Abbott - Cut immigration...

[Gordon]

For those of us in Sydney, we're bloody choking.

Sydney is full!!!!!

[Black Orchid]

Sydney is splitting at the seams and the only apologist naysayers come from the 'lesser' states. Once they are also splitting at the seams they might see some sense but, by then, it is all too late. If it isn't already. I tend to think it is too late already.

[Neferti]

The major cities (Sydney and Melbourne) are FULL. I used to live in both. Canberra, where I have been for the last 30 years, is beginning to fill up ... but there is nothing here other than Public Service ... plenty of space to start a "manufacturing" industry but why would they? Don't we have some Aussies with INNOVATIVE ideas .. can't they still get the Government new business initiative thingie?

[The Mechanic]

MINISTERS SMASH ABBOTT BUT BETRAY VOTERS ON IMMIGRATION

TWO months ago, the Australian Bureau of Statistics warned that our population was growing faster than that of any rich country it could think of.

We’d added 388,100 people — the equivalent of another Canberra — in just a year. Most were immigrants, taking our population growth to 1.6 per cent.

This is plainly nuts, as the federal ministers busy smashing Tony Abbott last week tried so dishonestly to deny.

Think: At this rate, every city, town and bush camp in Australia will be twice its size in just 44 years. And you think the traffic is already bad enough? The house prices too high?

Think of this, too: Most of that doubling of population will be new arrivals with no deep cultural ties to this place. Isn’t our social cohesion fraying already?

The Bureau illustrated what an unprecedented demographic experiment our politicians are now imposing on us, saying: “Australia is growing faster than our close neighbours and other major OECD countries, except for Papua New Guinea (2.1 per cent).” It also showed a chart of how we compared.

It’s frightening.

[The Mechanic]

the Liberal Party has lost its way with a faction at the TOP acting like bully school children..

the Leftist way..

they attack their own far worse than they attack the opposition..

the latest email sent out accidentally to the wrong address and now everyone knows just how pathetic they are ..

[Outlaw Yogi]

For those of us in Sydney, we're bloody choking.

Sydney is full!!!!!

I bailed from Sydney in the 90s because it was chock full of wogs back then.
Must be complete madness by now.

I lived in Bundy for 9 years, and it's a bit like California in that everybody's from somewhere else, mostly Sydney.
These days I avoid Bundy if I can because the traffic is like being back in suburban Sydney.

My advice is abandon the cities and go bush ... hey I only paid $1k per acre and never run out of firewood ... life's not too bad when you own a forest.

[Rorschach]

African truancy levels on par with indigenous rates
The Australian
12:00AM March 6, 2018
Rebecca Urban
Melbourne

Melbourne schools in suburbs with large populations of African migrants, including the troubled South Sudanese community, are facing high truancy rates similar to those afflicting many indigenous communities, sparking fears of poor educational outcomes and spiralling social problems.

Up to 50 per cent of students enrolled at some schools in Flemington, Tarneit and Sunshine in the city’s west and Dandenong in the east fail to attend at least 90 per cent of school days, data published by the Australian Curriculum, ­Assessment and Reporting Authority has revealed.

Education experts believe that 90 per cent attendance is the minimum benchmark for a student to progress in their learning. Victoria’s overall attendance level is 79.5 per cent, meaning one-fifth of students are not attending school consistently.

African community leaders, teachers and social workers have expressed alarm at the high level of school disengagement and were concerned about possible links to the recent spike in crime and anti-­social behaviour by young people from South Sudanese backgrounds.

School principal Matthew Shorecross, who runs Sacred Heart School in Fitzroy, which has a large intake of South Sudanese, Ethiopian and Eritrean students from the Atherton Gardens public housing estate, said the secondary school system was failing many migrant and refugee students, particularly boys.

“In saying that, they’re probably disengaged by the time they get there,” Mr Shorecross said. “We ... probably haven’t done a good enough job. We need to get better at catering for different learning styles.”

With research suggesting that it can take five to seven years for a child raised in a non-English-speaking home to acquire language skills equivalent to an Australian-born classmate, Mr Shorecross said engagement was crucial in the early years so that “kids don’t drop off the radar in the meantime”. Sacred Heart recorded an attendance level of 81 per cent last year — above the state ­average — whereas Fitzroy Primary School, which has a similarly disadvantaged demographic, had an attendance level of 70 per cent. Several schools in Dandenong and Pakenham recorded attendance levels of between 60 and 70 per cent, while Sunshine College reported an attendance level of just 59 per cent in term one, dropping to 54 per cent by term three.

In the City of Wyndham, where youth vandalism and anti-social behaviour sparked headlines over summer, Tarneit P-9 College ­recorded a 72 per cent attendance level and noted its concerns over unexplained absences, particularly in the primary year levels, in the latest annual report. It has since introduced an attendance policy and employed an African community liaison officer.

While each of the schools has large numbers of students with a language background other than English, the data does not provide a breakdown by nationality.

However, according to the census, the Wyndham and Dandenong regions have among the highest number of South Sudanese migrants across the state.

Debney Meadows Primary School, where 85 per cent of students come from Horn of Africa countries and most live in the Flemington public housing estate, reported an attendance level of just 46 per cent last year.

Principal Vicki Watson said all schools faced challenges and Debney Meadows was no different. “We do a lot of work to make sure our beautiful young people are here every day,” she said.

Other principals approached for comment by The Australian did not respond.

Federation of South Sudanese Associations president Kenyatta Dei Wal, a member of a recently formed taskforce to tackle youth crime, said a “holistic solution” was needed.

State Education Minister James Merlino said the vast ­majority of young people from culturally diverse backgrounds were “engaged and thriving at school”.

Mr Shorecross said Sacred Heart students had benefited from exposure to the wider community and role models who had achieved success in their own education.

With that in mind he has hired two engagement officers — Wally Elnour and Bakhita Dao, both of South Sudanese descent — to support struggling children to ensure they don’t fall behind.

Mr Elnour, 20, is excited by the new job, which the actor was encouraged to pursue after playing a promising basketballer caught up in a police investigation in the SBS TV series Sunshine.

“Growing up, I was the sporty type and I loved going to school,” he said. “If kids can have their passion and find it early, it can drive them to be better people. School can help them to do that.”

[Rorschach]

Tony Abbott is wrong about lots of things, but not immigration
By Tony Walker
1 April 2018 — 4:13pm

Just because Tony Abbott advocates a particular course of action doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Nor should his strange decision to launch a book by the anti-immigrant campaigner Pauline Hanson preclude reasonable consideration of his views on contentious issues of the day.

Former prime ministers are entitled to be heard, whether you agree with them or not.

What Abbott had to say in a recent address at the Sydney Institute about reducing immigration to enable the country to pause while an infrastructure deficit is overcome represents a reasonable response to an extraordinary level of community concern.

“My issue is not immigration; it’s the rate of immigration at a time of stagnant wages, clogged infrastructure [and] soaring house prices,’’ he said.

Let’s put some numbers around the issue. In the latest ABS Demographic Statistics report, Australia’s population grew by 1.6 per cent or a tick over 388,000 in the twelve months to June 2017.

Victoria easily outstripped the other states – and the national average – adding 2.3 per cent in 2016-17, or 144,400. This compared with a gain in NSW of 121,800, or 1.6 per cent, bang on the national average.

The surge shows no sign of slackening: to the contrary. In the 12 months to June 2017, the net overseas migration (NOM) figure of 245,400 was up 27.1 per cent, or 52,400 people on the previous year of 193,000. Let’s repeat that: 27.1 per cent.

In a country with one of the world’s most fragile ecosystems, these sorts of population increases are not sustainable, whatever self-serving arguments for a bigger Australia might be advanced.

Former NSW premier Bob Carr, a long-time advocate of a rational immigration policy, put the quality of life argument quite well on Q&A. "Do we really want to be adding a million to our population every three and a half years? Would it be such a departure from God’s eternal plan for this continent if we took six years about acquiring an extra million?"

Among OECD countries, Australia’s population increase in 2016-17 is at the top of the scale compared with Canada, up 0.9 per cent over a comparable period, the United States up 0.7 per cent and Britain 0.6 per cent.

Put another way, Australia’s population expanded between 2003-16 at 2.5 times the OECD average. The NOM is running at three times the national average in the years since Federation.

In commentary accompanying a report out in March – Housing Affordability: Reimagining the Australian Dream - the centrist Grattan Institute in Melbourne cautioned that Australian governments were “squandering gains from migration with poor housing and infrastructure policies’’.

Grattan warned that “unless the states reform their planning systems to allow more housing to be built, the Commonwealth should consider tapping the brakes on Australia’s migrant intake’’.

Since I doubt that anyone, including John Daley, Grattan’s chief executive, believes that governments will make significant inroads into the nation’s housing shortage in the foreseeable future, this can be read as a call for a review of the country’s migrant intake.

For Melburnians who have borne the brunt of a population surge, the following numbers will be no surprise. In the decade to 2016, the city’s population increased by 1.1 million, or 30 per cent. In the same time frame, Sydney grew by 845,000, or 20 per cent.

After saying Australia needs to cut immigration numbers, former PM Tony Abbott has been criticised by government ministers, who say he's just wrong.

According to Grattan, Melbourne’s traffic congestion is as bad as Sydney’s, if not worse, especially given a single bottleneck via the West Gate Bridge across the Maribyrnong waterway to the city’s western suburbs.

These suburbs towards Geelong and the Surf Coast are among the fastest expanding urban conurbations in the entire country.

What should be making Melburnians’ and Sydneysiders’ blood boil is the failure of successive governments - federal and state - to get on top of infrastructure challenges. This reflects a monumental planning failure – and demographic forecasting that vastly underestimated population growth.

In 2002, around the time then treasurer Peter Costello was telling Australians to have “one kid for mum, one for dad, and one for the country’’, the ABS was forecasting a population of 26.4 million by 2051 from numbers then of 19.7 million.

We are now less than 10 per cent shy of that projection with population edging towards 25 million.

In 2002 the ABS forecast populations for Sydney and Melbourne by 2051 of 5.6 million and 4.7 million respectively. As things stand, Sydney’s population exceeds 5 million. Melbourne will overtake Sydney by mid-century, both with populations above 8 million.

What all this means is that as governments scramble to accommodate population growth way beyond demographic predictions, they are being forced to retrofit strained infrastructure at a vastly inflated cost.

In all of this, a reluctant political class would be making a huge mistake to ignore public disquiet on the issue of population pressures, and in the process enable anti-immigrant populism to fester exemplified by Pauline Hanson’s calls for a zero-immigration intake.

“A strong immigration program in the long term doesn’t preclude a smaller one in the short term, especially when there’s acute pressure on living standards and quality of life,’’ Abbott told the Sydney Institute.

I couldn’t agree more.