Unfashionably Conservative

Paradise lost

2012-02-10T23:31:00.000-08:00

Sydney in the 1960s:

Contrast the above footage of 1960s Sydney to the Sydney of today. One can clearly see how mass Third World immigration has forever changed - for the worst - what was once a beautiful, idyllic, Australian city.

Hat tip: Mark Richardson at Oz Conservative.

"We did it to ourselves"

2012-02-02T13:32:00.000-08:00

In a 2010 piece for Alternative Right, Australian writer R.J. Stove
laments the suicide - demographic and cultural - of WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) Australia.

Stove:

... if we Australian WASPs (and I, though Catholic by choice, am largely WASP by ancestry) have become strangers in our own home, it is fruitless to go around blaming Jewish behavior. We did it to ourselves. (With substantial help, admittedly, from bellyaching Irish ex-Catholics, not to mention from Calabrian Mafia thugs.) Our position, and ultimate complicity in our own doom, may call to mind the 17th-century Spanish proverb: “Castile has made Spain, and Castile has destroyed it.” For “Spain” read “Australia,” and for “Castile” read “the WASP”.

Jack Lang on White Australia

2012-02-02T13:13:00.000-08:00

Former ALP heavyweight and NSW Premier Jack Lang in his 1956 autobiography:

White Australia ... was Australia's Magna Carta. Without that policy, this country would have been lost long ere this. It would have been engulfed in an Asian tidal wave. There would have been no need for the Japanese to invade this country. ...

Even the United States has had to wrestle with the problems of Jim Crowism, racial segregation and color discrimination. Labor didn't want this country to have similar problems. Had we listened to the do-gooders and the crusaders for international brotherhood and racial equality, the barriers would have come down long ago. Our living standard would have been destroyed. We would have had intermarriages of races, half-castes and quarter-castes with all the social dilemmas that invariably follow such racial mixtures. We would have had a Black, Brown and Brindle streak right through every strata[sic] of our society. Instead we ... decided to keep this country as a citadel of the white peoples. Australia is still White Australia thanks to those who battled against those who wanted to exploit colored labor for their own ends. We must keep it that way.

For most of the 20 Century, the Australian Labor Party championed White Australia. These days, the Australian Labor Party champions Non-White Australia.

Andrew Fraser interview

2012-01-29T11:06:00.000-08:00

Professor Andrew Fraser interviewed about his book, The WASP Question, by David Oldfield on Radio 2UE.

Barbarism on Australia Day

2012-01-26T07:38:00.001-08:00

From the Herald Sun:

A large police contingent was called to a Canberra restaurant after Aboriginal-rights protesters trapped the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader inside today.

Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott were attending an Australia Day presentation of the inaugural National Emergency Medals at the Lobby Restaurant when protesters who had just marched to commemorate the Aboriginal Tent Embassy’s 40th anniversary surrounded the building.

Both party leaders were trapped inside for around 20 minutes before police forced a way for their exit and they left in the same car…

The protesters banged on the three glass sides of restaurant chanting “shame’’ and “racist’’ and chased the pair’s car down the road as they left, banging on the roof and bonnet.

This vulgar display certainly does nothing to promote the Aboriginal cause. Then again, I'm not even sure what their cause is any more. They have already received land rights, recognition as the "first peoples" of Australia, and generous handouts making them the most heavily subsidised ethnic group on the planet. What else do Aboriginal racial activists actually want? Every non-indigenous person to immediately leave Australia? Do they want to return to their old pre-European settlement, Stone Age-like way of life?

Europeans have been here for over 200 years, with many generations being born and buried on this land. Aborigines need to accept this fact and move on. They need to come to terms with the fact that the colonisation of Australia was inevitable. They also need to come to terms with the fact that the early British settlers were remarkably successful in developing this arid wasteland into one of the world's most prosperous, advanced societies and that the white Australian majority has every right to be proud of these nation-building achievements, particularly on Australia Day.

Towards a new racial hierarchy?

2012-01-24T11:33:00.000-08:00

Nicolas Rothwell writes in The Australian about the proposals made by legal and Aboriginal activists to change the Australian constitution:

The expert panel is asking them to accept several measures that tug in different directions: both to deracialise the Constitution and to insert in it a clause recognising the special need for indigenous advancement; both to prohibit racial discrimination and to recognise the special place of Aboriginal languages, cultures and ties to the land. Equal rights - and a special role as well..

At core, the dilemmas lurking in the referendum lurk there because of the bedevilling concept of race and a keenly maintained conviction of indigenous difference. The expert panel’s aim is virtually to ban racial thinking, while exalting a particular racial category.

Despite speaking in the language of "anti-discrimination", it is clear from the proposed amendments that the "expert" panel's real aim is to promote one racial group over another - in this case, Australia's tiny indigenous minority over the European Australian majority. They want to legally enshrine a privileged place for Aboriginals in the Australian constitution. This is not about ending racial discrimination. Quite the opposite in fact.

Where is the outrage?

2012-01-24T10:57:00.000-08:00

Perth Now reports:

A PERTH teenager has spoken of his terror after he was violently bashed by a gang of thugs who repeatedly kicked him and stomped on his head …

Perth detectives are hunting up to 20 youths, believed to be of African descent, who were involved in the attack in the city at 11.30pm last night…

"The only thing I heard before they caught me was: `Who are these white c**ts?’ It was totally unprovoked."

Imagine the screams of outrage if a gang of white youths brutally assaulted some Africans on the streets of Perth. We would never hear the end of it.

White Australians being violently attacked by recently-arrived minorities doesn't quite fit the whites=bad, non-whites=good multicultural narrative, so don't expect much in the way of a media reaction.

We can thank the Australian Government, with its zealous commitment to non-discriminatory immigration and multiculturalism, for the importation of such violent, racist, white-hating thugs.

More multicultural propaganda from SBS

2012-01-15T02:16:00.001-08:00

I managed to miss this when it was originally aired on SBS:

*Yawn*

Another biased, minority-centric SBS "documentary" designed to make this country's white, Anglo-Celtic majority feel ashamed for merely existing. This is not an accurate account of Australia's modern immigration history. Rather, it is crude multicultural propaganda piece aimed at denigrating and delegitimising the people who founded and built this country.

I find it interesting how white Australians are constantly being told how "racist" they are by non-whites, yet it is only Australia and a few other white-majority countries that permit large-scale, diverse immigration. Non-white nations are careful to maintain racial and cultural homogeneity and most permit essentially no immigration at all. A blatant racial double standard that SBS fails to acknowledge.

African countries for Africans. Asian countries for Asians. Arab countries for Arabs. Western countries for everybody?

Labor of yesteryear

2011-12-04T04:53:00.000-08:00

"Do the multi-racialists want Australia to consist of a small number of people from all the African and Asian nations, or do they want to admit millions of coloured migrants from those nations for permanent settlement in a continent that was first settled 184 years ago by Europeans while other, nearer nations passed it by as a useless, barren land? If Australians are ever foolish enough to open their gates in a significant way to people other than Europeans, they will soon find themselves fighting desperately to stop the nation from being flooded by hordes of non-integratables. Then we will also need a Race Relations Board. None is needed now. A Race Relations Board is necessary only where there are racial problems and racial tensions. We are currently spared this rather expensive luxury."

— Former Labor leader Arthur Calwell, in his 1972 memoirs.

Let them all in!

2011-12-04T03:07:00.000-08:00

The Herald Sun reports:

LABOR has agreed to increase the refugee intake by almost 50 per cent - so long as they are processed overseas.

The proposal, put forward by Immigration Minister Chris Bowen, would increase the annual intake of 13,750 to 20,000, provided they are processed offshore.

Another brilliant Labor strategy.

Australia is being swamped by illegal immigrants masquerading as refugees? No problem, we'll just double our annual refugee intake!

And if doubling our annual refugee intake doesn't stem the asylum seeker flow? I guess we could always just double it again to 40,000 per annum.

Even then, why impose an arbitrary ceiling of 40,000 per annum?

After all, Australia has an obligation to help every poor, downtrodden (non-white) soul in need, not just a select few. There are myriad dissatisfied, hard done-by people all over the world who would simply love to move to wealthy, comfortable Australia and live off the generous welfare state that they and their abundant progeny will never contribute to. Why not just them all come in? The wishes and interests of the Australian people are obviously not relevant considerations when formulating refugee policy. Nor is the huge cost to Australia, both financial and social, of importing more people from dysfunctional, backwards countries a valid objection either. So why impose limits on the number of refugees Australia can take? Let all the huddled masses come and live the Australian dream!

Australia may already have the highest per capita refugee intake in the world, but we can take even more - courtesy of the Australian taxpayer - because everybody knows that Australia is not a real country with its own legitimate national interests but, merely, a "piece of good luck to be shared with the rest of the world." *

* A quote from Geoffrey Blainey's 1984 book on immigration, All For Australia.

Parasitic politicians get a payrise

2011-11-30T07:27:00.000-08:00

The SMH reports:

Federal politicians are in for a big pay rise with Prime Minister Julia Gillard set to take home an extra $90,000 and Liberal turncoat and new Speaker Peter Slipper pocketing an extra $70,000, News Ltd papers say.

The report says the extra money will put Ms Gillard in a higher pay bracket than either US President Barack Obama or her British counterpart David Cameron.

*snip*

Humble backbenchers will get another $40,000 for an annual wage of $180,000.

The News Ltd papers say the government is bracing for a public backlash to the pay deal, particularly after its spending cuts announced just two days ago included slashing the baby bonus and reducing public service spending.

I just can't wait to hear the justifications for these massive, undeserved pay increases.

I suspect I will be waiting some time, though.

The West's demographic winter

2011-10-30T03:42:00.001-07:00

U.S. commentator and legend Patrick Buchanan:

On Oct. 31, the U.N. Population Fund marks the arrival of the 7 billionth person on Earth and raises the population estimate for the planet at mid-century to 9.3 billion people.

There is a possibility, says the United Nations, that, by century's end, world population may reach 15 billion. What does this mean for Western civilization?

It may not matter, except to identify who inherits the estate. For while world population is exploding, Western peoples are dying. Not a single European nation, except Muslim Albania, has a birth rate that will enable it to replace its present population.

By mid-century, Western man will be down to 12 percent of world population. By century's end, he will be a tiny fraction, roughly equal to the white population of Rhodesia when Robert Mugabe came to power.

The demographic winter of the West has set in.

Full article

Gaddafi lynched, Clinton laughs

2011-10-23T11:00:00.001-07:00

Hillary Clinton on the death of deposed Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi:

Western leaders have been quick to applaud Gaddafi's brutal summary execution at the hands of a frenzied horde of savages.

So much for human rights and the rule of law in the "new" Libya.

*UPDATE*

British columnist Peter Hitchens writes on the barbaric lynching of Muammar Gaddafi:

Colonel Gaddafi was cruelly murdered by a mob. This disgusting episode, which no decent person can approve of, is typical of the sordid revolution which our Government has decided to endorse and aid.

Nearly as bad, most of our media reported the barbaric spectacle in gleeful tones. God preserve them from ever being at the mercy of a lynch mob themselves is all I can say.

Shame, also, on those who referred to this squalid crime as an ‘execution’. Why is this word these days applied to its opposite? An execution follows lawful due process. It is not another word for a gang slaying or a lynching, such as happened to Muammar Gaddafi.

Any new state that begins with such an event will be poisoned and polluted by it ever afterwards, just as the communist world was blighted by the Bolshevik massacre of the Russian imperial family in 1917.

The nebulous new Libyan regime is already torturing its prisoners, who in many cases have been seized without formal legal procedure. From now on, all those who supported this ill-advised intervention will share responsibility for every lynching, whipping, unjust detention and miserable dungeon in the New Libya they helped to make.

Frank Salter on Malcolm Fraser

2011-10-23T09:49:00.000-07:00

Political ethologist Frank Salter on former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser's support for multiculturalism and his intense hostility towards Australia's Anglo-Celtic majority:

Malcolm Fraser, one of Australia’s longest serving prime ministers (1975-1983) was recently quoted talking about the origins of the multicultural policies his government initiated, in The Australian newspaper on 21 May 2009, “Death of a leader of cultural revolution Jerzy Jubrzycki”.

Mr. Fraser agreed with Prof. Zubrzycki, the intellectual father of multiculturalism in Australia, that the country was a “narrow, Anglo-Saxon society . . . up to, if you like, the Second World War." "[Prof. Zubrzycki] believed passionately that people should be treated as equal, and that being a good Australian didn't require people to give up their country of origin." "John Howard didn't like the word multiculturalism . . . But you've only got to walk down any street in Melbourne and Sydney to know that it's already too late - we are, in fact, a multicultural society.”

These remarks summarize Mr. Fraser’s support for multiculturalism over the years. They indicate an unsympathetic attitude towards Anglo Australia and a revealing use of the multiculturalism concept.

In principle it can be fair to criticize a society for being narrow. It is true that in 1945 Australian cities lacked cultural amenities and that our diet was due for a change. But we were still developing the continent, having begun from scratch in 1788. In that time we had built towns and cities and had one of the most productive economies in the world. Our British heritage made us one of the world’s few liberal democracies. We had a flourishing culture, from opera to popular. That’s quite an achievement in only 157 years.

However, Mr. Fraser goes beyond alleging narrowness. His words imply criticism of Australia’s core ethnicity. Our narrowness consisted of our Anglo-Celtic ethnicity. In other words, being of British ethnicity was a disability. The country was too Anglo-Celtic.

In addition Mr. Fraser’s comments reveal some of his notions about just what multiculturalism is. He links anti-Anglo prejudice to the formation of multicultural doctrine: it was Jerzy Zubrzycki’s reaction to “narrow, Anglo-Saxon society”. How to interpret this other than that Australia was too Anglo for Professor Zubrzycki’s taste? Mr. Fraser clearly shares this taste. Note that in the 1950s when Prof. Zubrzycki arrived from Poland Australia was overwhelmingly Anglo-Celtic because non-British immigration had only begun in earnest in 1949. Australia’s ethnicity was a local variant of British ethnicity. Most felt that way. We had just participated in a second world war entered into to defend mother England.

Mr. Fraser also expresses the aspect of multiculturalism that emphasises civil rights—that people from different cultures should be treated equally. But he again goes further with his remark that one can observe that Australia is multicultural by strolling around Melbourne and Sydney. What he is saying is that multiculturalism is the same as ethnic diversity. But cannot a society achieve perfect multiculturalism by tolerating or celebrating the ethnic cultures of all its citizens whatever their proportion of the population? Mr. Fraser implies otherwise: Australia is more successfully multi-cultural the more diverse it becomes. Hence the slap at John Howard: “it’s already too late”. This confirms the suspicion that for multiculturalists traditional Australians were always the “other”, always the antagonistic group to be combated. Especially this second kind of multiculturalism is compatible with minority chauvinism and an aggressive attitude towards Anglo-Celtic Australians.

The two faces of multiculturalism—the original rights-based type and the pro-diversity type—have very different implications for immigration policy. Rights-based multiculturalism is compatible with selective immigration. Logically, a government might simultaneously promote respect for the right of all citizens to express their ethnic identities and yet defend the group interests of the majority ethny by emphasizing immigration from Britain and other European-derived societies. That would be democratic. A pro-multicultural government might adopt a similar immigration policy for different reasons—to protect national cohesion and guarantee the long-term viability of multiculturalism.

Obviously this is not how multiculturalism has operated. It has always been linked to mass Third World immigration, confirming the interpretation of Mr. Fraser as treating Anglo-Celtic Australians as adversaries.

What remains unexplained is why someone like Mr. Fraser, ostensibly a conservative Anglo, should treat his own people so distantly. Why the hostility?

Original article

"Why the hostility?" Good question. Why is it that elites in not only Australia, but throughout the Western world, so loathe their own people to the point where they actively seek to replace them through mass Third World immigration?

See also:

"The Misguided Advocates of Open Borders" - Salter's 2010 Quadrant article on the poor quality of analysis behind Australia's abandonment of traditional assimilationist immigration policies.

God Save the Queen...

2011-10-20T01:13:00.000-07:00

... because nothing will save Julia Gillard.

(Inspired by the Royal visit to Australia.)

The WASP Question

2011-10-19T11:22:00.000-07:00

Canadian-Australian academic Andrew Fraser, an ex-Macquarie University law professor who was hounded from his job for daring to question the wisdom of mass non-Western immigration and multiculturalism (read Fraser's own account of the whole disgraceful saga here), has a new book out entitled The WASP Question.

From the publisher:

Andrew Fraser’s The WASP Question deals with the question of Anglo-Saxon life in the United States, Australia and everywhere across the world where they have settled. Having for the most part lost a sense of their own ethnic identity in a time of increasing globalism and international multiculturalism which values nearly every culture except their own, the ‘WASPs’ – White Anglo-Saxon Protestants – are alternatively mocked, attacked and ignored in their own lands. Professor Fraser addresses the many questions involved in the matter with impeccable erudition and proposes possible solutions for the future. Constitutional and legal history, evolutionary biology and Christian theology all come into play as Fraser tackles one of the most burning questions of our time. As an analysis of the problems, and possible way forward, faced by a European ethnic group, the book will be of interest to anyone concerned about the fate of not just the Anglo-Saxons, but any specific cultural and racial identity in the postmodern, multicultural age.

Interesting, if controversial, reading.

The corpse of multiculturalism?

2011-10-19T10:53:00.000-07:00

Taki Mag's Jim Goad on multiculturalism:

... You don’t see such sensitivity training being forced upon anyone in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, or South America. You don’t hear China, Japan, or Israel being lectured to swing open their doors to foreigners. Almost exclusively, multiculturalism is a psychological marketing program designed for majority-white countries. Often, it is sold with the idea that whites are paying a historic debt, are reaping what they’ve sown, that what goes around comes around, that the wheel has turned full-circle, the chickens are coming home to roost, and that it’s time to pay the swarthy piper his due.

Country by country, continent by continent, there’s a sense that the newer, darker arrivals are receiving preferential treatment over those who’ve been there for generations. In the UK, it’s called “Positive Discrimination.” In America, it’s called “affirmative action” and “amnesty.” And across every border where whites are a majority, there’s a creeping sense that politicians don’t give a f*ck about how they feel. They never asked for these new waves of immigrants, and they had no choice in this odd social-engineering experiment that’s demolishing whatever they used to share as a common culture.

Suddenly, this doesn’t seem so much like a celebration of all cultures as it does punishment of a specific culture. And that doesn’t sound like such a swell recipe for having everyone get along.

We’ll be continually reminded that European satellite nations such as Canada, the USA, and Australia were settled atop indigenous skulls, so the land-grabbing descendants of those race-murderers have no right to whine about being gradually wiped out themselves by newcomers.

Once again, for Christ’s sake, whether he’s dead or alive: Two wrongs don’t make a right. If colonialism was wrong then, it’s wrong now. Multiculturalism is merely colonialism with a prettier name. I realize and concede the fact that it awards us with a dazzling array of ethnic restaurants unparalleled in their tastiness.

Under multiculturalism, we have a wider selection of food…and no one talks to anyone anymore. Many of us now speak different languages and wouldn’t even know how to talk to one another. Rather than erasing borders, multiculturalism has merely created new borders within borders. Rather than destroying nationalism, it creates mini-nations within nations.

If we’re going to push multiculturalism’s glories, shouldn’t we point out where has it worked in the past? If diversity is a strength, why did stretched-too-thin empires such as ancient Rome and the Soviet Union eventually fall from the weight of their own diversity?

Stop calling me a racist and shoot some believable answers at me. I really want to hear them.

Great Southern Land

2011-10-19T10:42:00.000-07:00

Politics aside, this classic by the 1980s band Icehouse manages to capture the isolation, harshness and sense of eternity of the Australian continent.

Danube so blue, so bright and blue

2011-10-19T10:37:00.000-07:00

An der schönen blauen Donau

"Big Australia" policy lives on. Just don't tell Australians.

2011-10-19T09:11:00.000-07:00

Once of the first things Julia Gillard did after she slit Kevin Rudd's throat to become Prime Minister was to publicly repudiate Rudd's "Big Australia" policy.

In short, Rudd wanted to flood Australia with hundreds of thousands of migrants every year all in the name of "growth". Actually, Rudd never really explained why Australia needed to so dramatically expand its population through mass immigration. I assume it had something to do with big business' insatiable demand for cheap labour and more consumers. No doubt Sinophile Rudd's own desire to see Australia become more Asian in terms of its ethnic makeup (most immigrants to Australia now come from Asia) played a major part in his support for open borders and a larger Australian population.

In any case, the Australian people weren't so keen on the idea of being inundated by millions of Third World immigrants. Labor was able to get away with its immigration free-for-all for a while but eventually public discontent became impossible to ignore. Hoping to nip this growing public backlash over immigration numbers in the bud, Labor dumped the "Big Australia" policy when it dumped Rudd.

Or so we were led to believe.

Despite Gillard's public assertion that "Australia should not hurtle down the track towards a big population," the "Big Australia" policy lives on, albeit quietly.

In fact, Julia Gillard's undeclared mass immigration programme is pushing us toward an even Bigger Australia than the 36 million advocated by Rudd.

As Peter Wilkinson from The Independent Australian has noted, Treasury has factored in a population growth rate of 1.5 percent per annum for at least the next three years.

"... according to the Treasury assumptions behind the plan to get the budget back in surplus in 2012/13, she is planning over the next three years to increase population by 1.5% pa, greater than the 1.2% pa which leads to a forecast 36 million by 2030 in the Intergenerational Report."

One wonders how Gillard and Labor hope to get away with such mendacity. Who knows? Maybe they hope Australians just won't notice the millions of Third World immigrants flooding into the country and overwhelming our cities.

Back from the dead

2011-10-19T08:50:00.000-07:00

After a long hiatus, I've decided to resurrect this blog in response to the depressing state of affairs here in Australia. Our country is being ruined by an imbecilic political establishment that is completely divorced from reality and utterly disconnected from ordinary Australians. To watch as this once great nation is mismanaged and misgoverned by the cretins in power is enough to make even the calmest of people explode into fits of apoplectic rage. This blog once served as a conduit to vent my political frustrations, mainly over the issue of immigration and the existential threat it poses to the historic Australian nation. I intend for it to once again serve the same purpose.

The forgotten Australians

2009-10-28T06:00:00.000-07:00

In an article for The Australian, John Pasquarelli, former advisor to Pauline Hanson, writes about immigration, multiculturalism, Barnaby Joyce, and those "forgotten Australians" looking for a champion:

Civil rights apologists try to bottle up public concern about illegal arrivals, militant Islamism, ethnic gangs, drugs and the murderous danger zones that our CBDs have become, but from time to time the outrage erupts on talkback radio and in the letters to the editor columns. A caller from Bathurst, NSW, recently said the threat of Pacific Islander gangs in western Sydney made him pack up and leave, and he is not alone. A woman who was flying her Australian flag during the Cronulla riots had her house pelted with eggs. Police told her to take down the flag as it was inciting the Muslims.

These are today's forgotten people, Australians of all generations who know their history and are embittered as they see their heritage, values, institutions and way of life devalued. Under Labor, the rapid-fire arrival of boatloads of illegals has, until recently, failed to generate the banner headlines of the past, no doubt heart-warming for those Greens, Laborites and Liberal marshmallows who favour the madness of some sort of open borders policy. Ex-Liberal MP Bruce Baird, now holding a Labor job, told the Ten Network's Meet the Press Labor's policy changes on dealing with people-smugglers had nothing whatsoever to do with the recent surge in arrivals.

As Christmas Island readies to put up the no-vacancy sign, the hitherto silent Libs have broken out, led by Philip Ruddock and Kevin Andrews, and already the polls have spiked substantially in their favour, no doubt creating more grief for Malcolm Turnbull, who is handcuffed to the usual suspects in Wentworth and whose only comment to date has been a limp-wristed call for an independent inquiry.

The chief objective of the illegals and their criminal co-conspirators, the people-smugglers, is to be allowed to come ashore on the mainland and that will surely happen soon.

Still disconnected from the mainstream, there is hardly a mumble from the Liberals as our immigration rates accelerate.

A new Australia is in the making, where our ethnic minorities will become majorities, aided by people running Malcolm Fraser's line that we need a population of 50million plus, no doubt to be fed by the spring of taxpayer-funded multiculturalism.

Full article

How long before the Third World immigration tsunami washes away these "forgotten Australians" forever?

Turkic-Muslim whining

2009-10-28T05:56:00.000-07:00

Nursel Guzeldeniz is a Muslim social anthropologist, writer and filmmaker who likes to write jejune, nonsensical articles railing against the so-called "Islamophobia" which now allegedly pervades the Western world, including Australia.

In an article about public opposition to the construction of mosques in Sydney, invidiously entitled "Anglo-Christian tribalism," Guzeldeniz wrote:

What lies at the heart of this fierce opposition to the construction of mosques and Islamic schools is some Australians’ inability and unwillingness to accept and acknowledge that Australia is a multicultural society, and to come to terms with this fact.

...

... although the White Australia policy was abolished in the early 1970s, the attitudes that created that policy still linger in Australia. And this leads to a tribal mindset based on Anglo-European-Christian identity in some suburbs where residents refuse to accommodate any difference fearing the change and discomfort this may cause.

Now, I'm not entirely sure what imbues Nursel Guzeldeniz with such arrogance, but her message to "Anglo-Christian tribalists", otherwise known as the Australian majority, is essentially this: "If you don't like the changes that we are imposing on the country, too bad! Australia is multicultural now!"

Guzeldeniz even has the temerity to assert that Australians must relinquish their "Anglo-European-Christian" identity so that newly-arrived immigrant minorities can retain their particular, exclusive identities!

After reading this particular article, one can only conclude that "multiculturalism", far from being about benign colourful festivals and exotic foods, actually means handing your country over to alien peoples and cultures and allowing them to do with it as they wish. Is it any wonder why some Australians continue to resist multiculturalism?

I can only imagine what would happen if a large population of Anglo-Christian Australians moved en masse into a Muslim country, say Nursel Guzeldeniz's ancestral homeland, and then demanded that the host society change to suit the newcomers and redefine itself as a multicultural country (an oxymoron if ever there was one). If the Muslim host population reacted in outrage to the changes this alien cultural group was imposing on their country, the Anglo-Christians could respond: "What's your problem? You need to accept and acknowledge that your country is now a multicultural society, and to come to terms with this fact. Your old, pre-multicultural identity is no longer valid."

Of course, if Western immigrants flooded into Muslim countries and began changing those societies to better suit themselves, they would be accused of colonialism and more than likely forcibly evicted by the host populations.

The economystic faith

2009-10-28T03:22:00.000-07:00

Lawrence Auster on the "economystic" argument in favour of mass immigration:

The prevailing view of immigration among mainstream elites is that it represents a great boon to the economy. That immigration is only to be considered from the standpoint of its economic effects has become such an accepted notion over the past 25 years that it has not occurred to many people what a bizarre idea it really is. The implication is that our well-being as a society is solely a function of economic output. Matters of quality of life, social cohesion and continuity, aesthetic enjoyment, political liberty, national identity, and all the other intangibles that make up the life of a society—since these cannot be stated statistically, they don’t count. Or so the economists seem to believe. The late Julian Simon, with his crack-pated idea that every immigrant, regardless of his cultural origin, level of education, or legal status, represents a net economic gain for this country, was perhaps the most extreme of these “economystics.”

Notwithstanding the veneer of scientific expertise with which its claims are advanced, the economystic faith boils down to an almost vacuous proposition: immigration is good because it increases population, and thus (assuming more economic output from more people) proportionately increases gross product. A doubling or tripling of the U.S. population will lead to a doubling or tripling of economic output. Voilà—immigration makes us a “wealthier” nation! One of the problems with this logic is that individual wealth does not necessarily increase, only the aggregate wealth. Meanwhile, our congested coastal and metropolitan areas have become two or three times more crowded. Pressure on open spaces and parks, stress on resources (increasing the need for burdensome regulations), crippling traffic congestion, displacement of older residents, as well as ethnic conflict, all become worse. Even as economic output goes up, overall quality of life can decline. But the economystic cannot see these things because for him the only reality is that which can be stated in economic terms.

For the economystic, the swelling of Los Angeles due to immigration has been a wonderful thing. According to the Los Angeles Times, “Development policies over the last decade have sought to make the Los Angeles area the magnet of the burgeoning Pacific Rim economy. The region’s growth has been phenomenal, as measured by trade revenues, number of building permits issued and aggregate income.” Sounds great, right? But the article continued: “The success of Los Angeles’ integration into the international economy, however, is not matched by success in integrating its immigrant and ethnic minority populations.” The article then discussed the uncontrolled ethnic rivalry and violence in this new “world-class” city of Los Angeles.

In other words, the great economic growth of Los Angeles has not necessarily been a boon for the people living there. By most standards, Los Angeles over the last 30 years has become an immeasurably worse place to live in as a direct result of the very things that have led to the growth of its aggregate wealth. The economystic cannot see this. He looks at a table of statistics, notices the upward trend in population and aggregate income, and rushes into print telling us how immigration is turning America into an earthly paradise.

The deeper problem with economism is that no true values, including the values of a distinct political system, culture and way of life, can be comprehended in economic or utilitarian terms. Solely on the basis of measurable, quantifiable, pragmatic facts it is impossible to preserve any society or institution, even so basic an institution as the nuclear family.

Suppose there were two families, the Smiths and the Joneses, living next door to each other. The two families get along, the children play together, the parents occasionally socialize with each other. Then one day the Joneses announce that they want to move in permanently with the Smiths. When the Smiths seem less than enthusiastic about this proposal, the Joneses say: “What’s your problem? You have enough room, your house is bigger than ours, and we get along together. Besides, the nuclear family is only a modern invention. A dual family will enrich all of us.” To back up these claims, the Joneses bring in an economist who says that two-family households have larger aggregate wealth than one-family households. They bring in a sociologist who cites studies showing that the children raised in two-family households have superior abilities in adjusting to different types of people in a diverse society. Faced with this aggressive challenge to their existence as a family, what can the Smiths say? Their family, as a unique, autonomous association, is an intrinsic, irreplaceable value to its members. It cannot be defended on the basis of quantifiable facts. In the same way, the nation is a family whose distinct character and values cannot be defended on a purely rationalistic basis. To say that it must do so in order to have the right to exist, is to deny its right to exist.

Read the rest here.

Another nail in the coffin of our heritage

2009-10-28T02:13:00.001-07:00

From The Independent Australian, Issue 14, Summer 2007/08:

Sic Transit Gloria

The demise of Old Norse at Australian universities is another milestone in the cultural dispossession of our founding population in favour of our "Asian destiny".

The University of Melbourne has decided to change its traditional course structures to what it originally called the 'American model' - now renamed the 'Melbourne model'. As a result, some forty or so subjects will no longer be taught. One of these is Old Norse.

The language of the Vikings was first taught at Melbourne in 1944, by the Belgium-born Augustin Lodewyckx. In 1946 a second course was set up in the English Department by Professor Keith Macartney. Graduates of these classes include many people who are household names to educated Australians. They include: Dr John Martin, the author of the best book on Ragnarok; Dame Leonie Kramer; the poet AD Hope; the great Anglo-Saxonist Bruce Mitchell; and the only Australian recipient of the Order of the Icelandic Falcon, Professor Ian Maxwell.

In 2007, allegedly in the interest of economic rationalism, this grand tradition draws to an end. Old Norse will be taught no longer, despite the school having international recognition of high standing. The University of Melbourne, in its weaselly defence, claims that only thirty-odd students undertook Old Norse in any given year. What the university apparently doesn't understand is that it's not the number of students that's important. It's the quality, a factor that will soon become much scarcer at what was once a great university, but is now being dumbed down to accommodate fee-paying Asian students.

In 1972, the American author Wilmot Robertson published the first version of his seminal book, The Dispossessed Majority. In his preface, Robertson perceptively remarked that, "The most truly disadvantaged are those who are hated for their virtues, not their vices, who insist on playing the game of life with opponents who have long ago abandoned the rules, who stubbornly go on believing that a set of highly sophisticated institutions developed by and for a particular people at a particular point in time and space are operational for all peoples under all circumstances."

That is the situation in Australia today. Our universities, like many of our other institutions, no longer play by the rules for which we initially created them, and continue to fund them. They give mere lip-service to those rules, in order to continue the dispossession of Australia's founding Anglo-Celtic population without alarming us too much. Would you like proof of this? Well, Melbourne University claims that low student numbers for Old Norse have doomed the subject. When Monash University abolished the same subject, back in the Hawke-Keating era, the number of students enrolled for Old Norse at Monash had actually been growing substanially for several years under the direction of a dynamic young Anglo-Saxonist from Oxford. Yet Monash made no secret of the fact that it preferred to allocate resources to Asian languages, regardless of student numbers. In other words, student interest in subjects relevant to traditional Australians was of no concern to Monash, which preferred to be an agent of change toward Australia's so-called "Asian destiny".

The demise of Old Norse at Australian universities could be seen as just a footnote to the cultural dispossession of our founding population, which still remains a majority. In itself, Old Norse is of little consequence. Yet if traditional Australians continue to allow our institutions, which once served us so well, to become a chorus to our ongoing dispossession, we will have only ourselves to blame. If our children have less and less exposure to our own people's heritage, we can scarcely blame them if they adopt the culture of other groups that are promoted positively in the media and elsewhere.

It is hard to know how to fight back against Melbourne University's decision to drop Old Norse. As a Melbourne University graduate, I have made it clear that their begging letters will no longer be rewarded with a cheque. Of course, that won't be enough to make any difference to them. I think we must withdraw our support - totally - from all institutions that have turned against the founding Australian people that they were originally created to serve.

There is a good, old-fashioned word for individuals and institutions that have set themselves against their own kith and kin. That word is "traitor".

The author wishes to remain anonymous for professional and personal reasons.

Kevin Rudd: The Manchurian Candidate?

2009-10-28T01:46:00.000-07:00

Is Kevin Rudd Australia's version of the "Manchurian Candidate"? Alan Fitzgerald, writing in The Independent Australian, thinks so.

It is generally accepted that Kevin Rudd is a detail man about running the country. Hence we can assume that four significant developments in Australia have his approval. These four developments are:

(1) Investment in the resource industries (covered below). The Chinese Government investment is so widespread and pervasive that they would have a better dossier on the resource industries in some details than the Australian Government.

(2) ‘Soft power’ - e.g... the establishment of Confucius ‘Institutes’ in the universities (also covered below).

(3) Large-scale immigration of Chinese via the educational institutions so that the Chinese are beginning to dominate the professional and managerial classes. This is the theme of The Howard Legacy so that there is no need to go into it here, save to note that one of the first actions of the Rudd government was to increase immigration rates to record levels. At the same time their was little financial help for Australian universities, so that they continue to be dependent on international students. This will lead to increased dominance and will be the topic of a future article.

(4) Becoming a large holder of Australian Government bonds issued to sustain the spiralling deficit. There is no information about who is buying Australian bonds, although it is understood that such information will be released soon. It seems highly probable that the Chinese are large buyers, as they have of US bonds. Once a capital importer like Australia becomes a perennial client of a sovereign state it must influence policy.

Read the rest here.

Multiculturalism, immigration and the "Chattering Class"

2009-10-28T01:15:00.001-07:00

In a long article for National Observer, Paul Christopher examines the Australian "chattering class" and attempts to explain the reasons behind their enthusiasm for multiculturalism and Third World immigration:

Multiculturalism: A Political Artifact

Multiculturalism is the demand that Australians should adapt to rancorous demands by newly arrived or resident ethnic groups. Multiculturalism emerged from the New Left matrix of the 1960s and 1970s and is the crazed orphan of cultural relativism. In the Australian case it was designed to destabilise the affiliations to British-Australian traditions, institutions and values. The operational assumption that Australia was a W.A.S.P. (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) paradise built on racism, genocide and oppression is still assiduously promoted by leftist historians and by ethnic and pro-ethnic media. Hating Australia became a profession.

In asserting the regressive fantasy that all cultures are "equal", cultural relativism ensures that the host country, Australia - a term that multiculturalists are trying to depreciate - was denigrated as the source of authoritative allocation of values and legitimacy. Australian multi-culturalism was never put to the people and was almost covertly promoted by progressive activist networks.

Multiculturalism became a contentious topic decades after the realisation that it was politically and culturally destabilising and the origin of many taxpayer-funded social problems including ethnic crime, narcotics, social and religious separatism and political vote-catching.

As two researchers recently summarised, "Multiculturalism was not well known or popular among ordinary Australians." Subsequent research into popular acceptance of multiculturalism reveals respondents were particularly concerned that "they were never asked to vote on it".

The historian of Australian multiculturalism, Mark Lopez, points out: "Multiculturalism was developed by a small number of academics, social workers and activists, initially located on the fringe of the political arena of immigration, settlement and welfare. The authors responsible for versions of the ideology were also principal actors in the struggle to advance their beliefs and make them government policy".

As Max Teichmann has noted: "The original definers of the multicultural scenario were few in number, so had to move carefully . . . Few Australians, native born or immigrant, really wanted it . . . Most Australians were quite unaware of this process of conversion by stealth of the decision makers and opinion formers."

Multiculturalism as a policy was never discussed internally at Cabinet level or party room within either political party. Members of both parties presumed that the legitimacy of multiculturalism derived from political leaders and elite support. Multiculturalism was public policy by stealth.

Lopez notes that through "core groups and activists' sympathisers and contacts . . . multiculturalism became government policy . . . because the multiculturalists and their supporters were able to influence the ideological content of the Minister's sources of policy . . . Contemporary public opinion polls implied...in the general population, a widespread resentment, or a lack of interest, of the kinds of ideas advanced by multiculturalists. ...The original constituency for multiculturalism was small; popular opinion was an obstacle, not an asset, for the multiculturalists."

Finally, "Multiculturalism was not simply picked up and appreciated and implemented by policy makers, government and the major political parties . . . [I]n every episode that resulted in the progress of multiculturalism, the effectiveness of the political lobbyists was a decisive factor. . . . [Multiculturalism was] tirelessly promoted and manoeuvered forward".

Gradually the downside of multiculturalism has become clear. The 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington have provided further insight into this perilous dimension, for as Walter Lacquer has written, the hijackers operated "all under the cover of multiculturalism".

By prescribing through law the status of numerous ethnic identities, Australia entered a new culture of complaint and litigation - against alleged discrimination. The multi-culturalists had a strategic advantage: their opponents were stigmatised as racists. Racism was described by university historians as the lynchpin of Australian nationalism and identity and involved a "cosmopolitan" hatred of Australians. As Lopez summarises: "In addition to being racist, the typical Australian was negatively stereotyped as parochial, boorish, narrow-minded, materialistic, suburban, culturally inferior and in need of improvement."

Multiculturalism became a profession based on the mobilisation of ethnic resentment. Grievance mechanisms required the expertise of the chattering class in the form of lawyers, social workers and, of course, the establishment of commissions and statutory bodies to rewrite "racist" laws and advance the interests of ethnic minorities repressed by the "dominant culture".

No country is naturally multi-cultural - it is always imposed. In 1996, the architect of multi-culturalism Jerzy Zubrycki described multiculturalism as, "a good idea that has gone wrong. Ethnicity has been cynically exploited for electoral and civic advantage. Morality rather than social engineering is now required to make Australia a better place." Multiculturalism poses the key questions of loyalty and allegiance to Australia: to whom do the hundreds of ethnic groups and communities owe allegiance? It may take a crisis to find the answer.

Immigration

The chattering class quickly attached itself to the immigration / refugee issue and promoted a climate of suspicion to all Howard Government claims. Immigration is a low or no-cost cause of high symbolic value. Demography and distance also shape its stance. The chattering class resides in areas and suburbs in which there are few ethnic minorities and therefore few attendant social problems.

The chattering class view immigration and illegal immigrants - commonly misnamed refugees - as a test of their cosmopolitanism, tolerance and cultural relativism. Support for immigration is a litmus test for moral superiority. They do not feel threatened.

However normals regard high immigration levels and illegal immigrants as threatening personal, community and national security (national security is a concept systematically devalued by the chattering class).

The chattering class accuse the Howard Government of exploiting the latent racism and xenophobia of Australians, thereby expressing their lack of understanding and contempt for one of the most racially tolerant countries in the world. The "illegal immigrants-refugee" issue also offers a media platform for a host of formerly anonymous legal mediocrities who can promenade as "men of principle", defending "refugees" in their favourite media outlets the A.B.C., The Age and S.B.S.

In mid-December 2001, bemused Australians television-watched "asylum seekers" burn down fifteen detention centre buildings, destroying four of them in Woomera, South Australia, as they chanted: "visa, visa, visa". The chattering class commentators justified their arson and sabotage against Commonwealth property by claiming it should be seen "in context" and they "shared their pain".

Living in their twilight zone, the commentators denied the existence of multi-million dollar people-smuggling rackets which placed hundreds of men, women and children at risk of death and massive trauma. They denied the existence of terrorist-sleepers entering Australia in the illegal immigrant streams. Thus the refugee-detention issue provided a unique insight into the moral posturing of the chattering class and their contempt for the key issue: Australian sovereignty.

Consistent with the compulsive attachment to "rights", the controversy over aboriginal rights and apologies is conducted by those who have knowledge by description rather than knowledge by acquaintance. Robert Manne, the chief academic exponent of the stolen generations myth recalls, "I did not encounter a single aboriginal child in my primary or high school years."

The use of the term genocide is particularly misleading and offensive to the many Europeans and genuine refugees from Asian countries who fled communist genocide and mass murder. Not only does it degrade and cheapen the horrific dimensions of genocide, but it also reduces genocide to a propaganda slogan against Australia's past. It is a chilling example of the "Big Lie".

You can read the full article here.

Playing the approved way

2009-09-19T11:02:00.000-07:00

In his most recent column at VDARE.com, R.J. Stove writes:

If the boat people issue continues for long enough to do Rudd serious damage, Australia’s conservatives might have a chance at winning power. Or, who knows, they might even raise the issue of legal immigration, effectively kept out of politics by the usual bipartisan consensus since Hanson’s implosion.

But probably, like the GOP in the U.S., they will opt to play the political game in the approved way—and lose.

The Coalition does not have the stomach the question the immigration status quo. The useless Malcolm "I Can't Believe It's Not Labor" Turnbull and his hapless gang simply won't dare challenge Rudd's immigration free-for-all for fear of not only opening themselves up to allegations of 'racism' but also upsetting their Big Business friends and financiers who enthusiastically support open-borders.

The best thing that could happen would be for the Coalition to suffer a massive, debilitating defeat at the next election, thereby preciptiating its implosion and permanent disappearance from the Australian political landscape. This would allow an actual conservative party to take its place, a party that actually offered the electorate a real choice on immigration.

A joke

2009-09-19T10:37:00.000-07:00

A politician died and went to Heaven to ask St. Peter for admission. St. Peter said "We don’t have many of your profession here in Heaven and it is our rule that you must spend a day in Hell and a day in Heaven before you elect for one or the other."

So the politician went to Hell, where he found himself on a beautifully manicured golf course, on which he enjoyed a pleasant round of social golf with some of his old mates who had preceded him. They then went to the bar and they reminisced about how they had conned and dudded people, followed by dinner - caviar, lobster, champagne - anything you fancied to eat or drink. The Devil turned out to be a most charming and solicitous host, full of jokes and leading the singing.

The next day the politician spent the day in Heaven, where he sat in the clouds, playing the harp and singing hymns. At the end of the day St. Peter asked him, "Which destination do you elect?" The politician replied, "Well it was very pleasant and relaxing in Heaven, but to be frank, I prefer Hell."

So down he went to Hell, where he found himself in a rubbish tip, where his old mates, with doleful expressions, were sorting rubbish and squabbling over the rotten scraps of food which had been thrown out. The politician cried out to the Devil "Where’s the golf course?" To which the Devil replied "Oh, that was during the campaign, this is the day after the election."

The enervated Anglosphere

2009-09-19T09:30:00.000-07:00

Fjordman writes:

The entire Western world is currently in decline, not just in relative terms as a percentage of the global population or economy, but in real terms as functioning societies.

That being said, although all Western countries without exception are sinking under the weight of Third World mass immigration and in the process becoming a part of the Third World, they are not sinking equally fast. With the exception of France, Belgium and possibly the Netherlands and Sweden, the English-speaking world is leading the disintegration of the West, ideologically and demographically. The entire West is sick, but the Anglosphere is sicker than most. The English-speaking countries still have the most dynamic military traditions of the West, but that counts for little as long as they are used for promoting global Multiculturalism rather than for protecting the home country.

I cannot see that the Anglosphere has more freedom of speech than Continental European countries, either. The USA with its First Amendment does, which is great (we'll see what their new President does about that), but al-Canada is plain nuts and Britain is a Multicultural banana republic. Australia and New Zealand could be a part of Greater China by mid-century. Maybe they will be more prosperous than France will be as a part of Greater Algeria or the United States as a part of Greater Mexico, but by then they will be Asians, not Westerners.

I'm not sure why the Anglosphere is so bad. In the case of Britain, I strongly suspect it's partly caused by a Post-Imperial Stress Syndrome for a nation that once ruled much of the world and now cannot even rule its own suburbs. Empire was their identity. Much of the same can be said about the French. Indeed I suspect that one of their motivations for supporting the awful EU project is for them to resurrect some of their past imperial glory in another form.

Yet this cannot explain the actions of the United States, which is still the world's greatest power although that may not last forever. There is some form of universal proposition nation idea with roots dating back to the Enlightenment at work here. It's the concept that a country is not a nation based on a shared heritage, but an abstract entity which can be joined by absolutely anybody, a bit like an enlarged video club. If you claim that the United States is a "universal" nation and that Hamas-supporting Muslims, with which Westerners have absolutely nothing in common, can and should be imported to the USA, then you are a supporter of the concept of a proposition nation. This idea will eventually kill the United States as we once knew it.

While a secular theology of immigrationism certainly exists in the Anglosphere nations, a theology which teaches, quite falsely, that immigration is, and has always been, an integral part of their respective national characters, one cannot overlook the role that powerful transnational commercial interests have played in opening up the Anglosphere nations to massive Third World immigration. Continental European elites, in contrast, seem slightly more reluctant to throw their nations under the wheels of the "global economy" express.

Deconstructing Australia

2009-09-19T08:59:00.000-07:00

Mark Richardson writes at Oz Conservative:

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."

Steyn on immigration

2009-06-03T13:16:00.000-07:00

After years of avoiding the topic, Mark Steyn seems to have finally taken a stand on the issue of immigration. He writes:

Two generations ago, America, Canada, Australia and the rest of the developed world took it as read that a sovereign nation had the right to determine which, if any, foreigners it extended rights of residency to. Now only Japan does. Everywhere else, opposition to mass immigration is “nativist”, and expressing a preference for one group of immigrants over another is “racist”. Even though 40 years ago governments routinely distinguished between Irish and Bulgar, Indian and Somali, now all that matters is to demonstrate your multicultural bona fides even unto societal suicide, as if immigration is like a UN peacekeeping operation – one of those activities in which you have no “national interest”.

“It’s overblown that suddenly Islam is going to spread across the nation,” a candidate for Canada’s socialist New Democratic Party said on the radio the other day. “And, if it does, so what?” Jens Orback, the then “Integration Minister” of Sweden (and pity the land that needs such a cabinet official), was less devil-may-care. On Sveriges Radio five years ago, he advised his fellow Swedes to “be nice to Muslims while we’re in the majority so that they’ll be nice to us when they’re in the majority.” Another “Integration Minister”, Armin Laschet of North Rhine-Westphalia, tells his fellow Germans that “in our cities 30-40 per cent of children have an immigrant background. It will be them who will sustain this country in 20 years.”

Very few Swedes knowingly voted for societal self-extinction, yet in barely a third of century it’s become a fait accomplis. And in a politically correct world there is no acceptable form of public discourse in which to object to it. This is the triumph of the left’s assault on language. As my colleague John Derbyshire put it in another context: Better dead than rude.

Full article

Wrongfully accused?

2009-06-01T13:03:00.001-07:00

Mark Richardson at Oz Conservative has a very interesting post about the recent attacks on Indian students in Melbourne.

Both internationally and at home, these attacks have been used as evidence of allegedly widespread European Australian racism, especially by the Australian mainstream media which loves to run stories about how evil and racist white Australians are.

Yet in the CCTV footage that Richardson posts of one particular attack, the attackers appear to be of non-European origin.

Richardson asks:

So what is going on here? Why would white Australians and white society be condemned for something they appear to have had no part in?

The answer, I believe, is quite simple: when it comes to allegations of racism, whites are always quilty until proven innocent. Moreover, it is only ever people of European descent who can be guilty of racism - non-European peoples are completely incapable of such a thing.

These are the rules that our modern, liberal, multicultural society seems to live by.

Stuart Macintyre: Anglophobe

2009-06-01T09:55:00.000-07:00

Stuart Macintyre is a historian and former communist known for being one of the prime protagonists in the so-called "History Wars" here in Australia. He is also the chap that Kevin Rudd has decided should help write our national history curriculum for schools from the first year of school through to Year 12.

Unsurprisingly, Macintyre is one of those leftists who views Australian history since British settlement as little more than an appalling legacy of racism and genocide. Indeed, he is one of the leading proponents of this view. In his opinion, the sooner evil Anglo-Australia is relegated to the dustbin of history, the better. As this article points out:

Macintyre also harbours a deep distaste for this country’s British heritage. In the concluding chapter of A Concise History of Australia (1999), he is comforted by the prediction that, just as the Romans were displaced in Britain, Aborigines and Asians will eventually supplant the colonisers of British descent in Australia. Just as the only remnant of the Roman empire in Britain is “a thin slice of the island’s multi-layered past”, so too will the British colonisation be overlaid by the culture and practices of other peoples.

Personally, I'd like to know how someone with such strong biases was ever deemed the best choice to write the national history curriculum for a people and nation he so obviously loathes.

Keep immigrants coming, demands non-Australian Rupert Murdoch

2009-02-07T22:38:00.001-08:00

From the Courier Mail:

RUPERT Murdoch has urged Australia to keep its doors open to immigration in a glowing tribute to the nation's most successful arrival, Frank Lowy.

The News Corporation chairman declared Australia's richest man the face of a nation built by migrants.

Mr Murdoch made the comments at a tribute dinner for Mr Lowy held by the American Australian Association.

In a warm and at times intimate speech, he presented himself and Mr Lowy as something of mirror images of each other: He, the Australian who gave up his citizenship to pursue business overseas, and Mr Lowy, the Hungarian migrant who came to embody his adopted homeland.

"In my recent Boyer Lectures I spoke of the importance to Australia's future of a liberal immigration system," Mr Murdoch said.

"Few other Australians embody the breadth of achievement or the contribution to Australia's prosperity made by immigrants in this country than Frank Lowy.

"There are few stories in which such hardship in early life has been transformed into such towering achievement as the story of Frank Lowy.

"In the 80s he marvelled at the fact that I was an Australian who had become regarded as a foreigner while he was a foreigner who had made his name as an Australian."

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull both attended the dinner - an indication of Mr Lowy's influence - and as usual Mr Murdoch had a strong message for them: Keep them coming in.

Sorry, Rupert, but you aren't an Australian citizen anymore, and so your opinion is irrelevant. Go sell your open-borders agenda to the U.S. government.

The fact that Murdoch traded his Australian citizenship for an American passport for business reasons tells us everything we need to know about his views on the nation-state. He obviously has no concept of national loyalty. To him, matters of national identity and culture are irrelevant. He is a prime example of what Samuel Huntington labelled "Davos Man", global economic elites 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 elite's global operations."

If Murdoch had his way, Australia wouldn’t even exist in anything but a geographical sense.

As for Lowy, why are our political leaders honouring a notorious tax cheat? Are they such whores that they'll rub shoulders with anybody, as long as they have a buck or two to throw to their re-election campaigns?

The innumerate Senator Evans

2009-01-04T07:02:00.001-08:00

In his new book Overloading Australia, poet and population reduction advocate Mark O'Connor writes:

In May 2008 the Labor Minister for Immigration Chris Evans informed the ABC Radio's The National Interest that net migration, which according to ABS figures was some 177 600, was only 70 000. "Last year I think we brought in about 140 total settlers - about 140 thousand total arrivals and 72 thousand left so we only got the net gain of about 70 thousand." It appears he got his figure for net migration (immigrants minus emigrants) by subtracting total emigrants from a figure (some years out of date) that he had been given for net migration. In other words he subtracted emigrants twice.

Certainly inspires confidence in Senator Evans's capacity to effectively manage our country's immigration programme, doesn't it?

Given the sheer obtuseness demonstrated above by Senator Evans, it doesn't surprise me one bit that he has fallen for the "immigration is a fix for an ageing population" fallacy.

A nasty piece of vandalism

2008-12-17T07:15:00.001-08:00

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

2008-12-03T02:55:00.001-08:00

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

2008-11-02T03:17:00.001-08:00

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?

2008-09-05T10:43:00.001-07:00

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

2008-09-04T02:10:00.001-07:00

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

2008-09-04T01:50:00.001-07:00

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

2008-09-03T23:43:00.001-07:00

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!

2008-08-24T09:34:00.001-07:00

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

2008-08-09T02:22:00.001-07:00

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

2008-07-29T21:33:00.001-07:00

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

2008-07-19T17:28:00.001-07:00

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?

2008-07-16T13:37:00.001-07:00

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

2008-06-26T20:38:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-16T09:57:00.001-07:00

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

2008-06-11T22:35:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-07T09:09:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-06-07T05:58:00.001-07:00

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

2008-06-05T04:10:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-31T20:04:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-25T08:35:00.001-07:00

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?

2008-05-16T15:47:00.001-07:00

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.