Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott has proposed that immigration to be cut in a bid to ease pressure on wages, infrastructure, and house prices.
“It’s a basic law of economics that increasing the supply of labour depresses wages; and that increasing demand for housing boosts price,” he added.
Abbott said cutting the number of migrants could improve the growth of wages, address housing affordability concerns and possibly reduce crime rates.
He concedes that having “a bigger Australia” will make the country stronger in the long term but he said a short-term cut would boost the Australian economy and be in the “national interest.”
“I want a stronger Australia; and, over time, that should be a bigger Australia. But no Australian government should put the well-being of potential incoming migrants over that of the existing population,” Abbott said.
On the issue of housing, the former liberal party leader said that “especially in the past decade, higher immigration has boosted demand and factored into price” which has been coupled with lower interest rates at the banks.
“Almost half a million new dwellings have been required over the decade just to meet the increase in net overseas migration,” he said.
He also said “something has gone badly wrong” with the integration of some migrants where “58 percent of refugees who have settled here in the past ten years are living on welfare” and “only 30 percent” of the migrants that came to Australia have learned English.
“Without the national language, how can newcomers ever really find a job and fully integrate into our way of life?” Abbott said.
On the issue of employment, Abbott said that Australians might possibly be “too fussy about the jobs they’ll do” or whether they'll work at all given the “availability of a don’t-ask-questions welfare.”
“But if it’s hard to find café or cleaning staff, maybe higher wages would help and maybe the welfare rules should be better policed. If it’s hard to find programmers, maybe companies need to do more training. And if no decent managers are available, maybe their pay might have to be increased – because that, after all, is how markets should normally work,” he said.
At the end of his speech, Abbott called for the Immigration and Border Protection and Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton to lower the overall migrant intake numbers as the “government’s first duty is to its own citizens.”
“At least until infrastructure, housing stock, and integration has better caught up, we simply have to move the overall numbers substantially down,” Abbott said. “A strong migration programme in the long term doesn’t preclude a smaller one in the short term especially when there’s acute pressure on living standards and quality of life.”
“I want to bring people in as young as possible, as highly skilled as possible so they’re paying taxes for longer, they’re contributing to Australian society and they’re helping build our nation,” Dutton said at the National Press Club.
“That’s been the wonderful history of migration in our country.”
“It costs more than $100,000 in public money per person that we add to our population,” she said, according to the news website.
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