It turns out that immigration has been running at an astonishingly high level. And the officials in charge justify this on the grounds that the economy is king. Australia is one big labour market.
Last year there were 171,318 permanent arrivals in Australia. There were also 47,780 New Zealanders who settled permanently and 657,124 migrants with the right to work. This adds up to 876,222 arrivals in a country with a population of about 22,000,000.
What is the purpose of this immigration? The Immigration Minister gave this explanation:
"Senator Evans said immigration should be the nation's labour agency, meaning a continued high intake of migrants ... Decisions about who came to Australia would increasingly be left to employers."
Are we a nation or an economy? Do we want to develop economically and industrially or just grow by selling passports and having more people? Do we really want to sacrifice individual standards of living just to have a higher overall level of GDP?
My apologies to Australian readers who find all this demoralising. I expect that at first it is unavoidably demoralising. But I hope that there will be at least one positive effect, which is to show just how bankrupt Australian liberalism has become. There is nothing worthwhile animating it. The focus of government policy is not even on real economic development anymore; it's just about crude technocratic management of the economy to maintain overall growth of GDP.
Richardson asks: what are we being delivered to?
If the rhetoric of our elites is anything to go by, I would say the post-national "new world order" of the "global economy."
Driven by an open-borders ideology that justifies their economic and financial interests, Australia's elites in business, politics, and academia have embarked on a course that will result in a staggering increase in the size of the our population, a radical change in our country's ethnic makeup, and the erosion of our historic national identity.
Of course, whether or not the Australian people wanted these dramatic changes imposed upon them is a question they were never asked.
Our interests and wishes don't matter.
All that matters is that we are delivered to the "global economy" through open-borders and the deconstruction of our nation-state.
In many ways, Australia's elites are examples of what the late Samuel P. Huntington labelled 'Davos Man', people who "have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the élite's global operations".
As Huntington noted:
"The views of the general public on issues of national identity differ significantly from those of many elites. The public, overall, is concerned with physical security but also with societal security, which involves the sustainability—within acceptable conditions for evolution—of existing patterns of language, culture, association, religion and national identity. For many elites, these concerns are secondary to participating in the global economy, supporting international trade and migration, strengthening international institutions, promoting so-called 'universal values' abroad, and encouraging minority identities and cultures at home. The central distinction between the public and elites is not isolationism versus internationalism, but nationalism versus cosmopolitanism."
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