Population question gets scant coverage

USUALLY the Murdoch press and the shock jocks will seize upon any opportunity to beat up on the Gillard Government. The slightest thing that goes wrong or the slightest failure to live up to a pre-election announcement and they pounce like a cat upon a mouse.

And then, just like the cat, they will keep playing with the half-dead mouse dragging it out on page one and most other pages or airing it to whingeing listeners day after day – showing off by letting it go and catching it again, never putting it out of its misery.

The half-dead mouse can be some blips in the insulation or the schools program or it can be some shonky economics analysis based on foolish premises to condemn the national broadband network or the carbon or mining tax.

Then last month a report appeared that highlighted a genuine shortcoming of the government which genuinely threatens the economic and social well-being of Australians far more seriously than a carbon tax. It fell silently, soundlessly into the news abyss of five of the seven Murdoch capital-city and national papers and all of commercial radio.

It was a report by Monash University’s Bob Birrell, Ernest Healy, Katharine Betts and Fred T. Smith on “Immigration and the Resources Boom Mark 2”.

It made a cogent case that you could halve net overseas migration from 180,000 to 90,000 and easily meet any skills shortage.

It said Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s statement before the election that she did not believe in a big Australia and wanted a sustainable population has been met with business as usual.

It seems that the Government’s population inquiry and the naming of a Minister for Sustainable Population have been nothing more than window dressing. Under present policies Australia is headed for a “Big Australia” of perhaps 50 million by 2050 and an unstoppable swelling in the years thereafter. It will have very large economic and social costs.

Did the Murdoch press and shock jocks hammer away at this empty promise? No way. The report got a 250-word story in Melbourne’s Herald-Sun which superficially angled it in a purely Victorian way and a 450-word piece well back in The Australian by the Social Affairs writer, as if this crucial economic debate is some peripheral sideline.

Neither story mentioned the empty promise. No follow ups. No hunting down further angles as with the endless scare campaigns on carbon tax – whereas the population stuff really is scary.

More importantly, neither story mentioned the report’s nailing of the economic falsehoods and the circular argument underpinning Australia’s immigration policy.

This is important stuff. If the Government continues with present immigration policy it will have a far more profound effect on the economic and social well-being of Australians than any carbon or mining tax — with none of the latter’s benefits.

The Monash report nailed the circular argument this way. It said the Government was relying on advice from Skills Australia. Skills Australia said Australia would need an extra 2.4 million skilled workers by 2015 and an extra 5.2 million by 2025. And that would require high immigration. But those forecasts were based on assumptions made by the modellers, Access Economics. And one of those assumptions was that net overseas migration would grow from 220,000 in 2010 to 250,000 by 2025.

In other words, we will need more skilled migrants because we have a high immigration. Under the Government’s reasoning we must have more migrants because we have so many migrants. The Government’s position is a circular illogicality. There is no logic in the conclusion that we have a skills shortage that must be met with higher immigration.

Quite the reverse. We have a skills shortage BECAUSE we have high immigration.

The Monash report also gives the lie to the notion of mining boom causing a skills shortage – which is often cited as a reason for higher immigration. Mining will employ just 80,000 more people in 2025 than it does now – less than half a year’s migrant intake. The rest of the migrants are going to city service jobs, or to no jobs, and have nothing to do with the resources boom. It is just a ruse.

Governments persist in high immigration because they have a target for GDP growth of 3.75 per cent a year and they are fearful of the political cost of a recession.

High immigration will give you higher GDP growth, but it is a stupid measure. So is the economists’ definition of recession as two successive quarters of “negative GDP growth”.

GDP measures total wealth generation, not wealth generation per person. If you have to share the wealth among more people because of higher immigration, there is less for each person.

On that measure, Australia did not avoid a recession with the global financial crisis. Per capita income fell in two successive quarters but total GDP rose so we did not notice.

The other point is that GDP does not measure well-being. What is the point of having a higher income if you have to spend more time in traffic on the way to work; wait longer for elective surgery; have higher class sizes for your children and so on?

Business, including big media companies, goes along with high population growth because their business grow and make more profit. This gives advantage to people in upper management and people with large shareholdings – people who do not have to worry about stretched public transport, congested roads or waiting for elective surgery – at the cost of everyone else.

The major political parties go along with it because their donations come from business. Also media-savvy lobby groups representing those businesses push for it. A scare campaign over population growth would be warranted because it really is scary, but not even Tony Abbott will take it up because his political party is so beholden to big business interests.

We are being conned here. We are not getting the full picture. The Monash report points out the social and economic costs of high immigration and proves that we would be better off socially and economically with half the amount of immigration we have now. But without extensive media coverage, this really scary message gets lost in beat ups against a sensible carbon policy and a reasonable mining tax. Doing our bit in world efforts to cut carbon emissions – a reasonable insurance policy, in the words of Malcolm Turnbull – will not adversely affect Australians anywhere near as much a persistent high immigration.

This also shows that something should be done about the ethics of economists who concoct reports to organisations like Skills Australia based on unproven assumptions. So many economists’ reports used to support lobbyists’ positions have in tiny type at the end that the conclusions are based on assumptions handed to them by the commissioning body. But the conclusions, not the questionable assumptions, get all the media coverage. Surely economists should have a duty to test the assumptions or at least make sure they are reasonable, not just wash their hands of them?
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on Saturday 6 August.