ABC Posted 29 May, 2024
Statement by Laura Tingle, 7.30 Chief Political Correspondent
For much of the past two weeks, the political debate has focused not on the federal Budget but on the Leader of the Opposition’s budget reply in which he pledged to cut migration to deal with the housing crisis.
I have written and broadcast on this decision and its implications on ABC platforms numerous times since then. I was also a panellist at the Sydney Writers’ Festival on the weekend when migration and housing were also discussed in a panel on the year in politics.
In my writing and broadcasts over the past two weeks I have observed on several occasions that there were considerable dangers for the way our political discourse would unfold – and for social harmony – in linking migration to the housing crisis.
At the Writers’ Festival I was asked to comment on the Opposition leader’s policy on migration and the economy, including housing. Mr Dutton has been vocal on this topic, particularly over the past fortnight.
“It’s not just housing,” he said. “People know that if you move suburbs it’s hard to get your kids into school or into childcare. It’s hard to get into a GP because the doctors have closed their books. It’s hard to get elective surgery. These factors have all contributed to capacity constraints because of the lack of planning in the migration program.”
He has also said migrants are the cause of “congestion on our roads”.
As the alternative Prime Minister, with an election approaching within a year, Mr Dutton’s comments deserve rigorous scrutiny and examination.
I have also pointed out that there were flaws in the Opposition’s position as a piece of viable policy. That is, while on the face of it an obvious answer to a shortage of housing might be to immediately try to cut the number of people seeking it – and the obvious answer there is migrants – things are actually a lot more complicated when you try to do that.
The Morrison government announced an almost identical cut in permanent migration numbers in the 2019 Budget, saying the “planning level of the Migration Program will be reduced from 190,000 to 160,000 places for four years from 2019-20”. The pandemic rather disrupted that plan.
But the very same 2019 budget papers were forecasting that net overseas migration would be 271,700 in 2019 before dropping to just 263,800 three years later in 2022, despite the cut of 30,000 permanent places a year.
A big reason for the fact that net overseas migration was not forecast to fall, despite the cut in the permanent number, is that more than half the people who are accepted as permanent migrants are already here when they apply. So cutting permanent migration doesn’t necessarily mean fewer people in, or coming to, the country. Some of the migration pool just changes “class”. Others are still able to come here on temporary visas.
There has also been confusion about whether the Coalition planned to cut the (relatively small) permanent migration number, or to cut back the much larger, demand-driven net overseas migration number, which includes programs that have no formal caps and includes overseas students.
Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor added to that confusion last week when he said the plan was to cut net overseas migration by 25 per cent, not just permanent migration. Mr Taylor also accused Labor of using migration to prop up the economy – and it is true that the post-pandemic surge in returning temporary visa holders has indeed played a crucial role in keeping a barely simmering economy from dropping into recession. But that raises the question of what happens if you cut migration as dramatically as the Coalition appears to want to do.
Discussions at writers’ festivals are much less formal and more free-flowing than a piece of analysis on an ABC platform and this was a format where adding detailed context to the discussion wasn’t really possible.
Panellist Niki Savva had quoted those points Mr Dutton had made about too many migrants meaning things like it was too hard to buy a house, get in to see your GP, or get into childcare, and noted that the Opposition Leader seemed to bring everything back to immigration.
In agreeing with that observation, based on Mr Dutton’s own quotes, I once again raised the risks for the political debate of a major political leader doing this, which I truncated as “everything that’s going wrong in this country is because of migrants”.
That was simply a result of trying to summarise a point in a much less structured forum and was not intended to imply he had said that verbatim. If I had been speaking on an ABC platform, or not in a five-way discussion, I would have provided all that context, as I do in my stories for the ABC.
I did indeed make the observation on Sunday that we are a racist country, in the context of a discussion about the political prospects ahead. I wasn’t saying every Australian is a racist. But we clearly have an issue with racism. For some months now, for example, The Australian newspaper has been devoting considerable space to its alarm about a rise in anti-Semitism in Australia.
Without even going into the historic record, there is also ample evidence that racism remains a particular problem in our legal and policing systems. A coronial inquest underway in the Northern Territory has become mired in an expose of racism in the NT’s elite policing unit. Racism and racial profiling repeatedly show up as an issue of concern in our policing and justice systems.
The morning radio news bulletins on the ABC on Monday featured several stories that were related to racism, including one about racial profiling of young South Sudanese men in a police presentation to public servants in Melbourne.
Surveys, including by the ABC, have repeatedly found the majority of Australians of non-European backgrounds reporting experiences of discrimination and racism in their lives, sometimes starting as early as primary school.
Is it relevant to raise this record of Australian racism in political analysis? Absolutely, if it becomes an issue of controversy in our political contest – as it clearly did when Pauline Hanson appeared on the national stage in 1996 and declared the country was being “swamped with Asians”. John Howard had similarly flirted with the issue of Asian immigration in the 1980s and Julia Gillard did too in 2013 when she used a speech on a visit to western Sydney to announce a clampdown on the issue of temporary skilled worker visas.
In my commentary at the ABC, and at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, I expressed my concern at the risks involved in Peter Dutton pressing the hot button of housing and linking it to migration for these reasons.
Political leaders, by their comments, give licence to others to express opinions they may not otherwise express.
That does not make them racist.
But it has real world implications for many Australians.
Finally, panellists were asked to nominate a positive change that had come from the change of government, on the basis of the famous quote that “when you change the government, you change the country”.
Not having the time in that setting to attempt a detailed and serious assessment of what has changed with the change of government, I made an off-hand observation that simply observed we now had fewer stunts like the “needles in strawberries” affair and that, whatever its failings, the current government seemed serious about policy.
I regret that when I was making these observations at the Writers’ Festival the nature of the free-flowing panel discussion means they were not surrounded by every quote substantiating them which would have – and had – been included in what I had said earlier on the ABC.
This has created the opportunity for yet another anti-ABC pile-on.
This is not helpful to me or to the ABC. Or to the national debate
I am proud of my work as a journalist at the ABC, on all its platforms, and I let that work speak for itself.
It is based, always, on solid research and a lifetime of experience reporting on Australian politics.
That work is built on, and delivered in, the framework of the ABC’s very high editorial standards.
