NSW Premier Bob Carr is quite right to express concerns that any increase in Australia’s family and business migration would put an unnecessary strain on Sydney. Regional centres are crying out for more people. Some have had declining population and they have blamed that – rightly or wrongly — for a decline of services and business activity. Mr Carr, on the other hand, points to growing population pressures in Sydney, particularly horrendous traffic problems.
Various schemes have been proposed to attempt to entice migrants out of Sydney. Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock has suggested rules to prevent migrants sponsoring family members to Australian until they could show they had established themselves outside Sydney. Another suggestion has been to give business migrants temporary visas until they get their business up and running in a regional area. Another idea put by Mr Ruddock was to give preferences among people who have studied in Australia to those who studied in a regional centre.
These ideas have some merit because once someone gets a job or establishes a business they are much less likely to drift to the city – particularly a city like Sydney where house prices and prohibitive and commuting costs – in time and money – would make a move less attractive.
However, such schemes do not address three fundamental points. The first is that people migrating to Australia often seek to live in places where they will find people from the country that they are emigrating from. This is particularly true of people coming from places where there are a lot of recent migrants. People naturally flock to places where they will find other people who share their language, religion and culture. Invariably that means the big cities, particularly Sydney, which have pockets of people from certain countries. The phenomenon has been so strong recently that it seems unlikely to be broken easily. Moreover, attempts to break it might result in communities of migrants from a particular country going to just one or two regional centres, rather than dispersing throughout Australia.
The second difficulty is that it is impossible to overcome the economic attraction that Sydney has in the first place. The city is booming. Even if people go through the motions of satisfying a migration program, the very attractions of Sydney and problems with regional centres that have caused the present population imbalance will eventually apply to the new migrants.
The third difficulty is that is it unacceptable to have restrictions on where a class of citizens can live. Australia is a free liberal democracy with equality under the law. To impose residential restrictions – even to migrants for a limited time – offends those ideals.
At best incentives can be given to migrants to encourage them to live in regional centres. Mr Carr has suggested rent assistance and tax breaks, for example. But once again, there is the problem of creating two classes of citizens. Already the NSW Opposition has called for any incentives to be applied across the board to any existing Sydney resident. It would make such a scheme prohibitively expensive.
Ultimately, Mr Carr is right. The only way to stop pressure on Sydney is not to increase migrant levels. More evidence is showing that increasing migration will do little about the aging population and in any event the economic and social difficulties of an aging population have been exaggerated.
Mr Ruddock was right in setting up a working party to examine the issue. It needs to assess the costs increased migration will place on Sydney’s infrastructure and service provision and if the Federal Government is not prepared to meet that cost it should think very careful about the proposals to increase migration at the behest of business lobbies out for short-term gain.
Most of the evidence suggests that maintaining the migration level around the 1999 or 2000 would be about right.