Even more curious

There have been some more immigration sceptical articles published in the left-wing Fairfax press. One concerns immigration fraud:

Hundreds of pages of leaked confidential departmental documents obtained by Fairfax Media reveal that Australia's national security is being compromised by wide-scale visa rorting and migration rackets operating with impunity, including some with links to terrorism or organised crime.

Secret departmental operations have estimated that as many as nine in 10 skilled migrant visas may be fraudulent, while an internal inquiry into Afghan visa applicants in 2012 assessed that more than 90 per cent of cases contained "fraud of some type" and raised "people smuggling, identity fraud, suspected child trafficking and national security implications".

Also, a 2010 report reveals that immigration investigators had uncovered a Somali people-smuggling cell in Melbourne linked to terrorist suspect Hussein Hashi Farah, who "is believed to have links to the al-Qaeda offshoot al-Shabab" and who fled Kenyan counterterrorism officials using an Australian passport in 2010.

The other is by businessman Dick Smith pointing out that endless population growth is likely to affect living standards negatively:

Mr Smith said, left unchecked, Australia's population would hit “80 to 100 million by the end of the century if we keep growing”.

He said that kind of perpetual growth would only serve wealthy Australians, while the majority of the population would suffer a decline in living conditions and be worse off.

“The cake is a certain size, mainly coming from our mineral reserves and our primary production from farming, and double the population, I believe everyone's worth half as much,” he said.

Again, interesting that this is happening at Fairfax.

The BBC debate 1

It's no wonder that the Western countries are in such trouble when you consider the shallow ideas that dominate the minds of our intellectuals.

John Derbyshire has a report up at Vdare about a debate on immigration that took place on BBC radio. The positions taken by the participants were as disappointing as they were predictable.

Why predictable? There is a growing consensus amongst liberals of all stripes that the point of life is to be self-made, particularly in the market. If you believe this, then you will see economic migrants as the ideal sort of person, since they are the ones who take the most initiative to be self-made in this way.

One of the panellists on the BBC debate was Claire Fox, who is the director of the Institute of Ideas. This is what she had to say on immigration:

So I believe in freedom of movement and therefore open the borders, but I suppose morally my main thing is that, being human, one of the most inspiring things about it is that you can make yourself not accept your fate and create your own destiny. And in that sense the immigrant is an ideal moral figure, and could be seen to embody it. So that's what I find inspiring.

Isn't that a revealing statement? She is saying that what defines us as a human is that we are autonomous in the sense of being self-determining or self-defining. That's step one in the thought process. But how do we self-define? To be consistent, we can only self-define in some area of life that we can pursue as individuals, such as career, travel, lifestyle, hobbies and so on. Career is the weightiest of these, so liberals tend to put most of their eggs in this basket. So what it all boils down to in the end, for a liberal, is being self-made in your career and economic status.

An economic migrant goes to all the trouble to uproot himself in order to make himself in the market and so he becomes for the average liberal "an ideal moral figure."

The mistake made by liberals like Claire Fox is to think of human life in terms of a detached self-making. We are supposed to make our lives as abstracted individuals, as this abstraction is supposed to give us the greatest freedom to self-create.

But we are not detached or abstracted selves. When we make our lives we do so as created beings with given natures. Freedom means a liberty to unfold (or fulfil) the best within these given natures.

And we do that best within natural forms of community, such as family, tribe and nation. This is particularly true for men, as our masculine talents are especially directed toward our roles in upholding these forms of human community.

In arguing for a borderless world, liberals are not adding to but are taking away from our freedom to creatively unfold ourselves as individuals. They are dissolving the longstanding communities within which such creative self-expression best takes place.

There were also some arguments relating to Christianity mentioned in the BBC debate, but I'll leave these to the next post.

Is this Catholicism or liberalism?

The Catholic Archbishop of Los Angeles, Jose Gomez, has given a speech urging American Catholics to support the legalisation of millions of illegal immigrants.

What is particularly disturbing about the speech is that it is framed almost entirely within a political liberalism.

The archbishop breezily advocated the creation of a new America via immigration:

“Immigration,” he emphasized, “is a question about America.”

During his remarks, Archbishop Gomez addressed the root of the immigration debate by asking the questions that underlie the issue: “What does it mean to be an American? Who are we as a people and where are we heading as a country? What will the 'next America' look like?”

“What should the next America look like?”

Talk about a fast and loose attitude. There is no concern at all for upholding a people and a tradition, just a casual embrace of change from one America to the next.

Can such a fast and loose attitude really be confined to issues of national identity? If you're willing to throw out your nation this casually, then why not change your church or religion while you're at it. Why not ask "What should the next religion look like?"

To put this another way, most people don't compartmentalise the different strands of their own tradition. If we value our tradition, and see the good in it, and want to uphold it, then we are likely to want to hold to the different aspects of it, including our national identity and the religion associated with it.

But Archbishop Gomez wants us to be so careless of our tradition that we will throw away our national identity in favour of the next one - whilst still caring about the fate of the historic Western religion. He advocates that we adopt an attitude that is both careless and caring - a contradictory impulse that is unlikely to hold.

The archbishop then appealed to a liberal civic nationalism:

The archbishop noted G. K. Chesterton's comment that the U.S. is the only nation founded not on a material basis such as territory or race, but on a belief – a vision.

The Founding Fathers – the writers of the Declaration of Independence – envisioned a nation “where men and women from every race, religion and national background could live in equality.”

But these days all the Western nations hold to a liberal civic nationalism. It is not distinct at all - it makes America no different to Australia or Sweden or Canada. It is a mere pretence that such a nationalism makes America unique.

And here's another problem with basing a national identity on liberal values of equality and non-discrimination. Because every traditional society did discriminate in order to uphold its particularity, then they all failed the test of these values. Therefore, the past is looked on negatively in terms of how morally tainted it was. The archbishop himself has adopted this liberal mindset. He said,

The American Dream has always been “a work in progress...not fully delivered,” Archbishop Gomez told his listeners. Slavery, nativism, and race discrimination have always been blights upon that dream, the reality of which has been both “painful and partial.”

How can you maintain a sense of continuity and a love of tradition if you adopt this liberal understanding of what a nation should be? What does it mean if the word you use to describe the history of your tradition is "painful"?

And how would the church fare if it were held to the same standards? Should American Catholics turn their backs to the historic church because the church discriminated to maintain its sense of itself and of the good that it embodied? After all, the church did not ordain women. It discriminated against homosexuality. It did not see polygamy as being equal to monogamy. You might argue that the church would not be the church if it accepted everything as being equal; that, in fact, it would be pointless to have a church that accepted everything as equal - that it would no longer be meaningfully a church. And you would be right. But the same thing can be said of a nation. If a nation is universal then can it really be a nation?

Which brings me to a final point. Archbishop Gomez peppers his speech with appeals to liberal moral terms, such as diversity and anti-discrimination. This is unfortunate as these are the very moral concepts that are likely to increasingly impact on the church itself in America.

Why? These concepts derive from a liberal idea that what can be truly and definitively known about individuals are their wants and desires. These wants and desires therefore constitute the good that individuals seek, and so what matters is that they can be pursued equally without impediment. Therefore, if there is a morality, it is based on qualities of non-interference, i.e. on concepts of individual rights, of tolerance, inclusion and non-discrimination.

And so when the Catholic Church makes a different kind of moral pronouncement, one based on the idea that something is inherently right and wrong, and that it is so for all people (a non-relativist moral position) it is condemned by liberals as fundamentalist. What is more, it is thought to be judgemental and to violate principle of inclusiveness.

In a liberal morality, for instance, it makes no sense at all to oppose the idea of gay marriage. If that is what people want to do, then to respect their expression of desire equally means allowing them to do what they wish to do. It would be thought mere bigotry or a phobia or prejudice or discrimination to think otherwise. So why shouldn't the church be forced to agree to gay marriage or else face legal sanctions? If, that is, such a liberal morality really is legitimate.

But if it's not legitimate the church should not be using it to justify amnesty for illegal immigrants. It is a dangerous thing for the church to be supporting the use of liberal moral concepts when it wishes to do so, but then to suddenly swing around and object when these concepts are used against the church itself.

German cardinal: we are a dying people

How's this for a coincidence. A few days ago I wrote about the decision of a former Archbishop of Cologne to build the Neviges cathedral in a modernist style.

Now it's the current Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Meisner, who is in the news. He has criticised the German Government's family and immigration policies in a courageous way.

Read on, because you don't often hear figures in positions of authority speaking out like this. It began when a journalist challenged the Cardinal on his opposition to abortion. He replied:

We are a dying people, but have a perfect legislation for abortion. Is that not the suicide of a society? People want most of all to shut women out of families so that production continues. But with money alone you can't get children.

He was then asked if he was against formal child care:

No, but it would be better for society to create a climate in which women bring more children into the world. That is to say: to bring to awareness the high worth of the family with a mother and father for the children.

He went on to talk about his experiences in communist East Germany:

I have already been part of the whole one-sided tragedy in East Germany. The women there, who stayed home for the family, were told they were demented. Because labour forces were needed childcare was brought in. A socialist educator said of this: "The creche (the "child crib") is in the Bible a temporary thing and we have made of it a permanent institution."

The interviewer then objected "But women want to self-actualise in a career." The Cardinal replied:

Not all. Where are women really publicly encouraged to stay at home and to bring three or four children into the world? One should intervene here and not - as Mrs Merkel does currently - only present immigration as the solution to our demographic problem. We cannot take the young people away from Portugal and Spain and thus rob their countries of their future just out of selfishness. We should train these unemployed people and offer them perspectives, but then allow them to return home where they are needed.

What's impressive here is that the Cardinal has recognised a need for the German people to survive into the future by being encouraged to have children of their own rather than relying on taking the youth of other nations. He wants the family as an institution to be accorded value and not just the market.

It turns out that the Cardinal has also (unsuccessfully) taken a stand on cathedral design. Back in 2007 the artist Gerhard Richter completed a new stained glass window for the historic Cologne Cathedral. Richter based his design on his trademark "random pixel" paintings (randomly computer-arranged coloured pixels).

I haven't seen the window personally, but I would have thought that art in a cathedral should attempt to be inspired rather than randomly generated:

Gerhard Richter's stained glass window in the Cologne Cathedral

Maybe it looks better when you're there, but from the photo I'd have to say that Cardinal Meisner was correct in thinking that this doesn't work as religious art (the colours fit, but it comes across as chaotic).

Cameron against open borders?

British PM David Cameron has given a major speech on immigration. The gist of it is that he wants to bring immigration levels back under control and to focus on those who are likely to contribute to the British economy.

The speech is worth reading, if only because Cameron details some of the rorts in the system. Parts of the speech I found most interesting include these excerpts:

...there's no doubt that badly controlled immigration has compounded the failure of our welfare system and allowed governments and employers to carry on with the waste of people stuck on welfare when they should be working.

...the very term "Points Based System" has proved to be misleading. The rhetoric implies that each and every potential migrant is carefully and individually assessed with only those scoring the most points able to enter the country. But the reality was very different. Instead of a system of points for individuals there were a range of low minimum thresholds where anyone who met them was automatically entitled to come, almost on a self-selection basis, to work and study and in many cases bring dependants.

...The reality was that someone with a modest salary and a Bachelor's degree in any subject from any college in the world could come over here and do any job they liked. And of course the system was a magnet for fraudsters. Plenty never found work at all. One study showed that about a third of those sampled only found low skilled roles working as shop assistants, in takeaways and as security guards.

...Take the next tier - Tier 2, for migrants coming here who actually did have job offers. Large numbers of this group were actually coming to do low-level work which many people have rightly felt those on welfare should be trained for but which instead went to migrants.

...It's a system where migrants got the choice to come, rather than us having the choice of migrants. And it's a system which was totally unfair which people rightly feel added to the sense that "something for nothing" was the order of the day.

...In April we introduced a limit on the number of economic migrants able to come to the UK from outside the European Economic Area. Many predicted that this wouldn't work and that it would stop British businesses getting the workers they need. But the evidence shows this just hasn't been the case. That limit of 20,700 for the year - has been undersubscribed each and every month since it was introduced with businesses currently using less than half of their monthly quotas.

...around two-thirds of the increase in employment since 1997, was accounted for by foreign-born workers. Even now people are managing to come to the UK and find a job. Yet throughout all of those years we consistently had between 4 and 5 million people on out of work benefits. You can understand it from the employer's point of view. Confronted by a failing welfare system, shortcomings in our education system and an open door immigration system they can choose between a disillusioned and demotivated person on benefits here in the UK or an Eastern European with the get up and go to come across a continent to find work. Or they can choose between an inexperienced school leaver here or someone five years older coming to Britain with the experience they need. But that situation is simply not good enough. We have to change things.

...when it comes to bogus colleges and bogus students we have to be equally clear: they have no place in our country. In June last year in New Delhi, for example, more than a third of student applications verified by the visa section were found to contain forged documents. Private colleges now have to face far more rigorous checks on the quality of their education provision before they can sponsor international students. Since May 2010 the UK Border Agency has revoked the licences of 97 education providers. A further 36 currently have their licences suspended.

...A sample of more than 500 family migration cases found that over 70 per cent of UK-based sponsors had post-tax earnings of less than £20,000 a year. When the income level of the sponsor is this low, there is an obvious risk that the migrants and their family will become a significant burden on the welfare system and the taxpayer. So we have asked the Migration Advisory Committee to look at the case for increasing the minimum level for appropriate maintenance.

...We're also consulting on how to tackle abuse of the system, to make sure that family migrants who come here are in a genuine relationship with their partner. Time and again, visa officers receive applications from spouses or partners sponsoring another spouse or partner soon after being granted settlement in the UK suggesting that the original marriage or partnership was a sham simply designed to get them permanent residence here.

...If we take the steps set out today and deal with the all the different avenues of migration, legal and illegal then levels of immigration can return to where they were in the 1980s and 90s - a time when immigration was not a front rank political issue. And I believe that will mean net migration to this country will be in the order of tens of thousands each year, not the hundreds of thousands every year that we have seen over the last decade.

Cameron seems to be genuinely set against open borders. Why the break with open borders orthodoxy?

There are several possibilities. He might, for instance, be trying to win back ground from the BNP. It could be, too, that this is part of his concern about "Broken Britain" - that he doesn't want the further growth of an unemployed underclass.

Right-liberals are often focused on economic criteria, and it might be that Cameron believes it is more economically rational to orient immigration to those who are going to contribute most economically; he does in his speech talk about "getting the right people we need for our economy".

So arguments about the economy and social cohesion seem to have led him to reject an uncontrolled, open borders approach to immigration.

Most of Cameron's policies so far have been disappointingly liberal, but it could be that he does present a genuine alternative to the Labour Party on this important issue. The real test will be whether he really can bring immigration numbers down to the levels of the 1980s.

Let's not get too nostalgic for Rudd

It's a year since Julia Gillard replaced Kevin Rudd as Australian PM. Gillard has very low popularity ratings and the press is beginning to talk about a Rudd comeback:

Voters in key marginal seats have forgiven Kevin Rudd and are clamouring for him to return to the Labor leadership.

I do understand Gillard's unpopularity. She is proposing a carbon tax at a time when many families are already having to cope with rising costs. But Rudd? He was the guy who sent immigration levels to a record high.

In 2008 under Kevin Rudd net migration hit 316,000. Given that there are usually around 80,000 departures, that means that even on official figures there were about 400,000 arrivals. That's an enormous number of arrivals for a country with Australia's population: it would be the equivalent of about 5,500,000 arrivals in the USA in single year.

It led to a welcome backlash with both the Labor and Liberal parties backing away from Rudd's commitment to a "big Australia". And the Labor Party under Gillard does seem to have drawn the figures back down a little, with net migration being cut to 171,000 in 2010 - which, if I remember correctly, is exactly the figure Tony Abbott promised the Liberal Party would cut the number to.

So whatever Gillard's failings, I wouldn't be in too much of a hurry to turn back to Kevin Rudd.

Blue Labour: a step forward?

From the Daily Mail:

A close ally of Ed Miliband has attacked Labour for ‘lying’ about immigration.

Lord Glasman – a leading academic and personal friend of the Labour leader – said that the previous Labour government had used mass immigration to control wages.

In an article for Progress magazine, the Labour peer wrote: ‘Labour lied to people about the extent of immigration...and there’s been a massive rupture of trust.’

Labour let in 2.2million migrants during its 13 years in power – more than twice the population of Birmingham.

Maurice Glasman was promoted to the House of Lords by Mr Miliband earlier this year. He has been dubbed the Labour leader’s ‘de facto chief of staff’ by party insiders and has written speeches for him.

Lord Glasman, 49, had already told BBC Radio 4 recently: ‘What you have with immigration is the idea that people should travel all over the world in search of higher-paying jobs, often to undercut existing workforces, and somehow in the Labour Party we got into a position that that was a good thing.

‘Now obviously it undermines solidarity, it undermines relationships, and in the scale that it’s been going on in England, it can undermine the possibility of politics entirely.’

The academic, who directs the faith and citizenship programme at London Metropolitan University, criticised Labour for being ‘hostile to the English working class’.

He said: ‘In many ways [Labour] viewed working-class voters as an obstacle to progress.

‘Their commitment to various civil rights, anti-racism, meant that often working-class voters... were seen as racist, resistant to change, homophobic and generally reactionary.

‘So in many ways you had a terrible situation where a Labour government was hostile to the English working class.’

I'm impressed. Here we have someone associated with the Labour Party leadership in the UK speaking very openly and clearly about the negative consequences of large-scale immigration, including the effects on wages and social cohesion.

I was sufficiently intrigued to do a search on Lord Glasman. It turns out that he is an intellectual figure who promotes a politics he calls "Blue Labour" - meaning a more conservative version of Labour Party politics.

If I understand correctly, Glasman dislikes a model of society in which people behave passively as individuals, whilst their lives are organised by unconstrained market forces and by the state. He seems to understand that people form a sense of community, at least in part, through local associations and traditions and he wants these to be defended.

Here are some quotes to give you a sense of what Glasman means by "Blue Labour":

Glasman describes Blue Labour as "a deeply conservative socialism that places family, faith and work at the heart of a new politics of reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity"...

"Society as a functioning moral entity has, in effect, disappeared."

Glasman says a Blue Labour party needs to reform around the family, faith and work, and place..

Then there's this:

He wants to foster a "Labour big society" based on ideas of "family, faith and the flag" and nurtured through cherished local institutions – everything from churches to post offices, banks, hospitals, schools and football clubs.

He reels off long lists of academics and political thinkers, from Aristotle to the lesser-known Hungarian intellectual Karl Polanyi, as influences. The latter, he says, taught him that capitalism, though a force for good if controlled, could also be a menace if not. Labour now had to "rediscover" the need to tame the markets as part of its mission to make individuals feel valuable again.

He objects to the idea that it was New Labour that was the problem – arguing that the party started leaving people like his mother behind after 1945, when the National Health Service and the welfare state were created. It gradually became elitist, managerial, bureaucratic in its style and thinking. Socialism became statism. Labour became "nasty".

"It became cynical because it was about a certain view of what was realistic; it was moralistic in the sense that if you did not agree with their discourse you were opposing progress. It was disempowering because of its administrative form. It was hostile to human association because it was about every individual entitlement, not people doing things together."

The nadir came in the ghastly encounter between Gordon Brown and Labour supporter Gillian Duffy on the campaign trail in Rochdale last May, when the prime minister angrily dismissed Duffy's views on immigration as "bigoted". Glasman believes Brown's dismissal of Duffy summed up Labour's internal crisis. "Labour had reached a situation under Brown where most of the people in the party hated one another and they hated people outside the party too."

He says Cameron's "big society" is in thrall to a free-market philosophy that leaves communities and individuals at the mercy of forces that respect profit far more than tradition, custom and a sense of place. The "blue" in "Blue Labour" comes from a conservative conviction that market forces, unconstrained, play havoc with the fabric of people's lives. It is the Labour party's task and vocation to provide a "countervailing force" protecting communities against wealthy, powerful interests.

And here's a really interesting quote from Glasman about the two previous Labour leaders:

Brown ended up defending the state, Blair ended up defending the market, and there was no concept of society

So is Glasman a step forward? I think so. It's not that Glasman is articulating an especially deep version of traditionalism. But he does recognise the corrosive nature of modern liberal managerial societies, and he's right too that capitalism can be a force for good but only if the power of the market is intelligently harnessed to serve social ends.

I suppose the danger is that a future Labour government might use Glasman as camouflage, by talking about family, faith and flag whilst continuing with the same radically liberal philosophy and policies. But Glasman himself, if his forthright comments on immigration are any indication, seems sincere about the idea of Blue Labour.

At any rate, it's an interesting development to keep an eye on.

Hawke: we should admire illegals

You wouldn't want Bob Hawke protecting your borders. The former Labor PM had this to say on the issue of illegal arrivals:

He also said there was no way to "stop the boats" as Mr Abbott had promised.

"We’re all bloody boat people," Mr Hawke said. "That’s how we found the place."

Mr Hawke said he understood the frustration of many voters at "queue jumpers", but said "we have to look at the other side of the coin".

He said the Coalition’s approach to the boat people question was "nonsense".

"We cannot turn the boats back," Mr Hawke said.

"These people have got initiative, guts and courage and Australia needs people like that."

The last bit is interesting. Those who are politically liberal, like Hawke, often see illegal immigrants in very positive terms, as showing ideal qualities. Why would they do this?

It goes back to the basic liberal world view. Let's say you believe that what matters is living an autonomous life. Who are you likely to think best represents this ideal? The Westerner who follows lawfully his own inherited culture and way of life or the Middle-Easterner who flies to Indonesia and pays a people smuggler to land him on Australian territory in order to enjoy the benefits of an Australian lifestyle?

The Middle-Easterner might well seem to better fit the liberal ideal. After all, he has done two things that make him fit the ideal of autonomy. First, he has acted to self-determine his life circumstances in a way that the loyal Westerner has not - he has dared to break the law and travel the seas to do so. Second, he has chosen "rationally" (in the liberal scheme of things) to enhance his autonomy by shifting to a more prosperous Western democratic country, where he will have more resources to pursue his individually chosen autonomous lifestyle.

So to the liberal mind, even though the illegal has jumped the queue, there's likely to be a respect toward him for doing so. He is acting in an ideal way compared to the ordinary citizen.

Most people don't think this way, as they don't share the underlying liberal philosophy. For traditionalists, it is not only autonomy that matters. Our membership of a common tradition, one based on kinship, language, history, religion and culture also matters. So for us, open borders are not to be welcomed and those who illegally cross borders for lifestyle purposes are not to be admired. We are more likely to look up to those who loyally contribute to a tradition they belong to or one that they can realistically assimilate to.

There's one other issue worth raising here. Liberals like Hawke think that autonomy is the key good and that there's more of it on offer in Australia than elsewhere. But if autonomy is what fundamentally makes us human, how can they bear the inequality of Australians having more autonomy than others?

They can't easily do so, which is one reason they are committed to programmes of mass immigration.

I'll put this another way. Let's say you believe that autonomy as the key human good must be distributed as equally as possible. Therefore, it should be distributed equally among the citizens of the state. But on what grounds should it not be distributed equally as well to non-citizens? What justification can be made for limiting equal distribution to citizens?

Liberals really struggle with this. Hawke himself once suggested that you could morally distinguish an Australian citizen from a non-citizen by the fact that the Australian citizen contributed taxes whereas the non-citizen did not:

An Australian is someone who chooses to live here, obey the law and pays taxes

But his successor, Paul Keating, didn't like making any such distinction between citizens and non-citizens. He railed against the "exclusiveness" of any such distinction based on citizenship as it involved,

constructing arbitrary and parochial distinctions between the civic and the human community ... if you ask what is the common policy of the Le Pens, the Terreblanches, Hansons and Howards of this world, in a word, it is “citizenship”. Who is in and who is out.

If you think this way, what can you do to make distribution equal to all? You can move toward a system of world government, but that's not yet in place. So you might instead think it moral to accept as many people into the liberal West as possible. Which, unfortunately, is what Tony Abbott initially committed himself to in his earlier stance on immigration:

My instinct is to extend to as many people as possible the freedom and benefits of life in Australia.

Again, traditionalists don't have this problem. We don't see autonomy as the sole good in life, nor as the good which defines our humanity. We therefore believe that someone living in a less wealthy or less democratic country can still have a worthwhile life based on such goods as family, community, religion, nature, art, culture and so on. Furthermore, as we believe that forms of communal identity are so important, we don't think the best solution to material inequality is to transfer populations but rather to work towards development in those countries requiring it.

Finally, there's a larger point to be drawn from all this. In the short term we are stuck with a liberal political elite and we have to try to influence politics within this limitation. But we won't ever get back to a really healthy state of affairs until we begin to have politicians who don't hold the underlying assumptions of liberalism. Our larger aim has to be a shift in political ideas, even as we attempt to deal with the political problems thrown our way by an ascendant liberalism.

Editor: let's end the conspiracy of silence

I'm happy to be able to report some more good news. Another mainstream opinion maker has questioned the benefits of mass immigration.

Ross Gittins is the economics editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. His opinion piece today (in the Melbourne Age) is well worth reading.  He begins by noting that for many years the political elite has deliberately ignored popular opinion on the issue:

Something significant has happened in this hollow, populist election campaign: the long-standing bipartisan support for strong population growth - Big Australia - has collapsed. Though both sides imagine they're merely conning the punters, it's hard to see how they'll put Humpty Dumpty together again. Which will be no bad thing.

The original bipartisanship was a kind of conspiracy. The nation's business, economic and political elite has always believed in economic growth and, with it, population growth, meaning it has always believed in high immigration.

Trouble is, stretching back to the origins of the White Australia policy, the public has had its reservations about immigration. Hence the tacit decision of the parties to pursue continuing immigration, but not debate it in front of the children.

But immigration has now become an election issue and Gittins thinks this is a good thing:

Gillard and Abbott have attracted criticism from commentators wedded to the old way of doing things, but the end of the conspiracy of silence is a good thing. Whatever the public's reasons for frowning on immigration, it does have disadvantages as well as advantages and the two ought to be weighed and debated openly.

Gittins is sceptical about the benefits of mass immigration because of its effects on the environment. But he also believes that for the native born that there is an economic cost as well:

Even when you ignore the environmental consequences, the proposition that population growth makes us better off materially isn't as self-evident as most business people, economists and politicians want us to accept. Business people like high immigration because it gives them an ever-growing market to sell to and profit from. But what's convenient for business is not necessarily good for the economy.

Since self-interest is no crime in conventional economics, the advocates of immigration need to answer the question: what's in it for us? A bigger population undoubtedly leads to a bigger economy (as measured by the nation's production of goods and services, which is also the nation's income), but it leaves people better off in narrow material terms only if it leads to higher national income per person.

So does it? The most recent study by the Productivity Commission found an increase in skilled migration led to only a minor increase in income per person, far less than could be gained from measures to increase the productivity of the workforce.

What's more, it found the gains actually went to the immigrants, leaving the original inhabitants a fraction worse off. So among business people, economists and politicians there is much blind faith in population growth, a belief in growth for its own sake, not because it makes you and me better off.

Gittins doesn't believe mass immigration has improved the standard of living:

Why doesn't immigration lead to higher living standards? To shortcut the explanation, because each extra immigrant family requires more capital investment to put them at the same standard as the rest of us: homes to live in, machines to work with, hospitals and schools, public transport and so forth.

Little of that extra physical capital and infrastructure is paid for by the immigrants themselves. The rest is paid for by businesses and, particularly, governments. When the infrastructure is provided, taxes and public debt levels rise. When it isn't provided, the result is declining standards, rising house prices, overcrowding and congestion.

So the option is either to raise taxes and/or national debt, or to allow the quality of infrastructure to decline. In Australia it seems to have been the latter option.

How much influence will the opening up of public debate on this issue have? It's difficult to say. The business lobbies do still have a great deal of influence, so I'm not expecting any immediate policy breakthroughs.

But it's nonetheless significant that papers like The Age are carrying such articles. It's possible that there has been a shift of sorts within the political class on the issue and hopefully this will lead to a less one-sided debate in the years to come.

Tim Colebatch: why can't we keep the public out of it?

Tim Colebatch has written a strikingly awful column for today's Age.

He's upset that public opinion has forced a debate on immigration during the election campaign. He wants the two major parties to return to a bipartisan policy of ignoring what Australians think about the issue.

He looks back nostalgically to Menzies (a Liberal PM in the 1950s and 60s):

Last week, pollster Gary Morgan pulled out some old polls - like, really old. In 1952, when the postwar immigration program was starting to transform Australia from an Anglo-Irish nation into a diverse one, his dad, Roy Morgan, found 52 per cent of Australians wanted the immigration intake reduced - while only 43 per cent wanted to maintain or increase it.

Did prime minister Robert Menzies change the policy to satisfy its opponents? No, he kept immigration rolling, and gradually Australians got used to it...

Why didn't Menzies buckle? Because the Labor opposition supported the policy, which it had initiated in 1947. ''My father used to send the results to both Menzies and Arthur Calwell (then Labor's deputy leader),'' Gary Morgan recalls. ''They were at one on this, so there was no political issue.''

According to Colebatch, the role of the Australian public is to "get used to" what politicians decide amongst themselves.

And there's more. Colebatch thinks John Howard got things right as Liberal PM:

The Howard government was the author of the high-immigration policy that Howard's heirs are now campaigning against. It saw that Australia would need a lot more skilled workers, and that it was cheaper to attract migrants with the skills than to train Australians in the numbers needed.

First, after an initial cut to the official migration program, it steadily lifted it from 67,100 to 158,630 in a decade. Second, in 2001 it made a momentous change by allowing foreign students with skills to stay here permanently if they could line up a job after graduating. Third, it introduced section 457 visas to allow businesses to bring in overseas workers in areas of skills shortages.

These were sensible moves...

The right-liberal mind at work again. If it's cheaper to bring in overseas workers than to train Australians then it's considered "sensible" to do so.

Colebatch ends with this plea:

Immigration is one of Australia's great success stories. It's a bipartisan success story. Why can't we keep it that way?

Colebatch is telling several hundred thousand readers that their opinion on something as basic as immigration policy should simply not matter - that the Liberal and Labor Parties should keep the policy out of public reach.

Economists don't have to follow an orthodox right-liberalism as Colebatch does. Terry McCrann, for instance, has written a column questioning the economic need for large-scale migration. He is concerned that if the Chinese boom (on which our mining exports depend) falters that the Australian economy doesn't have a fall back with which to provide employment for the many hundreds of thousands of immigrants entering the country:

What if we run a 250,000-plus annual immigration intake and the China boom ends? We pour people into an ever bigger Australia, and we don't get even the indirect jobs from a resources boom because we don't get the resources boom jobs in the first place?

He also points out the flaw in the idea that such high levels of immigration will pay for the welfare costs of an ageing population:

At core the new "populate or our future fortunes will perish" cry is the ultimate national pyramid scheme. We need to get to 36 -- or 50? -- million, to have the taxpaying workforce to support the now ageing baby-boomers. Beware of a Japanese-style population implosion!

Oh yeah? And when all those younger new arrivals start to age, we will presumably then need to move to 72 -- or 100 -- million, to have a sufficiently large taxpaying workforce to support them. Just as every boom busts, even our China one will; the laws of arithmetic always topple even the most elegant pyramid scheme.

A breakthrough in Liberal policy?

Just what does the Liberal Party stand for when it comes to immigration?

The answers are to be found in a directions paper put out by the party in April ("Towards a Productive and Sustainable Population Growth Path for Australia"). The policy is a long way from being traditionalist, but I thought there were some real positives in it as well. It may even make the Liberal Party worth voting for this election.

Same old, same old

I'll start with the negatives, so I can finish on a more cheerful note. The Liberal Party continues to believe (along with the right-liberal journalists at The Australian newspaper) that the purpose of immigration is to serve the economy:

The Coalition believes that addressing the skills needs of businesses to sustainably grow our economy is the primary reason for a migration programme. Consequently, economic considerations must be paramount in how our programme is framed and composed. (p.4)

The primary purpose of a nation’s migration programme is economic, namely to supplement natural increase to create critical market mass in the domestic economy and service the skills needs of a growing economy. (p.8)

So preserving distinct national traditions counts for nothing, it's all about the economy. This demonstrates just how far distant the Liberal Party is from being anything like a traditionalist party.

Furthermore, once you accept the premise that the aim of a migration programme is "to create critical mass in the domestic economy" then you are likely to remain committed to ongoing population growth via migration.

And the belief that a primary aim of immigration is to "service the skills needs of a growing economy" means that the Liberals are also committed to making it easier for businesses to bring in overseas workers via the 457 visa system:

liberalisation of arrangements for temporary business visas (457s) subject to clear standards, to make them more accessible to business, especially small businesses, and business in regional areas, with proven skills shortage needs (p.8)

It's worth noting too that it was the Liberal Party under John Howard which began the massive rise in immigration which Kevin Rudd then further accelerated (see figure 3 on page 4: Howard governed from 1996 to 2007. He held immigration steady until 2000 but then increased it every year till his defeat.)

Something better

So what are the more promising parts of the Liberal policy? Part of it is that the Liberals are now taking seriously the idea that there are some legitimate restraints on immigration numbers, such as the need to provide adequate infrastructure and to maintain environmental sustainability.

There is even a very clear statement in the policy paper that until infrastructure and sustainability can be factored into an immigration policy, that numbers should be kept below 180,000 per annum:

Until such time as a growth band can be established for future population growth that takes into account future infrastructure, services and environmental demands, the Coalition does not endorse the growth path projected in the third intergenerational report for a population of 36 million by 2050 that requires an average rate of net overseas migration of 180,000 per annum. (p.7)

180,000 is still an historically high level, but it's a lot lower than the current 300,000 average and at least it's a firmer commitment than anything made by the Labor Party.

And there's something else to be welcomed in the Liberal Party policy paper. The paper acknowledges that immigration does not necessarily raise real GDP per capita. This is a significant admission given that the Liberals place so much emphasis on the economic basis for migration.

The following quote is arguably the most important in the whole paper:

The economic focus of the Coalition’s approach to population policy is on productivity. In pursuing a commitment to improving productivity, we cannot allow population growth to become a surrogate.

The intergenerational reports conducted by Treasury have consistently highlighted the 3Ps when it comes to economic growth, namely productivity, participation and population.

In their most recent IGR, Treasury concluded that growth in productivity is the primary determinant of growth in real GDP per person ...

Our wealth as a nation is far more complex than simply taking more people in. It is possible to grow our economy without rates of population growth that diminish liveability and sustainability. (p.4, my emphasis)

And some important data is provided to back up this point. There is an attachment (A, p.9) which lists the productivity growth and population growth of the OECD countries. It is clear from this attachment that you can have productivity growth without major population growth.

Australia has one of the highest rates of population growth of the countries listed (15%) but one of the lowest rates of productivity growth per labour unit (1.1%). Compare this to the Slovak Republic which had a population growth of only 0.3% but a productivity growth of 5.0%.

So immigration cannot be the primary focus of economic development. Perhaps it is recognising this that allows the writers of the policy paper to make the following criticisms of recent immigration trends:

Australians are already feeling growing pains from current population pressures. Congestion in our cities, limitations on our energy supply, threats to food security, erosion of service standards in our hospitals and marginalisation of water resources are all evidence of the challenges created by population growth.

In October last year the Prime Minister dismissed these challenges and recklessly committed Australia to his idea of a Big Australia and later endorsed the 36 million population projections contained in the third intergenerational report.

The majority of Australians are uncomfortable with Kevin Rudd’s notion of a Big Australia of 36 million people as evidenced by recent surveys conducted by the Lowy Institute (69% opposed), Morgan poll (90% opposed), Ninemsn poll (82% opposed) and ANU (69% opposed).

As proposed in this policy directions statement, the Coalition does not endorse Kevin Rudd’s vision for a Big Australia of 36 million people by 2050. (p.1)

Is it enough?

So it's a mixed report. The Libs are blind to the need to maintain their own distinct national tradition. What matters for them is the economy. But they have recognised that there's more to economic development than immigration and that immigration numbers need to be linked to infrastructure and sustainability. They have committed themselves to numbers of fewer than 180,000 per annum and a population level of less than 36,000,000 by 2050.

These are still very high figures. However, it's better than any commitments made by Labor and could therefore be a positive reason for giving preferences to the Liberals at the election.

A welcome shift in Australian politics?

There has been a welcome shift in the political situation here in Australia.

In September last year there seemed to be no real opposition to Prime Minister Rudd's plans for a "Big Australia". There had been a staggering 876,222 arrivals in Australia in 2008 and the Immigration Minister was happy for this to continue:

Senator Evans said immigration should be the nation's labour agency, meaning a continued high intake of migrants ... Decisions about who came to Australia would increasingly be left to employers.

Tony Abbott, the Leader of the Opposition, had also declared himself to be in favour of a Big Australia:

My instinct is to extend to as many people as possible the freedom and benefits of life in Australia. A larger population will bring that about provided that it’s also a more productive one.

But the policy wasn't going down well amongst the working-class voters of western Sydney. As the election approached, it was one of the issues which was dooming the ALP to electoral defeat. And so Kevin Rudd was dramatically axed by his own party as PM, and Julia Gillard installed in his place. And her first policy initiative was to declare herself opposed to Rudd's Big Australia policy:

Australia should not hurtle down the track towards a big population. I don't support the idea of a big Australia... We need to stop, take a breath and develop policies for a sustainable Australia.

Gillard also announced as PM that it was OK to have a debate on issues of border security:

"People should feel free to say what they feel," she said.

"For people to say they're anxious about border security doesn't make them intolerant. It certainly doesn't make them a racist. It means that they're expressing a genuine view that they're anxious about border security ...

"So I'd like to sweep away any sense that people should close down any debate, including this debate, through a sense of self-censorship or political correctness."

Nor is Tony Abbott talking anymore about "as many as possible". The Liberal Party has now put forward a "contract" which sets limits to immigration in terms of the need to provide adequate infrastructure:

Contract 6: Link population growth to the provision of better infrastructure. The Coalition will set immigration numbers on the basis of economic and environmental sustainability.

Of course, politicians will say anything to win elections. Neither party has committed to an exact migration level, although the Liberal Party has nominated a figure under 180,000 per year until a review has taken place.

Former Labor Party leader Mark Latham is sceptical that Gillard will deliver cuts to migration:

Former Labor leader Mark Latham has labelled Labor's position on population growth "a fraud of the worst order", saying immigration numbers must be slashed.

Speaking on Sky News on Wednesday night, Mr Latham said it was not good enough for Prime Minister Julia Gillard to simply call for a debate on population, and she had to put forward a concrete plan on the issue.

Ms Gillard's "sustainable" population call was not backed with any substance and was a "fraud" designed to appeal to western Sydney voters sensitive to the asylum seeker issue, Mr Latham said.

"It's clever politics but it's a fraud. It's a fraud of the worst order," he said.

The former Labor leader said Australia needed to "take off the population pressure".

His comments followed statements by Ms Gillard on Sunday that she did not want to specify a population target but did not support the idea of "a big Australia".

It has to be remembered as well that immigration numbers began to skyrocket at the end of John Howard's Liberal Government, so it's not only Labor that we have to be careful about on this issue.

Even so, there are reasons to welcome the breaking up of the "Big Australia" consensus. It means, first of all, that there's more room for an open airing of views on the immigration issue. There have even been immigration sceptical columns appearing in the Melbourne Age newspaper (who would have thought?).

It demonstrates too why traditionalists shouldn't succumb to defeatism. You never know when the political situation is going to change, and the more we manage to build up some influence, the more we'll be able to intervene when opportunities arise to push things along in the right direction.

Finally, there's some evidence that the Liberal Party really has changed for the better on this issue. I'd prefer to present the evidence in my next column. It's not a complete break with past policy, nor is it really what traditionalists would want in the longer term, but I think it might be good enough to vote for. But it deserves a column of its own.

Tamils & national allegiance

Last week I reported on the attempt of boatloads of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees to land in Australia. The refugees claimed emotionally that they had nowhere else to go. I asked why they couldn't go to their ancestral homeland, the nearby state of Tamil Nadu in India.

There have been some interesting further developments. The Sri Lankan High Commissioner to Australia has noted that the spokesmen for the Tamils speak English with a distinct American accent and have therefore probably resided recently in a Western country. He therefore doubts that there would be any problem with them returning to Sri Lanka.

One of the spokesmen, Alex, explained his accent by stating that he "worked at an American call centre in Chennai for three years where he was taught to speak with an American accent."

Where is Chennai? It is the city formerly known as Madras and is the capital city of Tamil Nadu in India!

So not only is it possible for "refugees" like Alex to live in Tamil Nadu, he admits that he has already done so. Furthermore, he was able to obtain work in Chennai, where the economy is booming (it's estimated that Chennai's economy will grow 250% over the next 16 years).

The picture to the left shows a shopping mall in Chennai. The photo below it shows one of the numerous software parks in the city.

The point is that Chennai is not an economic basket case, but has a rapidly modernising economy. Tamils like Alex have already been able to move there and work there and so there is no obvious reason why they shouldn't have patiently taken advantage of the growing economy in Chennai - rather than taking a gamble on paying smugglers to get to Australia instead.

Two journalists

In my previous post I also asked why mainstream journalists hadn't asked about the Tamil Nadu option. Well, two of them now have. Andrew Bolt of the Melbourne Herald Sun wrote:

Let’s presume (on little proof) that these educated and monied Tamils could not stay in Sri Lanka, and let’s ask where they could go instead. Well, just across a narrow strait from their island is the Tamil Nadu state of India, which is safe.

And Greg Sheridan of The Australian observed that:

Just being a Tamil does not make you a refugee. Moreover, if you are fleeing persecution as a Tamil in Sri Lanka, why wouldn't you go and live in Tamil Nadu, the giant Tamil state of India, just next door to Sri Lanka? India does not persecute people for being Tamils.

Although I give credit to Sheridan for writing openly about the issue, his piece does illustrate some of the problems with the political situation in Australia. Sheridan is amongst the most adventurous in venturing his opinions - but his views are still a long way from anything that might be considered conservative or traditionalist.

His basic argument is that continuing mass immigration is a great thing, but that the public will only accept it if the government maintains control over the process. Therefore, he thinks the Tamils should be made to go through normal channels of immigration rather than jumping the queue.

Why would he support mass immigration? Sheridan believes that most of the boat people arriving in Australia are not genuine refugees but illegal immigrants. However, he thinks the actions of the illegal immigrants are moral, even if politically unacceptable:

I make no moral criticism of the illegal immigrants. If I were living in Sri Lanka or Afghanistan and I could pay a people-smuggler $15,000 to get me to Australia, to enjoy everything from law and order and good weather to Medicare, Centrelink and good schools, I would make that effort.

But that understandable motivation does not make a person a refugee. I think Sri Lankans generally make excellent migrants to Australia. I have always favoured a larger immigration program and a larger refugee intake, but I want Australia to choose who it takes and to do so in an orderly way.

It doesn't occur to Greg Sheridan that someone might love their country enough to stay and work to improve the living conditions at home rather than simply packing their family up to move elsewhere.

Sheridan views nations as places you park yourself to enjoy the conditions of life. If the conditions of life seem better elsewhere, then, as an individual "economic man", you rationally choose to park yourself there instead.

There's no sense that nations are distinct entities with unique traditions to which we are more closely or more distantly connected. Little wonder, then, that Sheridan's understanding of the allegiance we owe to particular nations is so flimsy - or that he thinks it moral and reasonable for people to transport themselves to foreign cultures if, say, the welfare benefits or schools are better.

Our allegiance to our homeland shouldn't depend narrowly on the material conditions of life. What is more important is the love of our own enduring tradition, a sense of shared sacrifices through history and an appreciation of our own distinct culture.

And if the schools aren't as good as elsewhere? You work to improve them as part of a commitment to your own nation.

What are we being delivered to?

Liberalism is advancing at breakneck speed toward the greatest emptiness ever known to mankind. Consider the following two news items. It has been announced that there is to be a national curriculum for Australian schools. On what principles is this curriculum to be based?

According to a report in the Herald Sun there are to be three "key considerations" underpinning the entire development process. They are:

i) indigenous perspectives
ii) a commitment to sustainable patterns of living
iii) the skills, knowledge and understandings related to Asia and Australia's engagement.

So the education of Australian children is being planned by people who seemingly lack a love of learning or a passion for culture or science. What a view of Australia these "key considerations" reveal. The Australian mainstream culture is overlooked in favour of "indigenous perspectives". Flogging stuff to Asia matters. And there's a nod to environmental sustainability.

And that's it. What does this say to the average Australian child? That they don't embody a culture and tradition of their own but are to develop instead as Economic Man - albeit one who remembers to recycle stuff.

The second news item is far worse. It turns out that immigration has been running at an astonishingly high level. And the officials in charge justify this on the grounds that the economy is king. Australia is one big labour market.

Last year there were 171,318 permanent arrivals in Australia. There were also 47,780 New Zealanders who settled permanently and 657,124 migrants with the right to work. This adds up to 876,222 arrivals in a country with a population of about 22,000,000.

What is the purpose of this immigration? The Immigration Minister gave this explanation:

Senator Evans said immigration should be the nation's labour agency, meaning a continued high intake of migrants ... Decisions about who came to Australia would increasingly be left to employers.

Are we a nation or an economy? Do we want to develop economically and industrially or just grow by selling passports and having more people? Do we really want to sacrifice individual standards of living just to have a higher overall level of GDP?

My apologies to Australian readers who find all this demoralising. I expect that at first it is unavoidably demoralising. But I hope that there will be at least one positive effect, which is to show just how bankrupt Australian liberalism has become. There is nothing worthwhile animating it. The focus of government policy is not even on real economic development anymore; it's just about crude technocratic management of the economy to maintain overall growth of GDP.

Anyway, in response to the educrats and their "key considerations" and to Senator Evans and his view of Australia as an employer run labour agency, I penned the following protest ditty:

Our liberal elite is cold and grey
No culture at all, the economy holds sway
Over pallid minds and hollow souls
Dedicated to technocratic goals.

Lord deliver us from these bloodless ghosts
Shut up in bureaucratic posts
Let men with hearts less feeble, values less base
Favour us all and take their place.

The Melbourne terror plot

I'm not sure if the news was picked up overseas but we've had another foiled terrorist plot here in Melbourne. Five Muslims living in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, four from Somalia and one from Lebanon, have been arrested for planning an attack on a military base near Sydney.

The reaction within the Somali community isn't promising. There have been reports in the media of Somalis claiming that the men are innocent, that the police are terrorists, that the Australian government is corrupt, that Australian authorities are bigoted, that the raids on terror suspects were unreasonable and that Somali leaders should have been consulted by the police before the raids:

Abdurahman Osman, a leader of Melbourne's 15,000 strong Somali community, said police acted unreasonably.

"What do you call waking people up at four in the morning with guns?" he said.

"It is the police themselves that are the terrorists.

... Mr Osman's outburst came as a prominent Muslim website featured a photograph of Australian soldiers in uniform with the caption: "Real Australian terrorists."

It also features a photograph of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd addressing Australian troops overseas with the caption: "Terrorist mastermind delivers sermon to impressionable followers."

"Mohammed" said on the website: "Why is it called terrorist attack when the Aussie troops have been raping, killing innocent Muslims for years?

"In this country we can't trust nobody. The Australian Government is corrupted."

... Mr Osman, until now a voice of moderation between Somalis and the wider community, said police should have consulted migrant leaders.

"The federal police could have come to us first and we could have helped them," Mr Osman said.

"We have met with them now, but we don't believe they have evidence of a terrorist plot and that is the feeling of the community."

Other Somalis accused Australian authorities of bigotry.

"As a Somali-born Australian I am outraged at these raids not only because my fellow Somalis are being targeted, but once again basic human rights are being violated," said Xamxam, a 21-year-old Sunshine woman

So there are Somalis who believe that they are the victims of a corrupt Australian society, even though it was young Somali men who were arrested for planning a violent terrorist act, and even though Somalis commit more crime here in Victoria than any other ethnic group (one in nine Victorians born in Somali committed a crime in the state last year).

The arrests have led a northern suburbs Labor Party MP, Kelvin Thomson, to call for a cut to the immigration intake to allow for a more careful vetting of immigrants who might pose a security risk. He wants a return to the immigration levels of the mid-1990s (80,000) rather than the extraordinarily high numbers of today (150,000 plus 250,000 on entry visas).

Looking ahead

Here's a YouTube video which was posted a couple of years ago and has already been viewed over three million times. It shows a presentation by Roy Beck on the long-term consequences of mass immigration into America.

A free-for-all?

Some items of interest from the papers:

Hazel Blears, a Cabinet minister in the Brown Government, has criticised her own party's handling of immigration into the UK:

Labour allowed a ‘free-for-all’ on immigration during its first years in power, a Cabinet minister has admitted.

Large numbers of economic migrants were let into the country claiming they were asylum seekers, Communities Secretary Hazel Blears said ...

On Saturday, immigration minister Phil Woolas questioned the 1951 UN convention that underpins asylum rules and added: ‘A significant number of people who claim asylum are doing so for broadly economic reasons.’

... Mrs Blears said management of immigration was ineffective during Labour’s first years in power.

‘Initially it was a kind of free-for-all,’ she added, with ‘a lot of people coming as economic migrants, but through the route of asylum seeking’.

In Sweden the Equal Opportunities Ombudsman has ruled in favour of women only gyms. The ideological reasons for doing so were explained as follows:

The gym argued that its initiative to create special zones for women, which mitigated "the negative effects of the gender power structure and the sexualization of the public arena", ought to be viewed as a positive move.

In its ruling, the ombudsman's office agreed that the gym's policy constituted a justifiable exception to prevailing discrimination laws.

"JämO is of the opinion that enabling woman to have a protected zone when training is a legitimate goal ..."

So women only gyms are allowed not so that women might freely socialise together or enjoy their own company, but so that they might have a "protected zone" to guard them from the "negative effects of the gender power structure".

The Swedes always set things out so clearly. The reason female only zones are allowed, but not male only zones, is because the Swedes have adopted patriarchy theory as a kind of state religion or belief system.

According to this theory, sex distinctions are not a natural and positive aspect of life, but exist to enforce an oppressive male power over women. Therefore, male only zones would be used in a detrimental way to organise an oppressive power structure and are suppressed; female only zones, though, allow women to have a protected space in which to escape patriarchal control and are therefore permitted.

Bad luck, though, if you are a Swede who doesn't believe in patriarchy theory. You are forced to live by its claims regardless. Less reason to believe that in a liberal modernist order the state is neutral.

Here in Australia, profilers have found working singles to be amongst the unhappiest part of the population - despite having more time, money and career success. Couples with children are generally happier despite feeling more stressed.

THEY'RE cashed up, career-driven and child free, yet working singles are among the unhappiest Australians ...

The research, released by the federal Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs Department ... showed working singles are unhappier than retirees, working couples and young families.

The singles group, which had an average age of 33, includes singles who worked full time, earnt more than an average income and had fair job satisfaction.

Yet despite all of the above, despite good connections with family and friends, they were unhappy about their single status and had "low life satisfaction".

I know these surveys aren't to be taken as the final word, but it's still interesting that the results go directly against what liberal modernism tells us ought to matter.

Liberal modernism tells us that our individual autonomy is the highest good. The group with the maximum amount of autonomy are the working singles; they are the most independent and unrestricted in their choices. But they are also reported to be less happy and to have lower well-being on average than married couples with children.

Doesn't this suggest a flaw in autonomy theory? Mightn't there be other goods - goods which connect us in important ways to others - which also need to be defended in society?

A step toward reform in the UK?

There has been a surge in immigration into the UK over the past decade, with numbers now running at over 300,000 a year. This is 25 times higher than at any other period in British history over the past 1000 years.

A coalition of public figures has been formed to support some modest measures to pull back the numbers. The leaders of this coalition include former Labour Minister Frank Field, Tory MP Nicholas Soames and former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey.

The proposed reforms are low-key: they would not limit refugee numbers, they would not limit immigration via marriage, they would not limit immigration from within the European Union and they would not limit temporary economic migration. The only change is that there would be a cap placed on the number of permanent economic migrants.

Even these modest proposals, though, drew a predictable response from some. Jill Rutter, a spokeswoman for a "progressive" think tank, said:

We need to make migration work for Britain, rather than play to xenophobic sentiments.

So even the most minor of limits placed on open borders still strikes Jill Rutter as "xenophobic". Clearly the word has lost all meaning.

The irony is that the reform proposals are being supported not only by a range of public figures from both the left and right, but also from ethnic minorities. A leading Muslim politician, Lord Ahmed, supports the reforms as do 75% of those from ethnic minority groups in the UK.

In fact, support for a reduction in immigration is overwhelming at the moment. 81% of Labour voters and 89% of Tory voters support a substantial reduction in immigrant numbers.

As for "making migration work for Britain", there's an interesting article here on the economic results of the immigration surge over the past decade. It turns out that shortages in the labour market have increased over that time, due to extra demand being generated; therefore, rather than filling labour shortages in the economy, the wave of migration has worsened the problem.

At the same time, because employers have had access to overseas workers there has been less need to train locals; there are now 500,000 unemployed 18 to 24-year-olds.

As I mentioned, the reforms don't go very far and they have already been rejected by the Labour Party; nonetheless, it's encouraging to see a range of public figures, including trade union leaders, economists and academics, step forward to present an alternative to the current open borders policy.

Australia's tribes on the move?

Does ethnicity matter? For evidence that it does, consider the article by Deidre Macken in the Financial Review ("Australia's tribes are making new tracks" 25/01/08 - subscription only).

The gist of the article is that when it comes to choosing where to live, people prefer to settle within their own ethnic communities. This is true of both immigrants and more established Anglo-Australian populations:

More than ever, migrants are settling in areas that reflect their ethnicity ... While migrants have always tended to follow in the tracks of kith and kin, Australian-born citizens are now doing the same ...

Macken summarises population shifts within Sydney this way:

In older suburbs, such as Parramatta and Bankstown, the adult populations are almost 70% ethnic. In new housing estates on the fringes, the population has mostly Anglo ancestry.

Much of the Anglo movement is from the western suburbs of Sydney to places like Gosford to the north:

in the five year period to 2001, Gosford got 49,000 new residents from elsewhere in Australia and only 4000 from overseas. What's more, a quarter of those new Australian residents came from the western suburbs of Sydney. The Gosford area is the major destination for refugees from western Sydney.

There has been a similar movement to Camden in the south-west. This helps to explain the fierce opposition by locals to the establishment of an Islamic school in Camden. Macken quotes researcher Gabrielle Gwyther as follows:

[Camden] is the white-flight suburb of the south-west. People who grew up in Liverpool, Bankstown or Auburn move up into the new estates of Camden, which are even designed to look like English garden estates.

Camden has always been an English town and they hold onto their tradition dearly. That's why the proposal for an Islamic school there sent them beserk - that's what they moved away from when they left Auburn, Greenacre and the like.

There is not only a population movement within Sydney, but also from Sydney:

Sydney has been losing 20,000 to 30,000 residents a year and, according to [Professor] Birrell, "most of those go to northern NSW and Queensland, and most of those would be Anglo-Australians".

The point to be made is that when it comes to something as important as choosing a place to live, ethnicity does matter. People are more likely to feel that they are part of a living community and tradition when they live largely amongst their own ethnic group.

Lessons of 2007

The Liberals have been defeated and what does the media say? You read everywhere that the Liberals must turn away from their socially conservative wing and to the left - or else face a more permanent electoral ruin.

It's an odd lesson to draw. Consider the following:

a) The Labor Party won by studiously avoiding any upset to the socially conservative instincts of the electorate.

b) The state Liberal parties are all more "socially progressive" than the Federal party and all are out of office.

c) The most unpopular Liberal policy was Work Choices, which was more of an economically liberal measure than a socially conservative one.

However, I do believe that the Liberal Party has to consider the future carefully. If you look at an electoral map of Melbourne you find that the Liberals can only rely on a tiny belt of four safe seats. The north, the west and most of the south now belong to Labor.

The problem for the Liberal Party is that migrants generally vote Labor. In a Parliament of Australia electoral survey it was found that:

a) There are 18 seats in which more than 22% of the population was born in a non-English speaking country. In 2006 Labor held 16 of those seats. It now holds all 18. Labor holds 27 of the 29 seats with the highest proportion of electors born in non-English speaking countries. (p.39)

b) 32 of the 33 electorates with the most people who can't speak English well voted Labor in 2007. (p.43)

c) The 24 electorates with the most Muslims all voted Labor. (p.29)

d) These results don't seem to correlate to levels of income. Of the 37 poorest electorates, 23 were held (in 2006) by the Liberals/Nationals, 12 by Labor and 2 by independents. (p.57)

How might the Liberal Party react to this information? They could, I suppose, conclude that they have to be especially nice to migrants to win their votes. The problem is that the Liberals could not have done more for migrants during their term of office. Migration was set at record levels and education policy favoured fee paying students from overseas. Despite this, the trend for migrants to vote Labor continued, leading to a loss of the Prime Minister's own seat.

A more realistic option would be for the Liberals to drop their commitment to high levels of immigration. They would have to stand up to the big business federations in doing this, but otherwise the move would be a popular one. It would also secure a more viable long-term future for the Liberal Party.