Trust Tony Abbott to tell it like it is about issues that matter most
John Stone
The Australian
12:00AM February 26, 2018
Last week Tony Abbott delivered the most outstanding speech, on immigration and other related topics, by any politician for many years. When did you last hear from an Australian politician any speech that calmly and analytically set out to initiate a vitally needed public debate? Ironically, the last one in my memory was also delivered (in London) by the same Tony Abbott last October, dealing then with the “global warming” religion and the associated erroneous and hugely costly energy policies from which we all suffer.
Have you ever heard Malcolm Turnbull make a memorable speech about anything — apart, perhaps, from his recent remarks excoriating his then deputy prime minister in terms that the latter, the next day, justifiably called “inept” and “unnecessary”?
The reaction to Abbott’s speech from his Liberal Party colleagues was deplorable — ad hominem, illogical and in many respects untruthful, a response that would discredit a secondary school debating team.
Yet even that deplorable response focused on one part only of Abbott’s remarks, which dealt not merely with our excessive immigration rate but also with stagnant wages growth, housing prices, jobs — particularly for young Australians — infrastructure backlogs, demands on our welfare bill and harmful effects on our already badly strained cultural harmony. All these, Abbott said, are being adversely affected by today’s immigration rate.
Contrary to many of his critics’ subsequent misrepresentations, Abbott did not assert that his proposal to cut the permanent immigration program from its present 190,000 a year to the 110,000 it averaged under the Howard government would solve all this. What he did claim, correctly, was that reducing immigrant inflow would contribute usefully to doing so.
Among several competitors, the most shameful response came from Scott Morrison. He relied on faulty analysis and, far worse, erroneous claims. He should know that in the lead-up to the 2015 budget, Abbott pressed (in the expenditure review committee, of which Morrison was a member) for a cut in the permanent immigration program.
He should also recall that, after the 2013 election, when Morrison was minister for immigration, Abbott cut the most costly permanent immigration component, the refugee and humanitarian program, from the 20,000 level to which Julia Gillard had raised it, back to 13,750 — a truly courageous decision that, predictably, brought down the usual furies on Abbott’s head.
How do I know this? Well, Abbott has publicly spelled out those ERC facts, and if I had to choose between him and the notoriously duplicitous Morrison, of whose underhand role in Abbott’s sacking I have written about elsewhere, I would unhesitatingly choose the former. But I don’t have to rely on that judgment. From March 2011 to September 2015, one of our sons served as Abbott’s chief economic adviser, and although during all that time his lips remained sealed, including to his father, he has now authorised me to say that Abbott’s published account is entirely accurate. So Morrison is wrong. Would he repeat his claim in answer to a carefully framed parliamentary question?
What, moreover, should we make of Morrison’s claim that cutting the permanent immigration program would cost the budget $4 billion-$5 billion over four years?
These figures are thoroughly misleading. For starters, they are up to 10 times higher per migrant place than comparable figures published by Treasury in the May 2009 budget would suggest. But even if you accept them as the commonwealth’s budgetary cost (which, for several reasons, I don’t), they neglect entirely the costs to which the greatly increased immigrant intake has subjected state budgets and local authorities. Think more schools, additional hospital beds, more police, more roads, footpaths, kerbing and guttering, and the list goes on. NSW and Victoria, in particular, where the immigrant increase has been concentrated, are groaning under these pressures.
In any case, ask yourself this question: If Abbott’s proposed immigration cut could raise lower-income workers’ wages by even (say) a few per cent, if it could produce even (say) a 5 per cent fall in the average cost of Sydney and Melbourne housing, if even (say) 20,000 more young Australians could get jobs now being taken by immigrants, wouldn’t you think that even a commonwealth budgetary cost of just $1 billion a year would be well worth paying?
