A nasty piece of vandalism

In an article at On Line Opinion, Australian-born Chinese Jieh-Yung Lo, a Policy/Project Officer of the Ethnic Communities’ Council of Victoria and Executive Member of Chinese Culture Monthly, demands that Australia dump the monarchy and become a republic in order to reflect "an ever-changing multicultural Australia."

He writes:

I believe a further commitment by our elected parliamentary representatives is needed to change the identity and face of our nation to ensure that our national identity is clear and addressed.

The article itself is of terrible quality. But some of the reader responses are worth re-posting here.

One poster writes:

Changing the “identity and face of our nation” sounds like a nasty piece of vandalism – no more than an attack on the history and achievements of the people who forged our identity and nation. It is an insult by the multi-culties who have lobbed here and, having accepted our hospitality and protection, now want to change Australia to something suiting them. What people like this author, and some fifth column Australians, are suggesting is that we give up our history and culture to foreigners let in by wet, immigration-mad governments.

The idea that we are bound to Britain and the Monarchy now in anything but history and culture is stupid and ignorant. The existing link is important to our history, but we are have been our own boss, our own country, for a long time. We have “absolute independence”.

This author, admitting that there is a mere 15.8% “…of Australians coming from more than 200 countries and ancestries and speaking a language other than English at home” has the cheek to suggest that Australia should change for just for that piddling number of people who should not have come here if they wanted the country to change for them – if, indeed, they do want that.

The Queen is a figure head. She has no say whatsoever in what happens in Australia. She ‘approves’ our Government’s choice of GG ceremoniously because she has absolutely no authority in the appointment, which itself is a little bit of historical ceremony having no affect on our identity or who actually runs the country.

Some people thinks it’s OK for latecomers to hang onto their heritage, but not OK for Australian descendants of the original settlers to hang onto theirs.

Another chimes in:

I agree.

When immigrants move into our country and then demand that Australia's historic national identity be dismantled in order to better suit them, I feel nothing but a deep revulsion and a sense of personal insult - as if we have invited invaders, rather than immigrants, into our midst.

Imagine if an immigrant in some relatively sane country - say Japan or Germany or pre-1970s Australia - who, shortly after his arrival, announces to the host population: "Oh, by the way, you people must - in order to make me feel more comfortable - surrender everything that has constituted the historic identity of your nation. But don't worry! You shouldn't see this as a loss!"

Like most imperialists, Mr. Lo seems intent on erasing the heritage of the nation he and his fellow immigrants seek to dominate. Mr. Lo would have us believe that the entire history of the Australian nation from colonial times up until the mid 20th Century, during which Australia drew its people and its culture almost exclusively from the British Isles, no longer has any bearing whatsoever on our contemporary national identity.

This is, of course, utterly absurd and highly insulting to many Australians. The truth is that Australia remains a British-based society, even if decades of multiculturalist propaganda has left many younger Australians believing that their nation adds up to nothing more than an amorphous cloud of 'diversity.'

Why do Australians allow recently-arrived ethnic minorities to dictate what our national identity and culture should be?

A history of the White Australia Policy

R.J. Stove summarises the Cultural Left's historical account of the so-called "White Australia Policy":

• By the late nineteenth century Australia had become a multicultural paradise, in which the Anglo lion lay down with the Afghan lamb, and in which the Oriental selflessly laboured to induct us within (to coin a phrase) The Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Such lamentable departures from this state of innocence as the goldfields’ anti-Chinese riots can be explained, though not excused, by the tragic absence of Eureka Street, The Sunday Age, and Sir William Deane.

• Alas, into “this other Eden” there entered a serpent, in the shape of Federation’s biological racists. These satanic traitors, such as Edmund Barton and Alfred Deakin, bound Australia hand and foot with the chains of the White Australia Policy. And the great hopes of maintaining the pre-1901 polyethnic haven were therefore doomed. Then behold, the veil of the multicultural temple was torn in two from top to bottom, and the earth quaked, and the rocks were split, and the Thousand-Year Aryan Reich of Menzies came to pass. And every man’s hand was against Australia, and Australia’s hand was against every man. And the very name of Australia was cursed by the tribes of Manhattan and Madras and Manila and Mogadishu, yea, even unto the seventh generation.

• It subsequently required the Four Just Men — Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke, and Keating — to wash away White Australia’s sins. But the forces of evil returned, in the shape of the Fascist Howard, who reimposed the Menzies Aryan dictatorship. And the land brought forth white picket fences. And there was darkness and gnashing of asylum-seekers’ teeth.

Read the full article here.

Albrechtsen, Ruddock and immigration

Janet Albrechtsen, a pundit I once admired, recently wrote a column praising the mass immigration policies implemented under the former Howard Government's first immigration minister, Philip Ruddock.

According to Albrechtsen, Ruddock "steered Australia towards greater appreciation for, rather than suspicion of, immigration" by essentially redefining immigration as purely an economic issue, devoid of any larger cultural or racial dimensions.

That immigration should only to be considered from an economic perspective has become the prevailing attitude these days. It is clear that our elites no longer view Australia as a nation, defined by a particular people sharing a common language, culture, history, and ancestry. Instead, Australia has been reduced to a mere economy, with its people viewed as nothing more than a labour force which can be augmented or even replaced through mass immigration if the "market" demands it. According to this view, it wouldn't matter if immigration turned Australia into a non-Western country, just as long as it was good for the economy.

Yet, as those who are familiar with her writings will know, Albrechtsen actually does profess to care about the future of Western civilisation on this continent and elsewhere.

Indeed, she has vehemently criticised the anti-Western ideology of multiculturalism, or what she calls "multicultural madness", on a number of occasions. Muslims, in particular, have been singled out in Albrechtsen's anti-multicultural tirades.

Needless to say, Albrechtson's trenchant criticisms of multiculturalism are indubitably valid. And her willingness to stand up for Western culture, albeit at the most superficial level, should be commended. But her inability to make the obvious connection between massive non-Western immigration and the menace of multiculturalism seriously damages her credibility.

It seems that Albrechtson, along with other Australian neoconservatives like Andrew Bolt, just can't bring themselves to admit that it is immigration that provides the oxygen for multiculturalism. Rather than concede that it is the immigration-induced revolution in Australia's ethnic makeup that is fuelling the multiculturalist movement, they perform mental gymnastics in order to convince themselves that one can support unlimited immigration while at the same time opposing multiculturalism.

My advice to Janet: next time you furiously denounce fractious, misogonystic Muslims or complain about the promotion of non-Western minority cultures at the expense of Australia's dominant Western culture, take a minute to consider how all these culturally alien and hostile non-Western peoples came to be in Australia in the first place.

And if you can't work it out, then perhaps you can ask your good friend, Philip Ruddock. He should know; he brought many of them here.

Is it "racist" to resist displacement?

American commentator Craig Nelson on his country's impending white minority:

So, just around the corner, whites in America are going to be disempowered, assuming we remain a democracy, through a radical and rapid transformation of the nation's demography on a scale unprecedented in world history.

In response to this news, individual whites — the proper, polite ones — will affect (or, if particularly ignorant of the world around them, evince) an attitude, at the least, of indifference and calm assurance, at the most, of celebratory enthusiasm.

For the sake of clear, adult thinking, let's dismiss these proper, polite whites as a bunch of panglossian ninnies and adopt a position more in line with everything we know about humans.

Let's say that the Census Bureau projections are deeply troubling and cause for alarm for white Americans, and leave it to the other races in America to decide for themselves what this demographic shift means to them.

Now, if you are a white person reading this, and if you are the type of white person who is already looking around for someone to point and shriek "Racist!" in front of, you might as well stop reading now. You don't matter to the following discussion, and it will be over your head anyway.

For everyone else, let's start by assuming that white Americans share with all peoples throughout the world at all times throughout history the characteristic that being disempowered as a group is a negative — like being conquered, or being subjugated.

Let's assume that it is the same disaster for whites that whites consider it to be for everyone else.

Let's assume there is nothing magical about being white that permits whites the luxury of indifference to this disempowerment — this permanent disempowerment.

Let's assume whites are not so superior that they can ignore gritty, bloody reality — that they can ignore, as if he were a precocious child, Willie Brown, the black former speaker of the California Assembly, when he says, "I think most white politicians do not understand that the race pride we all have trumps everything else."

Let's assume the United States is a nation not so exceptional that Americans of any color can opt out of the destiny that demography is.

If we make these assumptions — assumptions future generations will curse us for not making — then the new Census Bureau projections plainly demand an immediate and radical change in public policy, and an all out effort to accomplish this change.

Full article

Refuting the "nation of immigrants" nonsense

Lawrence Auster's excellent booklet, Huddled Clichés, is now available online.

Given that many of the clichés, half-truths and outright falsehoods used to justify mass immigration into the United States are also used by immigration celebrationists here in Australia, it's well worth a read.

Auster on the particularly nauseating "nation of immigrants" chant:

The statement, “we are a nation of immigrants,” gives us no guidance on what those limits should be. Two hundred thousand immigrants per year? Two million? Why not twenty million—since we’re a nation of immigrants? The slogan also doesn’t tell us, once we have decided on overall numbers, what the criterion of selection shall be among the people who want to come here. Do we choose on the basis of family ties to recent immigrants? Language? Income? Nationality? Race? Victim status? First come first served? The “nation of immigrants” slogan cannot help us choose among these criteria because it doesn’t state any good that is to be achieved by immigration. It simply produces a blind emotional bias in favor of more immigration rather than less, making rational discussion of the issue impossible.

To see the uselessness of the “national of immigrants” formula as a source of political guidance, imagine what the British would have said if they had adopted it in 1940 when they were facing an imminent invasion by Hitler’s Germany. “Look, old man, we’re a nation of immigrant/invaders. First the Celts took the land from the Neolithic peoples, then the Anglo-Saxons conquered and drove out the Celts, then the Normans invaded and subjugated the Anglo-Saxons. In between there were Danish invaders and settlers and Viking marauders as well. Since we ourselves are descended from invaders, who are we to oppose yet another invasion of this island? Being invaded by Germanic barbarians is our national tradition!”

Since every nation could be called a nation of immigrants (or a nation of invaders) if you go back far enough, consistent application of the principle that a nation of immigrants must be open to all future immigrants would require every country on earth to open its borders to whoever wanted to come. But only the United States and, to a lesser extent, a handful of other Western nations, are said to have this obligation. The rule of openness to immigrants turns out to be a double standard, aimed solely at America and the West.

Read Huddled Clichés here.

Paul Sheehan on immigration

Columnist and author Paul Sheehan writes:

Did you know the Rudd Government is implementing the biggest immigration program since the end of World War II, and the biggest intake, in absolute numbers of permanent immigrants and temporary workers, in Australia's history?

Did you know the migration program for 2008-09 has set a target of 190,300 places, a robust 20 per cent increase over the financial year just ended?

On budget night, May 13, amid the avalanche of material released by the Government, the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Senator Chris Evans, issued a press release stating, among other things: "The use of 457 visas to employ temporary skilled migrant workers has grown rapidly in recent years. A total of 39,500 subclass 457 visas was granted in 2003-04 compared with an expected 100,000 places in each of 2007-08 and 2008-09." That is a 150 per cent increase in four years.

Did you know the number of overseas students coming to Australia is also at a record high, with 228,592 student visas granted in 2006-07, a 20 per cent increase over the previous year?

Under the Rudd Government, Australia's net immigration intake is now larger than Britain's, even though it has almost three times the population of Australia. To put all this in perspective, the immigration program in the Rudd Government's first year is 150 per cent bigger than it was in the Howard government's first year. The immigration intake is running almost 60 per cent higher than it was three years ago.

Full article

Sheehan forgot to mention that Australia now has the highest per capita permanent immigration intake in the world.

Don't expect the Rudd Government to be broadcasting this fact though. As Sheehan notes, the Rudd Government refuses to even mention immigration.

The fact that the Government can implement a policy such as this without any public consultation or discussion whatsoever makes we wonder what kind of "democracy" Australia really is.

Soon-to-be white minority countries

From the United States:

White Americans no longer a majority by 2042
By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER

WASHINGTON (AP) — White people will no longer make up a majority of Americans by 2042, according to new government projections. That's eight years sooner than previous estimates, made in 2004.

My guess is that Australia won't be far behind. Currently, Europeans still comprise around 85 to 90 percent of the total population in Australia (although it's almost impossible to find any current information on Australia's ethnic/racial make-up, so the European component could be much lower). However, Australia's immigration intake is much larger in per capita terms than America's, so the rate of ethnic change is much faster. If current immigration and birth rate trends continue, a submergence date for the white Australian majority sometime not long after mid-century seems likely.

Now, as mind-blowing as the massive immigration-driven demographic changes in both the United States and Australia are, what really amazes me is how the historic European populations of the West are supposed to celebrate their own dispossession as a milestone for "diversity". Losing control over your own country or territory is universally understood to be a bad thing, so why are white people been told by their national elites that it somehow benefits them?

Moreover, why is it that the type of "diversity" celebrated by multiculturalists is confined only to Western countries? Non-Western countries are never said to be in need of a heavy dose of immigration-induced "diversity". Nobody is demanding that Asian, African, Middle Eastern or Latin American countries be radically transformed via mass immigration.

No, it's only Western countries which are obliged to open their doors to the world and allow their founding European populations to be relegated to minority status. The inevitable result will be that in a hundred years, most Western countries, particularly the high-immigration English-speaking nations, will be largely populated by non-Western peoples, while the countries from whence these immigrant colonisers came will still be what they've always been. Asian countries will still be Asian, African countries will be African, Middle Eastern countries will still be Arab etc. etc., but many European and European-descended peoples will have completely lost control over their countries and will be headed toward complete and utter demographic oblivion.

Far from adding to "diversity", the Third World immigration takeover of Western countries actually means a net loss of civilisational, cultural and ethnic distinctiveness on a global scale.

It's the population, stupid!

From the ABC:

Migrants to fuel emissions increase: researchers

Researchers have warned that greenhouse gas emissions will increase dramatically as immigration increases Australia's population.

The Federal Government is being accused of ignoring the role of population growth in Australia's increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

Monash University researchers predict the population will grow to 31.5 million by 2050, with almost 10 million migrants making up the increase.

That is despite industry groups warning the workforce is set to shrink as baby boomers retire.

The researchers project emissions will grow to 800 million tonnes annually, about four times what the Federal Government hopes to achieve by 2050.

Dr Bob Birrell has told ABC Radio's AM that population growth is the main driver of emissions.

"It is a puzzle as to why the Rudd Government has made no reference, nor its adviser, Professor Ross Garnaut, to this factor," he said.

"I can only deduce from their behaviour that although they would like to achieve a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, it's a lesser priority than population building policies."

Dr Birrell says the environmental and economic effects of the population increase will eventually flow on to consumers.

"Every extra million associated with migration will add to economic activity and thus, greenhouse emissions, and businesses who are vying for permits will have to pay more because of the competition to get those permits," he said.

"That means of course passing on the costs to consumers, or struggling to compete against imports."

Needless to say, the Rudd Government is patently brain-dead if it actually believes it can reduce carbon emissions while also running the biggest immigration program in this country's history. Unless we stabilize our population, Australia can forget about trying to reduce its carbon emissions.

Rudd's gang-busters immigration program

Columnist Paul Sheehan asks the question:

Could someone point out to me where, in last year's election campaign, Kevin Rudd or his Labor cohorts announced they were going to commit Australia to a gang-busters immigration program?

Where was Labor's policy announcement that Australia, with its stressed bread basket living from winter rain to winter rain, was going to increase its population by 1 million people during the three-year term of a Rudd government? I can't find it.

Nor can I.

Perhaps Chairman Rudd and Chris Evans would like to explain why they believe Australia needs to be running the largest per capita immigration program in the world. I certainly haven't heard any rational justification for these massive levels of immigration.

A legacy of displacement

In his January 2008 review of The Howard Legacy: Displacement of Traditional Australia from the Professional and Managerial Classes by Dr. Peter Wilkinson, American commentator Thomas Jackson makes the observation:

Australia has an immigration policy that is like ours stood on its head. The United States is filling up with unlettered Hispanics, who make every social problem worse, whether it is crime, school failure, illegitimacy, youth gangs, obesity, or drug-taking.

Australia is importing hundreds of thousands of smart, hard-working people who are streaming into the nation’s best universities and working their way to the top. Mass immigration at its best? No. “In 1994 the acerbic Le Kuan Yew, then Prime Minister of Singapore, forecast that Australians were destined to be the poor white trash of Asia,” writes Peter Wilkinson in The Howard Legacy. “Today one can say that white Australians are destined to be the poor trash of Australia.”

Australia's looming immigration disaster is simply another reminder that the large‑scale immigration of people who are ethnically dissimilar to the host population is always fraught with danger, irrespective of whether the immigrants themselves are skilled or non-skilled.

In The Howard Legacy, Dr. Peter Wilkinson explores in great detail how Australia's current immigration program is leading to the gradual emergence of a Chinese market-dominant minority.

To quote Wilkinson directly:

In selecting skilled immigrants, those who have done a degree in Australia receive bonus points in the criteria for acceptance for residency. In effect the policy selects those Asians who have higher cognitive ability, predominantly ethnic Chinese. In the ‘knowledge economy’ of today a premium is paid for qualifications and cognitive ability. They and their children (who will inherit their higher intelligence) will fill the professional and managerial ranks in Australia. They will dominate the cognitive class and hence have disproportionate influence in the country. This has important ramifications for both internal and external policies as ethnic demographic change continues.

According to Wilkinson, this situation has become about because governments have failed to adequately invest in the education of our own people. Instead, it has come to rely on an ever-growing number of largely Asian immigrants, many of which use Australia's universities as a back door into the country. Little known changes to immigration laws made by the former Howard Government mean that foreign students can now apply for permanent residency once completing a degree in Australia. Desperate for the income streams provided by these full fee-paying foreign students, Australia's universities have increasingly allowed themselves to serve as "visa factories".

Jackson summarises Wilkinson's proposed remedies to this problem:

Dr. Wilkinson makes the obvious recommendations: immigration should be cut, colleges should not have to depend on foreigners, and an Australian degree should not be a ticket to citizenship. He even suggests preferences for whites.

Of course, none of these changes will happen with Chairman Rudd at the helm. Jackson notes:

None of this seems likely. The new prime minister Kevin Rudd majored in Chinese as an undergraduate and held a diplomatic post at the Peking embassy. He is widely known as a Sinophile and even has a Chinese son-in-law. Mr. Rudd will not make it harder for Asians to tighten their grip.

Jackson then concludes:

What is happening in Australia is yet another example of why racial diversity does not work. The Chinese who can afford to immigrate are well above average in ability and even further above the Australian average. There is nothing to stop them from displacing the WASP ruling class, and changing the country in ways whites will not like.

Had these talented immigrants been Britons, Canadians, or white South Africans, there would be nothing like the friction that is sure to come. There might be a few murmurs of discontent if Boers, for example, took over a few major banks, but in a generation Boers would be indistinguishable from old Australian stock. The Chinese will remain Chinese, whether they are running a corner laundry or the foreign ministry. And, as Dr. Wilkinson points out, when the old WASP elite discovers that its children and grandchildren are sweeping floors in Chinese-owned factories, they will have only themselves to blame.

Why a country's established elite would wish to displace themselves by willingly handing over the keys to their nation to newcomers is a question that will certainly flummox future historians.

Hat tip: Abandon Skip

Some inconvenient truths about immigration

Ross Gittens points out a few truths about immigration:

The third point in Mr Rudd's five-point plan to fight inflation is to "tackle chronic skills shortages", and part of this is to do so through the immigration program. Clearly, the Government believes high levels of skilled migration will help fill vacancies and thus reduce upward pressure on wages.

That's true as far as it goes. But it overlooks an inconvenient truth: immigration adds more to the demand for labour than to its supply. That's because migrant families add to demand, but only the individuals who work add to supply.

Migrant families need food, clothing, shelter and all the other necessities. They also add to the need for social and economic infrastructure: roads, schools, health care and all the rest.

Another factor is that their addition to demand comes earlier than their addition to labour supply. Unemployment among recent immigrants is significantly higher than for the labour force generally.

Admittedly, the continuing emphasis on skilled immigration - and on the ability to speak English - plus the fact that many immigrants are sponsored by particular employers, should shorten the delay before they start working.

Even so, we still have about a third of the basic immigration program accounted for by people in the family reunion category. You'd expect the proportion of workers in this group to be much lower. So though skilled migration helps reduce upward pressure on wages at a time of widespread labour shortages, immigration's overall effect is to exacerbate our problem that demand is growing faster than supply.

The Rudd Government professes to great concern over worsening housing affordability. First we had a boom in house prices that greatly reduced affordability, and now we have steadily rising mortgage interest rates.

The wonder of it is that, despite the deterioration in affordability, house prices are continuing to rise strongly almost everywhere except Sydney's western suburbs.

Why is this happening? Probably because immigrants are adding to the demand for housing, particularly in the capital cities, where they tend to end up.

They need somewhere to live and, whether they buy or rent, they're helping to tighten demand relative to supply. It's likely that the greater emphasis on skilled immigrants means more of them are capable of outbidding younger locals.

In other words, winding back the immigration program would be an easy way to reduce the upward pressure on house prices.

Finally, there's the effect on climate change. Emissions of greenhouse gases are caused by economic activity, but the bigger your population, the more activity. So the faster your population is growing the faster your emissions grow.

Our immigration program is so big it now accounts for more than half the rate of growth in our population.

It's obvious that one of the quickest and easiest ways to reduce the growth in our emissions - and make our efforts to cut emissions more effective overall - would be to reduce immigration.

Of course, you could argue that, were we to leave more of our immigrants where they were, they'd still be contributing to the emissions of their home country. True. But because people migrate to better their economic circumstances, it's a safe bet they'd be emitting more in prosperous Australia than they were before.

My point is not that all immigration should cease forthwith but, leaving aside the foreigner-fearing prejudices of the great unwashed, the case against immigration is stronger than the rest of us realise - and stronger than it suits any Government to draw attention to.

Read full article

A community of common values or common ancestry?

Writing for The Brussels Journal, British commentator John Laughland challenges the idea, currently in vogue among Western elites, that our national communities are mere civic constructs, with membership being determined by nothing more than one's adherence to vague, abstract values.

Laughland writes:

A nation, in other words, is not a “community of values” or an impersonal social construct governed by certain laws. A nation – as the word suggests, derived as it is from the verb ‘to be born’ – is a family. A family can be a source of great love, indifference or even fratricidal conflict, just as a nation can experience cohesion, social exclusion or civil war. Nations can certainly welcome into their midst people who are not originally members of it, just as a family can expand to include in-laws. Both can and should show tolerance and friendship towards them. But at the end of the day, nations like families are bodies of people related to each other by blood.

This basic fact remains, whatever choices the individuals themselves may make. It does not absolutely determine human choice but it does influence it. The experience of second and third generation immigrants in Europe, whose parents or grandparents have chosen to come to a new country, and who have themselves chosen to remain in it, often shows the truth of this: in spite of their individual choice, people’s behaviour often remains ethnically based and culturally separate from that of the host nation, especially if they are of a different race.

Full article

Also worth reading is Mark Richardson's recent post on civic nationalism:

Civic nationalism has no future

Australians fleeing immigrant-impacted areas of Melbourne

From the Herald Sun:

Almost a million Melburnians have upped stakes

John Masanauskas
June 27, 2008 12:00am

MELBURNIANS are moving house in huge numbers - with up to one-third shifting to other parts of the city and regional Victoria in the past five years, according to census data.

More than 900,000 city dwellers changed address between 2001 and 2006, as pressure from overseas migration pushed many locals towards the fringes.

About 500,000 people moved outside their local government area, while some 400,000 shifted to nearby homes.

The biggest single transfer saw 10,125 residents leave western suburbs such as Sunshine and St Albans for booming Melton.

There was a similar exodus from the Dandenong region to the southeast housing estates of Narre Warren and Berwick.

Dandenong has seen a major transformation, with the arrival of refugees and other immigrants, in recent years.

Daniel Willis, 22, said he and his partner, Rebecca Parry, moved from Dandenong to Narre Warren to escape rising crime and cultural change.

"We are going to have a family soon," he said.

"We didn't want to bring up a family in that sort of area."

City of Greater Dandenong councillor Jim Memeti said the area's cultural diversity was an asset and people moved because housing was cheaper further out.

Other areas with large outflows included neighbouring Clayton, which also has high immigrant settlement, and suburbs such as Box Hill, Pascoe Vale and Coburg.

Some areas with high outflows also recorded big intakes.

Boroondara lost 25,806 residents, but gained 23,237 from other areas.

Record high immigration and a rising birth rate saw the population rise across all council areas.

The data, prepared for the Herald Sun by the state Department of Planning and Community Development, revealed city fringe areas had the most internal movement.

More than 30,000 residents in the City of Casey, which includes Narre Warren and Berwick, moved within the area in the five-year period.

Other suburbs with high internal migration included Roxburgh Park, Sunbury, Frankston, Belgrave and Lilydale.

Planning department senior demographer Jeremy Reynolds said the trend to move small distances was common.

"The comparatively low numbers of moves across the Yarra in Melbourne, the harbour in Sydney or the Thames in London are indicative of this sectoral bias in migration," he said.

Head of Monash University's Centre for Population and Urban Research, Dr Bob Birrell, said poorer immigrants tended to settle in outer suburbia.

"Local residents in areas like Dandenong and Sunshine are tending to move out if they can afford to," he said.

The trend John Masanauskas is describing could best be summed up in two words: white flight.

As mass non-European immigration transforms the ethnic, cultural, and linguistic character of entire neighbourhoods, the white Australian locals are increasingly fleeing those suburbs in favour of more traditional, less 'diverse' areas.

Even the younger generation of Australians are voting with their feet against immigration and multiculturalism, despite a lifetime of "diversity" indoctrination.

Of course, there is nothing at all surprising about these trends. Segregation along ethnic and racial lines is inevitable and will only worsen as Australia becomes more diverse due to ongoing mass immigration. Only those in denial of human nature would claim otherwise.

Kevin Rudd's 'insane' proposal

In an article at On line Opinion, Joel Butler points out that Kevin Rudd's proposal to create an EU-like "Asia-Pacific community" would inevitably lead to open immigration and the end of the Australian nation as we know it.

He writes:

Kevin Rudd’s proposal to implement an European Union-like organisation in the Asia-Pacific region is nothing short of insane. The conditions prevailing in Europe in the 1950s when integration was first proposed, or even now that it has been more fully achieved, and those in the Asia Pacific region are so different that even the suggestion that a similar integrative structure might work is simply ludicrous.

One of the basic structural processes operative in the EU is the free movement of people within the EU’s member countries. In this day and age, free movement of people is a necessary underpinning for “free trade” since - especially for countries like Australia - the trade in services which are delivered by people are more and more important than the trade in goods.

A European Union based model in the Asia Pacific region that allows free trade by allowing the free movement of people between member states would mean the end of Australia as we know it. It would be completely and utterly unworkable because it would see mass-migration of overseas workers into Australia at a level so completely unmanageable as to lead to the breakdown of the economy and the social infrastructure.

If this sounds a little extreme - that I am suggesting an “end of the world as we know it” scenario - it is because the scheme would lead to just that.

Although Butler's article contains no mention of the profound ethnocultural effects open immigration would have on Australia, it is clear that open borders with Asian countries would result in the prompt and complete submergence of our current population by Asian peoples, transforming our historically European-majority nation into an extension of Asia in the blink of an eye. Our nation would cease to exist in any recognisable form. It would not be the end of the world for the rest of the planet's inhabitants, but it would certainly be a shocking and grotesque act of national suicide on Australia's behalf.

See also:

Rudd's plan to cede Australian sovereignty

A colonial hangover?

Abolishing Australia, continued

Abolishing Australia, continued

From the Vdare.com blog:

Australia to Merge with Asia?

Posted By Allan Wall On 11 June 2008 @ 9:32

The great nations of the Anglosphere seem determined to merge themselves out of existence.

Mass immigration is making the U.S. a part of Latin America, while an emerging North American Union would combine Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.

Across the Pond, Britain surrenders her sovereignty to the European Union. Not to be outdone, Down Under, the Australian Prime Minister appears to want to merge Australia with Asia.

An article in the Herald Sun entitled Unified Currency Chance with Asian Union, Says Expert [Jane Metlikovec, June 05, 2008] reports that Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has “announced his plan to create a broad Asia-Pacific Community by 2020.”

A certain Prof. Tim Lindsey of Melbourne University thinks that’s a great idea:

“We are living in the “Asia century,” he said.”Australia is uniquely positioned as the only Western society in Asia and we have never capitalised on that, despite most of our commodities going to Asia.”

So what about Australia’s Western identity and Anglo-Celtic heritage? Apparently, that can be easily disregarded:

(Lindsey) said Australia was still suffering from a “colonial hangover” by setting ourselves apart from Asia. “This perception of ourselves as a European nation has to change,” he said.

PM Rudd has chosen a point man to advance the project:

“Mr Rudd has appointed former foreign affairs secretary and one-time ambassador to Indonesia Richard Woolcott as Australia’s envoy to sell the idea.”

There is some political opposition:

Opposition MPs are divided about Mr Rudd’s plan, which he put forward during a speech to the Asia Society Australasia Centre last night, just days before he heads off on a week-long visit to Japan and Indonesia.

Opposition’s foreign affairs spokesman Andrew Robb says the plan is presumptuous.”His (Kevin Rudd) first job is not to be making pronouncements about grand architecture for the region, telling China, Indonesia and Japan and India how they will be organised as a region by Australia in the next 20 years,” Mr Robb told ABC Radio.

Nevertheless, Robb’s opposition seems more a question of practicality than a concern for Australia’s cultural identity:

“Once (Rudd) has demonstrated a capacity to build and maintain and grow strong bilateral relationships with all these countries (and) repair the damage he has already done with some of these countries, then we can… maybe influence the broader architecture that shapes the region.”

How about the argument that Australia’s cultural identity is non-Asian? Is that a legitimate argument nowadays?

More on Rudd's proposal to abolish Australia:

A colonial hangover?

Rudd's plan to cede Australian sovereignty

Ethnic separation not the real problem

When will Western countries learn that they simply do not possess an unlimited capacity to assimilate all the world's peoples?

Lawrence Auster notes that the concern voiced by some Western commentators that immigrants "are separating instead of assimilating" overlooks the real problem.

He writes:

In fact the issue is not that these groups are "separating" from the mainstream culture. It is that they are expanding their numbers and power--the power of their culture, religion, or ethnos--and in the process weakening the culture, sovereignty, and nationhood of the host society. But Western opinion makers almost never state the issue in those terms, because that would mean defending the specific culture of the host society, rather than defending the liberal ideal of the mutual harmonious blending of all peoples.

Auster further notes:

The fear that Muslims (and others groups) are "separating" themselves is a mirror image of the modern liberal belief in the West's unlimited capacity to assimilate non-Western and nonwhite immigrants. It conveys the idea that such separation is a deviation from the normal, natural, and correct course of things, which is assimilation. From the liberal point of view, assimilation, which is the liberal ideal, and separation, which is the failure or rejection of that ideal, are the only two conceivable options.

As suggested above, this view of the problem excludes other possibilities, such as that the immigrant group is not interested in assimilating or in separating, but, as human groups have been doing since the beginning of time, in spreading itself at the expense of other groups, namely our group. This possibility is never admitted by mainstream commentators, as it would mean the end of the belief in the universal sameness and equality of the human race, and thus the end of modern liberalism.

A colonial hangover?

Lawrence Auster has commented on Kevin Rudd's plan to create an "Asia-Pacific community." He pastes an article from the Herald Sun which contains these comments from a Professor Tim Lindsey:

Professor Tim Lindsey from Melbourne University said an Asian Union was a fantastic idea.

"We are living in the "Asia century," he said.

"Australia is uniquely positioned as the only Western society in Asia and we have never capitalised on that, despite most of our commodities going to Asia."

He said Australia was still suffering from a "colonial hangover" by setting ourselves apart from Asia.

"This perception of ourselves as a European nation has to change," he said.

Professor Lindsey's assertion that "Australia is uniquely positioned as the only Western society in Asia" is geographically erroneous. Australia is not a part of Asia - it is a unique continent in its own right. Moreover, if Professor Lindsey were to stroll over to Melbourne University's Geography Department and examine a map of the globe, he'd find that most European capitals are, in fact, closer to the major Asian power centers than the Australian capital Canberra.

Geographical fallacies aside, Professor Lindsey's comments are a reminder that most of Australia's political, economic and academic elites are at best indifferent, at worst openly hostile, to the preservation of Australia's historic European culture and majority population. In fact, according to the good professor, the loss of our identity as a predominantly European nation would be desirable! Lindsey presumably believes that the disappearance of traditional British/European Australia is required to rid this country of its "colonial hangover," so that a new, emancipated Australia can fully realise its Asian destiny.

While demanding that Australia's historic identity be extinguished in order to "capitalise" on the "Asia century," Lindsey doesn't actually explain in any specific terms how Australia would benefit from becoming less European and more Asian. More trade? As the professor himself notes, most of our commodities are already going to Asian countries. And we certainly don't have much else to export to Asia, especially not since our own manufacturing sector was decimated by the rise of the Asian manufacturing mammoths. In reality, trade with Asian countries does not depend on Australia redefining itself as a part of Asia. No more than the remarkable post-war increase in trade between Japan and Western countries was contingent on Japan abandoning its traditional identity.

What does Australia stand to gain then? More "cultural enrichment"? While de-Europeanisation may be the goal of those elites who loathe traditional Australia, and believe that Asian peoples and cultures offer something inherently superior, not many Australians would consider the loss of their identity and culture "enriching." The wholesale destruction of a nation's historic identity and culture never is.

Rudd's plan to cede Australian sovereignty

From The Age:

Rudd pushes for Asia Pacific Community

June 4, 2008 - 11:27PM

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has flagged an ambitious plan to lead debate on the creation of a broad Asia Pacific Community by 2020.

And he has appointed former foreign affairs secretary and one-time ambassador to Indonesia Richard Woolcott as Australia's envoy to sell the idea.

Mr Rudd put forward the concept during a speech to the Asia Society AustralAsia Centre on Wednesday night, just days before he heads off a week-long visit to Japan and Indonesia.

"I believe it is time that we started to think about where we want to be with our regional architecture in 2020," he said.

"We believe that we need to anticipate the historic changes in our region and seek to shape them, rather than simply reacting to them."

Mr Rudd wants any new regional creation to span the entire Asia Pacific, including the United States, Japan, China, India and Indonesia.

And he believes it must engage in broad dialogue, cooperation and action on economic and political matters, as well as future challenges related to security.

"The purpose is to encourage the development of a genuine and comprehensive sense of community whose habitual operating principle is cooperation," Mr Rudd said.

"The danger in not acting is that we run the risk of succumbing to the perception that future conflict within our region may somehow be inevitable."

Excuse me, Mr. Rudd, but I do not recall this plan being put to the electorate in November 2007, and enunciated as a significant foreign policy initiative. I'm sure I would've remembered any proposal to thrust Australia into some kind of EU-style 'Asia-Pacific' union, thereby eroding our national sovereignty and dissolving our borders.

The truth, Mr. Rudd, is that you do not have a mandate to surrender Australia’s national sovereignty, especially not to a supranational body dominated by countries with which Australia has little in common. Australia is neither geographically nor culturally a part of Asia, and it would be a grave and irreversible mistake to erase the sovereignty and identity of our nation in some futile attempt to "fit in" to the region.

As incomprehensible as it may seem to you, the majority of Australians remain wedded to the idea of a sovereign Australian nation-state with control over its political, economic, cultural and demographic destiny. Unlike yourself, they're not prepared to relegate the Australian nation-state to a tired piece of history.

Immigrants squeezing native-born Australians out of the housing market

From The Courier Mail:

Migrants push up house prices

Renee Viellaris
May 29, 2008 12:00am

THE Federal Government has admitted that battlers could be squeezed out of the housing market by tens of thousands of new skilled immigrants.

A Senate budget estimates hearing has been told the extra 31,000 permanent skilled migrants will compete with local people for a place to live.

But Immigration Minister Chris Evans played down the issue, saying more skilled migrants would boost the nation's low housing stocks in the long run.

The revelation is bad news for many Australians who have been squeezed out of housing and rental markets by rising costs and a shortage of properties.

In the lead-up to last year's election, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd campaigned on delivering more affordable housing.

Migration deputy secretary Peter Hughes said increasing the permanent skilled migration program - which will stand at 133,500 in the next financial year - would reduce inflationary pressures and cut the cost of housing.

But the answer was not good enough for NSW Senator Marise Payne, who asked: "Where are they going to live? We are underbuilding by 30,000 dwellings a year already in this country."

Senator Evans replied: "They are going to live in the same places that the million people who came in under your government are going to live.

"They may have well made a contribution to the current housing crisis and you're right to express interest in the public policy issues in how next year's intake will impact on the problem."

He said he had spoken within his ministerial counterparts about the problem.

"(Affordable housing is generally) a real problem (and) it's one of the reasons why housing has been a key focus for this Government," he said.

"There are huge pressures on housing in this country and one of the things I'm looking to respond to is the Housing Industry Association's call for the fact they can't get building tradesmen.

"And one of the things I've been pressing the department on is us trying to be responsive in this year's program.

"For the need to find construction workers and bricklayers, carpenters etc, and make the program meet these shortages in Australia."

Mr Hughes also downplayed the pressure it would have on the already-stretched market, but said all immigration over the years had impacted on housing. "Newcomers to the country obviously draw on the housing and accommodation stock," he said.

Exactly how is mass immigration to Australia benefiting the host population again?

Needless to say, Senator Evans' plan to import even more foreigners to address shortages in the building sector is utterly stupid, irresponsible and immoral. Immigration is the problem here, not the solution. As immigration has increased, the rapid population explosion has caused demand for housing to outstrip supply, thus pushing up house prices and fueling the demand for even more immigrants to be imported to construct extra dwellings. This self-generating process has been great for property developers, real estate agents, and the immigrants themselves, but it's the rest of us who have been forced to pay the price for their greed.

Clearly, the best option would be for the government to drastically reduce immigration levels, thereby evening out supply of, and demand for, housing.

Rudd Labor Government announces massive increase in immigration

Appalling news from The Australian:

Labor promises massive increase in migration to lure workers

Paul Kelly, Editor-at-Large | May 17, 2008

IMMIGRATION Minister Chris Evans wants a major overhaul of the migrant program to boost numbers, promote unskilled as well as skilled applicants and gear Australia to the new global competition for workers.

Predicting a "great national debate over the next few years", Senator Evans said he planned to bring a series of cabinet submissions to reform a "model that is out of date" and too unresponsive to employer needs. He said the debate about temporary migration was over; the coming debate would be about semi-skilled and unskilled migrants to meet labour shortages.

Next month, cabinet is expected to approve a pilot program for a guest worker scheme from the South Pacific. Senator Evans called this a "stalking horse" for the larger debate on unskilled migration.

His comments came after the Rudd Government's first budget, delivered on Tuesday, lifted permanent and temporary migration for 2008-09 to nearly 300,000 in the biggest annual increase since the program's inception by the Chifley government in the 1940s.

The skilled component of the permanent intake is running at 70 per cent, probably the highest ever.

"My general view is that we are increasingly facing a labour shortage, not just a skills shortage," Senator Evans told The Weekend Australian.

"The demands of business are hitting us in the face. What I'm thinking about is a fairly serious overhaul of the migration system and trying to design a visa and migration system that meets the realities of the 21st century and the internationalisation of the labour market.

"There is a lack of responsiveness to employer needs. What's not widely understood is that there is a global competition for labour. The workforce is more contract based. BHP (Billiton) brings an engineer here from South America for two years and he'll be in Africa two years later. It's the nature of his work."

Asked about the hefty increase in the intake announced on budget night, Senator Evans said: "It was certainly driven by the economics.

"No doubt Wayne Swan had his eyeon wage inflation pressure and Treasury advice about that. But fundamentally it's a response to the huge demand for labour."

Senator Evans said the Government's first response to shortages was more education and training but "the reality is that there are demands now that won't be met by that agenda". This was true in the short-term and long-term.

He said he had two aims - to make the program more responsive to industry and to restore its integrity, notably the457 temporary visas, to eliminate exploitation and any undermining of Australian conditions. This was critical because there was urgent pressure on the 457 program for a shift down the skill scale from professionals such as doctors and engineers to tradesmen and IT workers.

"The demand is often for truck drivers, store managers, below tradesman-level jobs in the mining industry," Senator Evans said. "More broadly we have an ageing population. My inclination is not to do reviews, but get on with it. As a cabinet, we are engaged with this issue.

"I think Australians are prepared to accept strong migration provided they think we need the skills and contributions that people bring."

He foreshadowed a relaxation of the former government's rigid rules about migrants' ability to speak English. Some of its measures were "pretty clunky and actually stopped business operating".

Perhaps Senator Evans would be kind enough to explain how this massive increase in immigration, mostly from the Third World, will benefit the existing Australian population. We hear much about the supposed benefits for all of mass immigration, but I'm yet to see a single study that outlines the specific benefits of mass immigration to this country’s host population. I want to see less clichés and sophisms, and more hard facts. I want to see the full economic costs of immigration taken into consideration. And the social and environmental impacts, as well.

Studies from both Australia and abroad have concluded that immigration has little positive impact on GDP per capita. And the Rudd Government isn't even hiding the fact that it's using immigration to hold down wages. Are immigration enthusiasts seriously claiming that lower wage growth somehow benefits the current citizenry of Australia? And what about the effect of mass immigration on housing affordability? There can be no doubt that large-scale immigration is driving up the demand for housing, pricing native-born Australians out of the market.

There is another major drawback to mass immigration: the destruction of the social, cultural, linguistic, and ethnic cohesion required for national unity. Current immigration policy is not only adversely affecting the living standards of the existing population through a combination of lower wage growth, higher rents and housing costs, more urban congestion, more pollution, and more pressure on public services and infrastructure, it's also threatening the Australian nation itself with ethnic fragmentation.

Not that these inconvenient truths about mass immigration evidently bother Mr. Evans. Who needs to do 'reviews' when you can simply regurgitate fallacious open-borders arguments?

Mr. Evans may claim that he wants to see a "great national debate" about immigration. Yet as long as the Establishment and its media mouthpieces continue to exaggerate the benefits of immigration, while completely ignoring the costs, any real debate seems unlikely.

Transforming Australia... for what?

From The Australian:

'Hidden' migrants drive ethnic change

Ean Higgins May 16, 2008

AUSTRALIA is undergoing an unparalleled movement of people and ethnic change through "hidden immigration", but lacks a comprehensive policy to deal with it, according to an eminent demographer.

Monash University professor Andrew Markus said raw immigration numbers masked the magnitude of a demographic revolution that had produced a population where one in four residents was born overseas.

At 24 per cent, the overseas-born proportion of the population is twice that of the US at 12 per cent, and three times that of England and Wales at 8 per cent, where racial tensions have flared again.

"Opinion polls in England in July 2007 and March 2008 indicated that immigration and race issues are the main concern of electors," Professor Markus said.

He said that while Australians had been tolerant and migrants committed to their new home, strong political leadership was required to convince the nation of the benefits to all of high immigration to avoid a backlash.

Professor Markus presented his analysis at this week's Australian Davos Connection Future Summit.

"The elements of a policy to promote social cohesion within communities characterised by diversity of language and culture are well known - and difficult to implement," he said. "At present, Australia lacks full clarity of vision, coherence and consistency - while the largest movement of people in the country's history is under way."

Speaking to The Australian yesterday, Professor Markus said that although many Australians regarded the rate of immigration as high, they probably had little idea that the transformation was far bigger than they imagined. The usually quoted "headline" number of permanent arrivals - people successfully applying each year for permanent residency from overseas - rose 67 per cent between 1999 and last year, from 84,000 to 140,000. But Professor Markus said this figure failed to include on-shore "conversions" from foreigners on student or temporary work visas to permanent residence.

That number rose from 15,000 in 1999 to 52,000 last year. Taking those figures into account, the annual increase in new permanent residents nearly doubled over the past nine years, from 99,000 to 192,000.

The number of permanent departures - Australians leaving the country without any immediate intention of return -- doubled from 35,000 in 1999 to 72,000 last year.

Many of those departing were taking highly sought skills to more highly paid jobs overseas, Professor Markus said.

Added to an ageing population, future economic growth would require filling Australia's skills shortage largely from overseas. But the result would accelerate the pace of ethnic change, and because immigration had been skewed towards "magnet" destinations, in some areas the transition would be extraordinary, he said.

"With the uneven distribution of the overseas born, this translates to 34.5 per cent of Sydney's population, 31 per cent of Melbourne's, and over 70 per cent in some urban localities," Professor Markus said.

He proposed several measures towards a national policy to make immigration work.

These included challenging disadvantage in education and employment, tackling institutional discrimination, and a "consistent set of policies to be implemented at the community level to promote inter-cultural understanding, bridge building and participation".

Markus is right about Australians being largely oblivious to true extent of the immigration-induced ethnic transformation currently being inflicted upon their country. This is not because Australians are a mob of ignoramuses. Rather, it's because both past and present federal governments have deliberately kept them in the dark over immigration matters.

The truth is that had Australians been asked whether they wanted their country radically changed through mass immigration, the answer would have be a resounding 'No!' So, successive federal governments simply didn't bother to ask and, in order to prevent a backlash, they didn't bother to tell either.

However, Markus is wrong when he claims that more immigration, and thus more ethnic change, is necessary and inevitable. It is neither. Australia could cut its insanely large immigration intake tomorrow without the sky falling in.

Contrary to the myths peddled by the open-borders brigade, immigration is not essential to Australia's future economic prosperity. Immigration does not boost GDP per capita. It does not add more to the supply of labour than it does to its demand. It cannot prevent our population from aging.

In short, there is no compelling reason for this massive build-up in the foreign born population. There is no compelling reason why Australians should allow themselves to be displaced by foreign peoples and cultures. And the sooner Australians realise this, the sooner they can work towards reclaiming some control over their country's future.