Elizabeth Watson-Brown (Ryan, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to debate the question of immigration in Australia. People are not wrong to look for someone to blame for the considerable squeeze and stress we've all felt over the last few years. People aren't wrong to want to live in a peaceful and harmonious community, and they want to know why it feels less and less like we live in one. At face value, I can understand why people might look at immigration and assume that's where the problem lies. I disagree, of course, and I'm going to get into why. Before I do, I want to say that I feel like this conversation can get very heated from all sides, and it's not helpful to anyone if you go around calling everyone woke or racist all the time. I want to deal with this in a measured way.

They say that facts don't persuade anyone these days, but I have a fundamental belief in the intelligence of the Australian people, so I figure I'll give it a shot. The fact of the matter is that immigration is simply not the cause of our current ills. Take housing—if immigration were really causing the housing crisis, how do we explain the fact that house prices shot up astronomically during the COVID period, when we actually had net negative immigration? Over the last 10 years, the population has increased by 16 per cent, and the number of dwellings has increased by 19 per cent. We're building more homes than there is growth in population, yet prices keep rising. The fact that Labor and the Liberals have rigged our housing system in favour of property investors and the banks is the cause of this terrible situation.

Let's look at the cost of living. How can we honestly say that Coles and Woolies are putting up their prices because of immigration—or insurance companies or energy corporations? Studies by the OECD and the Australia Institute show that around 50 per cent of inflation in recent years has been caused by corporate price gouging, largely a result of monopolised and unregulated industries. For those worried about the environment, immigration, again, is not the cause of the lack of regulation on wasteful plastic production, the lack of regulation on damaging suburban sprawl, the lack of regulation on native forest logging.

It is true that our roads are clogged. Our services are struggling. You could say that we've had too many people come into this country, or you could simply point out that our major parties have abysmally failed to plan for growing populations and build the public transport, the hospitals, the schools, the public space that we all need.

It should be pretty clear by now that there is someone to blame for how much harder life is becoming for so many in this country, and it's Labor and the Liberals and their decades-long bipartisan commitment to deregulation, privatisation and tax breaks for huge corporations and the ultrawealthy. While these corporations and billionaires have plundered much of the country and while Labor and the Liberals have squandered our wealth, migrants work hard, build community and enrich our society. No-one's saying we should simply throw the borders open. Maybe in some distant future humanity will be able to live entirely without national borders. Who knows? In the meantime, we need some controls; we need some balance.

The member for Kennedy's statement takes people's legitimate concerns down a dark, distracting and dangerous path, one that renders us all weaker in the face of corporate dominance, since we forget who really has power in this situation—one that makes us more suspicious, less connected to our communities and more anxious, not more peaceful, not more at ease. More to the point, politicians talk about social cohesion, but they never put two and two together. Social cohesion is fundamentally undermined by ballooning wealth inequality.

Ultimately, I think, when we talk about curtailing immigration, we are really talking about wanting to take back control of this country. I couldn't agree more, but let's do that together—let's do it all together. Whatever your country of origin, whatever your religion, we ought to take back the country we call home from the lobbyists, from the moneyed interests, from the big corporations, from a political class that has proved so thoroughly incapable of tackling the major problems we face today.

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