices and public transport stress suggest that increasing Sydney’s population will result in a poorer, not better standard of living.
The Government projections about increased immigration leading to higher standards of living have to be taken with (almost literally) a grain of salt. The projections are monetary only and emphasise benefits. Loss of environmental amenity is hardly considered.
It is difficult to see how an immigraiton program in a democracy that believies in equality before the law can prevent people from taking up residence in Sydney, and thus putting further unneeded pressure on that city. True, the Government has announced some welcome measures to get a more even distribution of the migrant intake. It has raised the points required by migrants to get a visa to 115 and then lowered them back to 110 for those who wish to settle outside Sydney and have appropriate business and/or local or state government sponsorship from a region outside Sydney. But there will be nothing to stop migrants from ultimately going to Sydney. And that is where many will want to go because previous waves of migrants have gone there so there will be family, kin and national ties there.
Overall, there was simply no need to increase the intake. Migration except of a massive – and socially unsustainable level – will not appreciably affect the age structure of society. And in any event the aging of society is an overstated problem – the costs of the young outweigh the costs of age as many increasingly aged but increasing affluent European societies are finding. The Government seems to have pandered to busienss interests, particularly the housing industry.
The previous intake was about right. It was satisfying to a high degree economic, family and humanitarian requirements and would have enabled Australia to ensure environmental sustainability more easily.
That said, the Howard Government has been far more sensible on immigration than the Hawke-Keating Governments. Within a short time of coming to office in 1996 it changed the immigration mix so that skilled migrants would outnumber family-reunion migrants. That has no doubt helped the dependency ratio and the government bottom line. Immigration peaked in 1986-87 at 125,000, nearly 80,000 of which was family-reunion. Much of that was vote-catching, rather than nation-building.
Australia already does enough on the humanitarian front with the highest per capita intake of any nation on earth.
At least with the increases announced this/last week the projections are for an increasing proportion of skills intake.
The other welcome part of this/last week’s announcement is a requirement that business migrants have conditional visas which only become permanent after the establishmetn of a business. The previous unconditional scheme was open to abuse.