Why
We will retain all the racial and religious diversity we already have but complement it with the unity of more people having spent most of their lives in Australia and more people speaking English as a native language. With deeper roots to the land and closer connections to each other, our ability to understand each other, empathise with each other, communicate and collaborate will increase every year. The more we have in common with each other and with our leaders the more comfortable and effective we will be in holding our leaders to account – this is of immense importance to a democratic political system.
Australians have generally been faced with two unappealing options when considering diversity’s challenges. Big business claims that language and culture is irrelevant, and no level of migration will change a country’s ability to communicate and co-operate. The far right in turn has wanted to take Australia back to a racist past that is as unworkable as it is unwanted.
LMA offers a third way. We do not shy away from acknowledging the difficult fact that high enough immigration and diversity will reduce social solidarity and social capital. However, we want to answer that challenge in a constructive and workable way that the whole community can support. Our racial and religious diversity is here to stay so let’s embrace that. The diversity of people having lived in Australia and speaking English as a native language is up for grabs, let’s choose the community we want. With low migration every year we will have more people with more lived experience and native language in common.
With low migration and high intermarriage, we will birth a brand new Australian ethnicity.
Each generation will have more in common than the last and our ability to communicate and co-operate will rise.
While many Australians consider that we have a high level of environmental concern, on any global statistical analysis, such as emissions per person, we are one of the most environmentally dysfunctional countries.
To lower our environmental damage requires either making things more efficiently (decoupling) and/or making fewer things. Decoupling alone cannot eliminate the environmental scarring from modern industrial processes, it can only reduce it. We also need to shrink our economy so we will make fewer things in the first place, so called degrowth. Getting individual Australians to consume less is politically impossible at scale so simply having fewer Australians is the only politically feasible pathway to lowering consumption.
The relationship between migration and wages at the economy wide level is complex and people can reasonably disagree but the impact of migration on certain sectors is not contentious. Most migrants lack native English, local cultural knowledge, networks, relatives and Australian citizenship. They are then precluded from employment in fields such as politics, public service, consulting, management, marketing, high end sales, academia and think tanks.
Migrants are therefore over-represented in fields without these requirements, such as ride share driving, farm work, hospitality and cleaning – so called blue-collar industries. A seller’s market for blue collar labour would drive a wealth transfer to some of the most disadvantaged people in the country, including Australia’s young, poor and many of Australia’s recent migrants.
Migration increases the number of people in Australia which increases the number of houses needed. Economists call this ‘demand’ for housing. Migration is a significant factor in demand and demand is a significant factor in prices. Simply reducing the number of people looking for housing would make a buyer’s market for housing.
When the population is growing we have to have some densification and urban sprawl. This means that any resistance to one instance of urban sprawl or densification, such as protecting a certain piece of bush or a certain suburb, will always only ever lead to another instance of densification or urban sprawl being more profitable and so harder to prevent. That is most efforts of so called NIMBYs are offsetting each other. The only politically realistic way for a durable end to both urban sprawl and densification is to end population growth, which can only be done in Australia with lower migration. A stable population is the only way we could have a permanent end to both urban sprawl and densification. Alternately, what urban sprawl or densification we did have with a stable population, would result in appreciably greater housing availability.
Around 30% of our exports are highly carbon intensive (such as coal, oil and gas (23%), meat (4%) and international tourism (3%) because it is dependent on cheap untaxed aviation fuel). Carbon intensive exports face a bleak future. We need to start imagining how we will structure our society and economy on the basis of only 70% of our current exports and we need to start the transition sooner than later. Lowering migration now will begin that process and soften the blow when it comes. It will also reduce the urban sprawl currently destroying some of our most productive farmland.