An underlying British-Australia cultural egotism surfaces repeatedly in Katharine Betts's book, The Great Divide: Immigration Politics in Australia (Duffy and Snellgrove, Sydney, 1999). Her ingenious use of the notion of “markers” in relation to the so called “new class” is very revealing. In her view, implacable hostility to racism, and any sympathy with multiculturalism are evidence either of membership of the “new class”, or “special interests”, by reason of NESB background.
She also indicts her so-called new class for an “anti-national” animosity towards wars and militarism, and associates this anti-militarism with “new class” attitudes on racism and migration. I find this construction extremely curious, as I'm told Ms Betts is herself a Quaker.
I wonder what Ms Betts makes of the almost total transformation of the bulk of the “new class” including myself, into advocates of immediate military action to protect the people of East Timor against the vicious Indonesian army.
I reject celebration of the imperialist bloodbath of the First World War. I spent the most useful part of my life campaigning against the Vietnam War and I take none of that back. Nevertheless, I strongly favour the recent Australian military intervention in East Timor, much to the chagrin of the right-wing populist P.P. McGuinness. (McGuinness and I always seem to be on opposite sides, and this pleases me. On the odd occasion when I've agreed with McGuinness, I very carefully examine my reasoning to see where I've gone wrong.)
Curiously, Sydney postmodern theorist Ghassan Hage, who expresses an ostensibly leftist opposition to existing multiculturalism in his exotic book White Nation, actually shares Betts's methodology, in that he develops his own version of the inaccurate “new class” theory.
What an implacably British-Australia chauvinist construction Katharine Betts's use of new class rhetoric really is. It has no appeal at all for me, given my largely Irish Catholic background, and it's not likely to appeal to any social group other than a rapidly declining Anglo upper-class. The industrial working class is largely of NESB background. The nudging 20 per cent of the population who now have degrees, and the 700,000 students are, by definition, infected by this “rampant cosmopolitanism”. The audience for Betts's now slightly eccentric “new class” theory is really quite small, and declining all the time.
The most coherent, energetic and persistent anti-migrationists are the group around Robert Birrell and Katharine Betts at Monash University, who tend to make the ideological running for most other opponents of migration.
The really rabid xenophobes, such as Pauline Hanson, feed off their arguments. The Monash group has two quite contradictory lines in relation to the economic effects of migration.
One line of argument, which they share with people such as Ted Trainer, is a general, currently rather popular, polemic against the whole idea of economic growth. They argue that economic growth, which migration fuels, is bad for us.
Well, there's a tiny element of truth in this line of argument. Some economic growth is bad and should be fought on a case by case basis. For instance, woodchipping of old growth forests is quite antipathetic to the interests of the human race and the environment. Much economic growth, however, while it should be made more civilised and reorganised in a rational way, is desirable from the point of view of most humans on the planet, who don't yet have sufficient access to all kinds of material goods to make their life better.
The arguments of deep ecologists such as Ted Trainer against all economic growth are, in practice, hostile to the aspirations of most human beings for substantial improvements to their conditions of life. The use of this kind of argument by comfortable, affluent anti-migration academics in a rich, first-world country such as Australia is thoroughly repellant, and I'm fascinated that the Monash group has used that kind of argument in the six or seven books that I've collected of their published work, as far back as 1977.
The other main line of argument is more or less the opposite of the first one. It is that migration is bad for the economy because it diverts resources from unstated better uses to the construction of infrastructure for the migrants, and that much of this labour is used in a manufacturing economy that is being scaled down anyway because of globalisation and the destruction of tariff barriers (which the Monash group explicitly applauds).
They even argue that a bad feature of migration is that some resources are diverted to infrastructure for the new migrants, reducing the average productivity of labour. Nevertheless, interests such as the housing industry and manufacturing capitalists that want to sell their goods, are attacked for having a vested interest in migration.
Viewed in any sensible or even-handed way, these economic attacks on migration tend to undermine and contradict each other, but for these people anything goes in the war against migration. As one line of economic their argument after another is demolished by changing circumstances (almost none of their economic predictions in relation to migration have eventuated) the Birrell group works very hard to come up with a new economic angle against migration.
There is now a fairly considerable body of concrete analysis and description of the economic effects of migration, the most recent example of which is the work of Bruce Chapman in Canberra. The general conclusion of almost all economists, conservative or left-wing, with a few exceptions, is that migration is either more or less neutral in relation to economic effects or, in most circumstances, a positive stimulus to economic development and a positive factor in reducing unemployment.
Empirically, this would certainly seem to be the case. Cities in Australia such as Sydney, Brisbane and Perth, which are hot-spots for migration, are also at the lower end of the unemployment statistics. Cities such as Melbourne, Newcastle, Adelaide and Hobart, which are stagnant as far as recent migration is concerned, are at the higher end of the unemployment statistics.
There is another subtle economic point about substantial, diverse migration. One of the factors that helped Australia get the Olympic Games was the presence in Australia of substantial migrant communities from almost everywhere on earth, and the Games will give Australia a considerable economic boost, both before and after, for obvious reasons.
A similar point applies to trade, particularly with Asia. The presence of energetic trading communities from different countries contributes to trade with those countries. Again, a number of firms trading mainly in Asia have chosen to use Sydney as a location for their call centres and card centres because Sydney has a large reservoir of skilled labour speaking and writing just about every language on earth.
The anti-immigrationists make three main appeals. One is to the perceived latent resentment of Anglo-Australians against changes to the ethnic and cultural mix of Australia. This line of argument is essentially an appeal to cultural ativism.
It is usually there in the arguments, but it is often veiled a bit to avoid offending the more civilised Australians. At the popular level, talkback radio hosts, and the One Nation bunch exploit this perceived ativism mercilessly. At a theoretical level people such as Miriam Dixson and Paul Sheehan implicitly invoke this perceived feeling while ostensibly deploring it.
The second line of argument is that migration is economically bad for Australia. That argument is unsustainable and I've dealt with it above.
The third argument is much more powerful and potent these days, even with many people who are opposed to overt racism, and regard themselves as civilised. It is expressed in the viewpoint of the organization called Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Society and in the political outlook of the conservative electoral formation, the Australian Democrats, who advocate zero net immigration.
The best-known popular advocates of this point of view are Tim Flannery, author of The Future Eaters and his disciple Paul Sheehan, author of Amongst the Barbarians. Other people who write about these questions and claim some expertise in the field, are the poet Mark O'Conner, the CSIRO scientist Doug Cocks, Ted Trainer the deep ecologist, the Birrell supporters and Katharine Betts.
Their essential argument is that Australia is a supremely eroded, overwhelmingly arid continent, that we are already overpopulated, and that if our present rate of population growth, the historically general 1.5 per cent to 2 per cent annually that has been the case over most of our history, continues further, disasters will develop in the not-too-distant future.
In one article, Flannery advances the argument that we should reduce the population from 19 million to 12 million. One wonders whether that includes an offer of voluntary euthanasia on his part! This line of argument involves a very considerable virtuosity with statistics.
Cocks and Flannery, who attempt occasionally to quantify their views, toss around various figures for arable land available in Australia. They appear to concede that most estimates of available arable land, made by people who know something about the subject, show that there are still vast areas of unused arable land in Australia.
Nevertheless, they manage, by ingenious manipulation of the figures to argue that this is really not significant, because the arable land is in Northern Australia, the water is in Northern Australia and we should be ultra-cautious. They continually express animosity to agriculture, which seems to be the hallmark of quite a few modern pseudo-geographers and pseudo-anthropologists.
There is a whole school developing of semi-scientific popular journalism devoted to the argument that agriculture is destroying humanity. Flannery even argues that it would be a good idea to make a large part of Australia into an enormous ecological theme park, finding large mammals from overseas to replace the diptodron in the ecological niche that it used to occupy about 10,000 years ago. Flannery often seems to prefer animals to humans. I disagree with this approach.
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