Over the last decade, we have experienced little improvement in productivity in Australia – that may be unexciting news to many, but improving productivity is key to the country’s ongoing prosperity. Most laymen would think that technological improvements over the last decade would have inevitably produced some dividend in terms of productivity, but that seems not to have been the case. Productivity is linked to investments in plant and equipment that improve the ability of economic units to produce more per unit of labour input, and business investment over the period has been relatively weak.
Unfortunately, we may be seeing Just one of other dis-benefits of a high immigration policy. Both politicians and businesses are hooked on high migration – the first group because it keeps economy growing whatever mistakes they make, if not in per capita terms, and the latter because it keeps the number of customers growing, salaries lower and allows them to run lazy businesses profitably. It is also palpably clear that the government doesn’t have a firm handle on migration policy, the area is just too complex and replete with loopholes, and both sides of politics appear to be overly leveraged to a small selection of electorates with high migrant levels – and limited in their ability to introduce significant reforms which would, for example, ensure that “temporary residents” are really temporary and must leave, severely limit the ability of family members to join permanent residents or citizens and just simply improve the simplicity and transparency of the whole visa system.
Politically, we need to avoid a situation where genuine concerns over migration – which many feel they cant express because of concerns they would be accused of religious or racist discrimination – lead to the public overreacting anonymously at the ballot box – as we saw in the US.
