See, earlier: An Australian Reader Says Australia, Guarded By Unwadeable Seas, Needs To Up Its Airport Screening Game

From: Phil Shannon [Email him]

"Care for some rat poison?  How about some immigration, or some ‘diversity’?  Er ….. now that you ask, no thanks!"

The latest annual survey [A Big Australia—Why it may be all over] of Australian voters' attitudes  to  population growth finds that 72% of them say Australia does not need more people while 50% want immigration reduced (see commentary in Sustainable Population Australia Newsletter 141).

A majority of voters believe that Australia’s high immigration rate (which drives two thirds of the country’s annual population growth) is responsible for the deterioration of the quality of life in our big cities and of the natural environment whilst less than a third accept the elites’ economic case for high immigration viz to ensure economic growth.  Whilst aggregate GDP thrives on high immigration, it is per-capita GDP  and real wage growth—the practical measures of living standards for your average Bruce and Sharon—that have atrophied because of high immigration, say the researchers.

The survey also dares to tread on the sacrosanct area of “ethnic and cultural diversity”, a moralistic incantation that is used by political and cultural leaders to ring-fence immigration from criticism.  At least half the electorate “do not support the progressive cultural values that left elites regard as legitimating high immigration”.

You could probably add an extra 20 or so percentage points to the immigration-skeptical and diversity-averse majority of Australians, as Patrick McDermott has documented on  VDARE.com  (here and here) on how “social desirability bias” suppresses truth-telling in surveys on “racially sensitive” topics.

Non-white immigration is just such a topic.  Australia’s historical seed-stock, immigrants from the UK, Ireland and Europe, now account for just 5% of total immigration whilst Asia now rules the immigration roost with 72% of the total annual foreign intake, with the Middle East and North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa, gaining speed.  Australians of Anglo-Irish and European ancestry aren’t at all happy about this.  Only 29% of all Australians agree that “we need more people to increase our cultural diversity” whilst a majority (53%) think that “cultural diversity is a threat to Australia’s own culture and identity”.  Adjust as appropriate for social desirability bias and the unpopularity of immigration and diversity is pretty clear.

On the other hand, the people that matter (corporate cheap foreign labour types and the politicians in financial and ideological sync with them) are besotted with “a Big Australia” and its “commitment to an open, globalised economy, featuring progressive cultural values and high immigration”.

So, too, are their strange new class allies, graduates.  Degree-holders, says the survey, can’t get enough immigration and diversity, the non-whiter the better.  The graduate 25% of the Australian population contains almost all of Australia’s woke liberals, all bred from that academic petri dish for wokeness, the universities (also big fans of immigration’s full-fee-paying foreign students).

If the blood-thinning medication trading under the name of Warfarin was called by its base ingredient—rat poison—no one except a lunatic would go near it.  So, too, if “a Big Australia” and “Diversity” were marketed under their actual ingredients of job-stealing, wage-sinking, welfare-sponging, traffic-clogging, nature-degrading, Open-Borders globalism and the death of Australian national identity and culture, then no one except a lunatic, or, as this survey shows, a woke liberal, would want to have a bar of it.

Phil Shannon is a veteran Australian (of Irish and French stock) working class socialist and latter-day VDARE.com supporter.See earlier letters from him here.