Nothing changes a country for better or for worse like migration. Australia’s early settlers created a country that was a pioneer of democracy with the world’s highest standard of living. Our post-war migrants, many refugees from war-torn Europe, worked hard in factories, farms and national development projects like the Snowy scheme and revelled in being described as “new Australians”—a term that Sir Frank Lowy said filled him with gratitude because it meant that, finally, he lived in a country where he belonged.
People who work hard and pay taxes; who embrace our language, our history and our way of life; who integrate from day one and who assimilate as quickly as possible, should always be welcome here. Indeed, they’re precisely the people who’ve made modern Australia great: a country with an indigenous heritage, a British foundation, and an immigrant character, starting with the settlers and continuing with people from all over the world who came here to join us, not change us, because they liked what they’d heard and seen and wanted to be part of it.
But rather than join Team Australia, too many people today are simply living in Hotel Australia and taking advantage of the facilities, especially the ability to work for extended periods of time, send remittances to family back home, and skip from visa to visa without necessarily ever becoming Australian citizens; or, if they do, without taking seriously the words of the citizenship oath: “from this time forward, under God, I pledge my allegiance to Australia and its people, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey”. Pretty obviously, anyone who believes in death to the infidels, a global caliphate, sharia law—or the leading role of the Communist Party for that matter—couldn’t take that oath in good conscience and can’t live happily in a liberal pluralist democracy.
The Bondi massacre is simply the worst manifestation of our country’s recent negligence in keeping migration under strict control—with one shooter coming here as a student in the late 90’s and remaining on a succession of visas; and the other, his son, born here and educated here but without ever embracing the fair-go-for-all that’s at the heart of Australia at its best.
Whether it’s an economically suicidal energy policy, its reluctance to stand up to intimidation from Beijing, and—especially—its mass migration policy, the Albanese government has been complicit in changing Australia for the worse. Was its bizarre early insistence that inadequate gun control (not Islamist fanaticism) was to blame for the Bondi massacre just a sustained failure to understand what the wrong sort of migration is doing to our country—or was it evidence of a desire to change our country by stealth, diluting and ultimately eliminating our core Anglo-Celtic culture (even though it’s the world’s most welcoming) and our foundational Judaeo-Christian heritage (even though it’s the world’s most universal)?
Because it was such a dismal milestone in our decline, for millions of Australians the Bondi massacre inspired a determination to retake control of our country. Early in the new year, in almost his first words as Liberal leader, Angus Taylor declared that migration numbers were too high and migration quality was too low. One of his first policy commitments was to an enforceable Australian values statement, to which all long term visa applicants would have to subscribe, with deportation for any serious failure to live up to it. Then, in his Budget reply, he said that only Australian citizens would henceforth be eligible for most welfare benefits as part of his overall commitment to put Australia first.
Now, he’s released further key elements of the Liberal-National Coalition’s immigration policy: ending temporary graduate visas, because over 50 per cent of overseas students never leave; dramatically cutting student visas, because most overseas students are coming for work and residency, not education; making it harder to apply for asylum onshore, because this has become a racket that’s exploited by unscrupulous people and their lawyers to stay here indefinitely; deporting immediately all non-citizens who’ve exhausted their rights of appeal; and requiring all who want to change their visa status to do so from outside the country. But for people with a definite job offer from a specific employer at above market wages, there will actually be more visas because truly skilled migrants boost our prosperity from day one. Together, these changes should reduce net overseas migration from record levels of about 300,000 a year (on a per capita basis, the highest in the world), to 100,000 initially, before stabilising at about the level of the Howard years. The Coalition hasn’t just railed against excessive migrant numbers, putting downward pressure on wages, upward pressure on housing costs, and straining both infrastructure and social cohesion, but provided a considered, costed mechanism to bring numbers down.
John Howard famously declared: “we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances under which they come”. Twice now, Coalition governments have ended waves of illegal migration by boat—something no other governments have managed to achieve. Since then, out-of-control legal migration has become the business model for colleges selling work rights in the guise of education, and businesses that would rather import cheap labour than pay and train local workers. And because Labor regards recent migrants as its vote bank, only the Coalition can be trusted to get this right.