To my surprise a left-wing economics professor...

Professor Robert Rowthorn is an Emeritus Professor of Economics at Cambridge University. He is said to be one of the most eminent of left-wing economists in the UK. So I was pleasantly surprised by the findings of his research paper on the economics of mass immigration.

In short, Professor Rowthorn's review of current research does not find any significant boosts to the economy from mass immigration. This means that the other negative effects of mass immigration, such as building on the green belt or crowding in the cities, means that the consequences of mass immigration ‘are mostly negative for the existing population of the UK and their descendants’.

From the Daily Mail report:

Professor Rowthorn, a former consultant to the International Monetary Fund and the UN Trade and Development Commission, said in his report that there may be no economic gains from immigration at all.

If there are, they will be outweighed by extra costs imposed by the strain on housing, land, schools, hospitals, water supplies and transport.

He said in a landmark report for the Civitas think tank: ‘Unrestrained population growth would eventually have a negative impact on the standard of living through its environmental effects such as overcrowding, congestion and loss of amenity.

The Professor notes that it is possible for mass immigration to have an overall negative effect:

‘If many of the immigrants fail to get jobs, or if they end up in low skill jobs or displace native workers, large-scale immigration will have a negative impact on GDP per capita and on government finances,’ he added.

The impact could be positive or negative but either way it is unlikely to be very large. The only thing that is certain is that immigration on the present scale, if it continues, will lead to much faster population growth and a much larger total GDP than would otherwise be the case, with consequent pressure on infrastructure and the environment.’

(Related to this last paragraph see the data on the disability pension in the UK here.)

Business group calls for more...(you guessed it)

The Australian Industry Group wants the government to increase immigration levels from 190,000 to 220,000 per year.

The chief executive of the business lobby, Innes Wilcox, thinks that up to 2.8 million migrants are needed to fill gaps in the economy:

Mr Wilcox says while there are Australians without work, there are not enough skilled workers for a range of specialist occupations, with the Ai Group singling out residential construction as an area of acute shortages.

Strange that he should single out residential construction as a labour shortage area. If you increase migration then you need to build more houses, not less - you could just as easily end up with a worse labour shortage.

Professor Bob Birrell has conducted research which shows that the skilled migration programme is not very successful in plugging skilled labour shortages. The single biggest category of those arriving as skilled migrants are cooks. Of those from non-English speaking backgrounds arriving with degrees, 31 per cent remain unemployed (compared to 9 per cent of locals with degrees) and only 26% end up in professional employment. Of NESBs with management and commerce credentials, only 18% end up being professionally employed.

So what then does big business really want out of a mass immigration programme? One thing to remember is that it is not big business itself that has to pay the cost of that 31% unemployment rate. That cost is spread out amongst the community. And with a supply of overseas labour there is more competition for employment amongst the semi-skilled and unskilled, especially amongst young people. You can understand too that a business lobby group might like the idea that they can freely draw in labour from wherever they want, regardless of economic circumstances or the impact on the host society.

One of the good things about all this are the comments to the ABC news report on this story. Many of the comments reject the idea of relying on overseas migration for skills, calling instead for companies to invest in training locals:

DonM: Surely we are smart enough to get by with a very modest level of migration say less than 100,000 migrants per year and focus on training our own people to meet skill shortages.

OskO: Answer is definitely NO as long as our unemployment rate is above 5% and our under employment rate is above 10%.

Serenity_Gate: Check out Germany's apprenticeship system. Wonder why German technology is so good? Their apprenticeship training scheme. Businesses are FORCED to train apprentices. This should be happening in Australia for our future. This is just a push to drive down costs of production through lower wages.

Kog: This is exactly what has happened across the IT sector, or what is left of it after outsourcing overseas. Record numbers of engineers out of work, and they want to import more?

That last comment does seem to be true. I know of some highly trained and experienced IT professionals who simply can't get work right now. In my industry (education), too, it is not uncommon for there to be over 100 applicants for each vacant position.

Perhaps public opinion, even amongst some middle-class Australians, will begin to make itself heard on this issue.

UK immigration minister criticises pizza boss

Regular readers will know that I'm not a great admirer of the UK Conservative Party. Nonetheless, today I have something positive to say about one leading member of that party, the Immigration Minister Mark Harper.

It was reported yesterday that the boss of the Domino's pizza chain in the UK, Lance Batchelor, wants another mass influx of overseas workers into the UK. He claimed that he couldn't find enough staff for his pizza shops from within the UK (and the EU).

He was supported by Sir Stuart Rose, the former boss of a supermarket chain. According to him, it is right that companies offer low pay as long as there is someone round the world willing to accept the work:

the former boss of Marks & Spencer, Sir Stuart Rose, also attacked the work ethic of many Britons and said it was wrong to criticise immigrants prepared to work for lower salaries.

Sir Stuart added: "It is up to people to decide whether they want to do the work for the pay that is being offered. If they don’t, somebody else is there to do it. What’s wrong with that?...I’m a free market economist – we operate in a free market. If these people want to come here, and work the hours they are prepared to work for the wages they are prepared to work for, then so be it."

I'm afraid that Sir Stuart Rose's comments are a good example of why I am not an absolute supporter of free market economics (though I am generally sympathetic to a market economy). If Sir Stuart had his way, the wages of British workers would fall to the lowest level that any migrant from around the world would be willing to work at.

It shows a gross lack of the virtue of fidelity: he is not standing in a faithful relationship with his own countrymen and willing what is good for them.

The good news is that Mark Harper, the Immigration Minister, was having none of it and rebuked the two men:

Businesses complaining about a lack of British applicants to fill job vacancies should pay higher wages, the immigration minister declared last night.

Mark Harper said that, if firms were unable to find willing workers, they were not paying the market rate and should ‘reflect’ on the salary package they are offering.

Mr Harper said there was no question of the government relaxing immigration rules so Domino’s could ‘keep wages low’.

He pointed out that Domino’s can recruit staff from within the entire EU without restrictions – an area that covers 500million people.

Mr Harper told a committee of MPs: ‘If out of a market of hundreds of millions of people you cannot find enough people to work in your restaurant, you should look at how much you are paying.

‘Dominos should pay what the market demands to fill their roles’

There is something else that Sir Stuart Rose and Lance Batchelor should consider. It is not always laziness that leads a local worker to reject a job that an immigrant worker is willing to take. It is often the case that local workers can't afford to do so.

For instance, if you're a male British worker and are offered a job on minimal pay you are likely to harm your position when it comes to attracting a possible future wife. But for a male immigrant that wage might look good to a woman from his home country.

Similarly, a male British worker has to look for accommodation standards that the women of his own community would accept, something that transient migrant workers might not have to worry about.

It's the case too in the US that undocumented migrant workers don't have to pay tax on their earnings and can therefore live on a lower wage than a local.

I can understand a local worker looking at a substandard pay offer and wondering why it would be worth accepting if it didn't provide him with an opportunity to establish a family of his own.

Sheridan on border protection failure

Greg Sheridan has written a lengthy article (registration required) about the boat people arriving in ever larger numbers in Australia. There are two interesting facts that he points to. The first is that the boats have become an organised Muslim channel of immigration to Australia:

This boatpeople phenomenon is essentially a determined Muslim immigration...A former senior officer of the Immigration Department spoke to me this week, on condition of anonymity, on the way the illegal immigration trade to Australia has become regularised, from Iran in particular. When he first got involved in this issue, Iranians and others would go to Malaysia, then on to Indonesia, and it would be months before they could find a people-smuggler. Now, he says, it is more often like a travel agent service, with everything arranged inside Iran.

Sheridan is concerned that this wave of Muslim immigration will bring to Australia ongoing security problems. So far there have been 40,000 boatpeople arrivals under Labour and this number will increase through family reunion. If you have 80,000 most will be law-abiding, but there will be some who will get involved in terrorism. The larger the overall number, the more difficult it becomes for the security organisations to control the situation.

The other interesting information that Sheridan provides are the unemployment numbers for the boat people. Most of those arriving are low-skilled and with poor English language skills. The rate of employment, even after five years, is abysmal:

The Immigration Department's figures, released last year, revealed that five years after arrival the rate of employment - not unemployment but employment - of Afghans was 9 per cent, while 94 per cent of Afghan households received Centrelink payments. From Iraq, 12 per cent were employed while 93 per cent of families received Centrelink payments. Overall, households that came under the humanitarian program had 85 per cent receiving Centrelink payments after five years. The family reunion cohort had 38%, and skilled migration 28 per cent.

Those are sobering figures. Even the skilled migration programme has 28% of families receiving Centrelink payments. But you can see how costly to the public purse the arrival of boat people really is: roughly 90% are unemployed even after five years in Australia. At the moment there are 3000 arriving every month or 36,000 per year. Of those 30,600 will require ongoing unemployment benefits. In just over three years there will be 100,000 requiring unemployment benefits, plus other family and rent assistance payments, plus the costs of education, health care and so on.

I should point out that even if the economic costs weren't so high traditionalists would still be opposed to mass, ongoing, diverse immigration. That's because we believe that the different ethnic and national traditions are important to preserve, and so we don't want them to be undermined by open borders.

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.

Is it the other way round?

You often hear the argument that Europe needs mass immigration to offset its ageing population. The immigrants, it is thought, will work to pay the pensions of the elderly Europeans.

But is that really how it's panning out? One of the wikileaks revelations is that 24% of Muslim men in the UK and 21% of Muslim women are living off disability pensions. At the same time, the UK Government has announced plans to raise the retirement age, over time, to 68 for both men and women.

In many cases, therefore, it will be older Britons who will be working longer in life to fund the pensions paid to younger immigrants. The situation will be the very reverse of that portrayed by the open borders lobby.

There's some other interesting data on this issue presented here. For instance:

• It would take vast levels of immigration to maintain the current age ratio in Europe. The population of the UK, for instance, would have to rise from 59 million in 2005 to 136 million by 2050.
• The problem of funding retirees is not that great anyway. In the UK, it would require a rise in the percentage of GDP devoted to state pensions from 6.2% to 8.5% of GDP.
• This extra cost would be offset by not having to pay the infrastructure costs associated with mass immigration.
• The immigrants themselves would eventually have to have their own pensions funded. Would hundreds of millions of extra migrants then have to be brought in to do this? Are we talking here of a population pyramid scam?

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.

Rudd MP vs Rudd PM

Kevin Rudd gave his maiden speech to parliament in 1998. He wanted in this speech to set out a distinctive political ideal for the Australian Labor Party. He didn't want to be seen as merely another technocrat in a parliament of technocrats:

For nearly a decade now it has become fashionable to accept the death of ideology, the triumph of neoclassical economics, the politics of convergence and the rise of managerialism.

Put crudely, it is the view that, because parties of the traditional Right and traditional Left have now moved to some mythical place called the `Centre', all that is left is an essentially technocratic decision between one team of managers against another, both operating within a common, or at least similar, mission statement.

Politics on this argument becomes little more than theatre — a public performance necessary to convince the shareholders at the AGM that the company needs new management.

The ideal he came up with for the Labor Party was not exactly original. He merely restated the underlying distinction between left and right liberals. Both kinds of liberals take as a starting point the idea that we are made human by being self-determining, autonomous individuals. But if society is made up of millions of self-determining, autonomous wills, how is it to be regulated?

Right liberals have generally preferred the free market solution. Individuals were to work for their own profit and the hidden hand of the market would regulate the outcome for the overall benefit of society. Left liberals, in contrast, argued for a greater degree of regulation by the state.

So it's no surprise that Kevin Rudd, as a left liberal, argued in his maiden speech for a higher degree of state regulation and that he saw in this a distinctive political ideal for the Labor Party:

I believe that there remains a fundamental divide between our two parties on the proper role of the state in a modern economy and society. This government's view is a minimalist view of the role of government. It is a view that holds that markets rather than governments are better determinants of not only efficiency but also equity ...

It is a view that now dominates the treasuries of the nation — both Commonwealth and state — and their combined orthodoxy that a good government is a government in retreat — retreat from any form of ownership, retreat from most forms of regulation and retreat from responsibility for the delivery of as many services as possible. It is a view which says, in effect, that governments are the enemies of freedom ...

It is a view that is Thatcherism writ large, including her most infamous proclamation that there is no such thing as society. And it is a view that labour markets are like any other market that should be deregulated because, according to this view, labour is no different from any other commodity.

This is not my view. Nor is it the view of the Australian Labor Party, of which I have been a proud member for 17 years.

Remember, Kevin Rudd pinned his hopes of being something more than a technocrat on this ideal. So is it really true that Mr Rudd, as PM, has based his politics on something other than the market? Is he something more than Economic Man?

In yesterday's Age there was a brief discussion of Australia's extraordinary rate of immigration. Tim Colebatch, the economics editor, was sufficiently broad-minded to observe that,

... as anyone in Melbourne knows, there are drawbacks to population growth. Labor MP Kelvin Thomson is worried: "We are sleep-walking towards environmental disaster" ... And trying to cut carbon emissions by 60 per cent while raising population by 60 per cent, he says, is "trying to fight with both hands tied behind your back". Another 13 or 14 million people will not give us a richer country, it will spread our mineral wealth more thinly and give us a poorer one."

And what did our supposedly market-independent PM have to say? Mr Rudd was all Economic Man:

I think it's great that our population is growing because so many countries around the world are shrinking and that poses a real problem in terms of having a strong tax base for the future and a strong economy.

Perhaps what is most striking is Mr Rudd's opposition, in his maiden speech, to the idea that labour should be treated just like any other commodity. He declared himself opposed to the view:

... that labour markets are like any other market that should be deregulated because, according to this view, labour is no different from any other commodity.

And yet his own minister felt free to declare to the public exactly this view: that labour is to be treated just like any other commodity, even to the extent that immigration decisions would, from now on, be left to employers:

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.

I don't even recall the Liberal Party publicly admitting to such a view: that immigration decisions would no longer be made by government as part of a larger national policy, but to employers as a function of the market.

So is being a political leader of a nation like being a manager of a company? Rudd wants the answer to be no, but in his most critical political decisions he is acting as if the answer were yes.

Guest worker scheme expensive

The Rudd Government has a plan to bring thousands of Pacific Islanders to Australia as "guest workers" on farms.

Yesterday it was reported in the Herald Sun that the scheme will have to be propped up by taxpayers:

Taxpayers will pay almost $10,000 for every unskilled Pacific Islander brought to Australia under a new guest worker scheme.

This news, sourced from the Government's own economic update, isn't surprising. I reported back in May that the Department of Immigration had warned about the costs of a guest worker scheme:

The department argues further that the level of management and extent of controls necessary to ensure employer and employee compliance with program conditions, and to safeguard seasonal workers from exploitation, would render such a scheme prohibitively expensive.

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.

Immigration forcing down standards?

What are some of the consequences of Prime Minister Rudd pushing immigration to record levels?

Well, pity the first home buyer. According to the ANZ bank, housing prices are set to soar again due to pent up demand:

The ANZ's senior economist, Paul Braddick, said yesterday that Australia faced a critical and potentially chronic shortage of housing.

"A growing housing shortage is setting the scene for the mother of all housing booms," Mr Braddick said.

"Demand has accelerated and rising immigration, both permanent and temporary, shows no sign of abating".

There will be cultural changes as a result of this. Parents and grandparents will have to play more of a role in purchasing housing for younger people, as happens in some Asian countries with high property prices. It will be more difficult for young people to establish financial independence early in life; it will also be more difficult for women to choose to devote a part of their life to raising young children at home.

We're also more likely to get low quality housing options:

A radical plan to solve Victoria's affordability crisis by putting shipping containers in caravan parks has infuriated social welfare groups.

Macroplan Australia managing director and prominent urban planner Brian Haratsis said shipping containers could be located on public land or in caravan parks ...

"There will be a lot of talk about trailer trash, but people don't seem to understand there are others who simply can't afford accommodation ..."

This follows on from earlier news about overseas students being crammed into Melbourne share houses. In one case a Nepalese landlord stacked 48 overseas students into a single Melbourne home:

A millionaire landlord has been stacking up to 48 Nepalese students in a single house in northern Melbourne and dozens in two other rundown properties, say council investigators.

In today's Age, writer Lea McInerney describes the difficulty of finding a flat to rent:

Constant, fruitless searching in this high-pressure rental market is crazing me ... I behave obsequiously toward agents ... They get to decide how long my life stays on hold. One day I'm sitting in a park, feeling glum ... A friend rings and I burst into tears, not sure I can go on ... The lowest number of people I count inspecting a flat was 11; at the busiest one, a quirky two-storey place, I stopped counting at 60 ... One agent I came across, from the kindly camp, said: "Don't take it personally; it's a nightmare for everyone."

Redefining the minimum

What are the economic consequences of having hundreds of thousands of international students in Australia? According to a report in The Age, minimum wage rates are not being respected:

NEARLY 60% of international students in Victoria could be receiving below minimum wage rates, a study by Monash and Melbourne university academics has revealed.

Interviews with 200 international students drawn from nine universities across Victoria revealed that up to 58.1% of students surveyed were paid below $15 an hour, with 33.9% receiving less than $10 an hour.

Does this have an effect on the working conditions of the wider labour force? The researchers found the answer to be yes:

The influx of international students working outside industrial relations controls adversely affects overall conditions in the workforce.

And is the Rudd Labor Government concerned by a workforce numbering in the hundreds of thousands working below minimum wage rates? Apparently not:

"The Rudd Government has shown no sign of recognising this as an issue," Professor Nyland said.

(For those interested in immigration related matters there is a new Australian website here.)

A throwback policy?

It seems likely that the Rudd Labor Government will introduce a guest worker scheme, bringing South Pacific Islanders to Australia to harvest crops.

(This is, oddly enough, a step back to the 1860s when kanaka labour was brought to Queensland to work on the sugar and cotton plantations.)

There is some resistance by the unions to the proposal. The national secretary of the CFMEU has warned that the guest woker scheme could lead to the "Mexicanisation" of the country's job market:

The large movement of guest workers from the Asia-Pacific to our small labour market would have profound effects on the ability of governments or unions to uphold standards.

Former union boss Doug Cameron has also come out in opposition to the proposal:

Overseas - in the UK, the US, Europe and in Asia - problems with migration schemes are there and we can't just sweep it under the carpet.

However, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) has approved a guest worker scheme on the basis that it would increase "labour market mobility". The Australian Workers Union has also given "in-principle support".

It's interesting to find the ACTU basing its policy on extending "labour market mobility". It wasn't that long ago that leaders of the ACTU could be found singing the Internationale; now they are echoing the free market ethos of the employer organisations.

We shouldn't be too surprised by this. A lot of union leaders today have little connection to the working-class. Bill Shorten, head of the Australian Workers Union before his recent election to Parliament, and one of the key supporters of the guest worker policy, is an alumni of Xavier College, the most prestigious Catholic school in Melbourne.

The Rudd Government seems to have committed itself to the guest worker policy, despite considerable opposition to the scheme from a number of well-informed sources. The guest worker option has been questioned not only by the unionists cited above but also by:

- The Australian Farm Institute
- The Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs
- Authors of the Australian Government's White Paper on the Overseas Aid Programme (2006)
- Emeritus Professor Helen Hughes
- Sandy Cuthbertson, Centre for International Economics, and Rodney Cole, ANU, in their research into population growth in the South Pacific Islands

I would suggest that those wanting to familiarise themselves with the arguments read the parliamentary research report prepared in 2006. Before I begin quoting sections of the report I'll briefly list the arguments it cites against guest worker schemes:

- they encourage inefficiency and backwardness in the rural sector
- they are a spur to illegal immigration
- they are expensive to administer
- they have failed overseas
- they distort the development of third world nations
- they make rural work unattractive to local workers
- they exploit immigrant labour
- they are likely to create welfare dependent ghettoes in Australian cities
- other developing nations will expect to join in

I can't quote every relevant section of the report. One interesting item of information, though, is that a survey of farmers showed that only one in ten thought that labour shortages were preventing the expansion of their business. In other words, 90% of farmers are confident that they already have enough labour not only for current needs but also to expand further.

The Australian Farm Institute undertook research into a guest worker scheme, but didn't endorse the option for these reasons:

A recent Australian Farm Institute study of farm demography examined but stopped short of recommending a guest-worker scheme to alleviate seasonal farm-worker shortages in the short term.

It suggested that such a program would need to be heavily regulated and monitored to prevent exploitation of the workers involved, and could lead to dependency on such labour on the part of otherwise unproductive growers. The agricultural labour force more broadly has increasingly required skilled workers to operate the high-tech (and expensive) farm machinery used in the production of crops such as grains, cotton or sugar, or, for example, to generate and interpret crop production data and manage genetic improvement in livestock herds. Referring to the farm sector labour force generally, the AFI study found that the Australian farm sector is not competitive in attracting labour. Low remuneration, poor conditions and lack of professional development or career structures were leading to labour shortages, especially in the horticultural industry.

The AFI study argued that in the medium to long-term the problems of the farm sector can only be met by a concerted effort to ‘professionalise’ the farm labour force. Farming is now a knowledge-based industry. The report concluded that:

"... over the medium to longer-term, a substantial shift will need to occur in how farmers manage the rural workforce. The focus on keeping rural wages low will need to change, and a greater focus will need to be placed on ‘professionalising’ the rural workforce by developing training and career structures.

"Farmers will need to recognise that in order to successfully produce the quality of outputs that are demanded by consumers in higher-value markets, a skilled and motivated workforce is essential."

The section of the parliamentarly report summarising the views of the Department of Immigration runs as follows:

The Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, in submissions to parliamentary inquiries, has consistently warned that there are serious risks associated with a Pacific guest-worker program. They argue that similar guest-worker programs would be sought by other countries and possibly other groups of employers. There would be significant problems of compliance. Pacific Islanders have high visa overstay rates. (The country with the highest visa overstay rate in 2004–05 was Kiribati.) A guest-worker scheme would increase these overstay (and illegal work and social security fraud) rates. It could lead to stigmatisation of Pacific Island communities in Australia, and a backlash against the migration program.

The department argues further that the level of management and extent of controls necessary to ensure employer and employee compliance with program conditions, and to safeguard seasonal workers from exploitation, would render such a scheme prohibitively expensive: the costs could outweigh the benefits. It points out that expectations regarding financial benefits for individual guest workers and the level of remittances sent home could be unrealistic, once costs of living and taxes in Australia are taken into account. (Temporary residents are taxed at a flat rate of 29 per cent.)

I'll finish by quoting the problems identified by the report with guest worker programmes overseas:

Debate about guest-worker schemes in Europe is coloured by the failure of earlier experiences; Germany’s ‘Gastarbeiter’ program is often cited as the archetypal guest-worker failure ... The program ‘failed’ because the guest workers who were supposed to leave stayed. After the program was abruptly ended with changed economic conditions in 1973, immigration continued as the ‘guest workers’ were joined by their families, and later by asylum seekers.

... A study published in July 2003 by the UK Trades Union Congress claimed there were up to 2.6 million migrant workers in Britain who were under the control of ‘gang-masters’ and unregulated recruiters. It claimed that farmers were unable to make the distinction between ‘legals’ and ‘illegals’; that many couldn’t afford to pay wages above welfare levels, and that people were evading taxes and being exploited. It made the point that while there was a system in place to recruit seasonal guest workers from Eastern Europe, there was no infrastructure to recruit people from East Anglia or Essex.

The USA ... As in Europe, debate about guest workers is coloured by the failure of an earlier program, the ‘Bracero’ program. This ran from 1942 to 1964, and admitted mainly agricultural workers from Mexico. It was accompanied by massive illegal immigration, and followed by even more massive illegal immigration ... According to Mark Krikorian of the Centre for Immigration Research in Washington:

"... As immigration has increased, native-born low-skilled workers (those most directly affected by foreign-labor programs) are increasingly dropping out of the labor force, and the tendency seems most pronounced among teenagers.

"... guest-worker programs just can’t work even on their own terms. Every guest-worker program - everywhere - has failed. In every instance, they lead to large-scale permanent settlement, they spur parallel flows of illegal immigration, and they distort the development of the industries in which the foreign workers are concentrated."

Canada ... As in the US agricultural sector, the ready access to low-skilled cheap foreign labour provided through CSAWP has been criticised as downgrading productivity and competitiveness in the sector over the longer term, as employers are able to avoid innovation and investment in new technology. Another criticism is that the Canadian guest-worker program, with its many layers of administration, would be so expensive that the costs to government would outweigh any economic benefits to the nation as a whole. Canadian taxpayers are thus subsidising employers’ use of cheap labour.

Lords report blunt on economic cost of migration

From the Daily Mail:

Labour's justification for mass immigration was torn to shreds by experts last night.

The experts are the members of the House of Lords economics committee, which includes two former Chancellors, economists and captains of industry. They delivered a report which found that mass immigration to the UK had:

a) reduced the wages of workers in low-paid jobs

b) not improved average living standards

c) increased the cost of housing, keeping young families off the housing ladder

Importantly, the commitee rejected the argument that mass immigration was needed to fill skilled labour shortages. It noted that despite a massive influx of labour (700,000 from Eastern Europe alone since 2004), the number of vacancies remained above 600,000, due to the fact that the immigrants consume as well as provide services.

A Conservative Party spokesman let another cat out of the bag. He pointed out that relying on immigrant labour was hazardous in the long-term because it meant that the training of local workers could be overlooked. According to David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, the report showed,

unequivocally that the benefits of the current immigration policy to ordinary UK citizens are largely non-existent.

There are a series of long-term risks to the economy, not least the disincentive to train, and it presents absolutely no answer to the pension crisis.

And the Labour Party response? The Immigration Minister, Liam Byrne, said of the report that:

It proves we were right to set up the independent Migration Advisory Committee to tell us which workers our new Australian-style points system should keep out or let in.

We're glad to see the committee welcome the system as well as our ban on low-skilled migration from outside Europe.

An Australian system won't really fix the problems identified in the report. In Australia we still have mass immigration; like the UK we're stuck in a cycle in which mass immigration is used to fill labour market shortages, but then creates more shortages; like the UK we're suffering from a "disincentive to train" which is most obvious in our increasing reliance on overseas doctors; nor does our system prevent low-skilled migration, with a return to Islander labour schemes now being discussed by the Rudd Government.

If the British elite is serious now about the costs of immigration then it must insist on following the report's recommendation that a cap be set on the numbers of immigrants accepted into the UK.

British report to query migration policy

The British Government is running a programme of mass immigration into the UK. In response to criticisms of this policy, the Government claimed that immigration boosted the economy by $13 billion a year. It turns out, though, that the boost is only because of the overall increase in population. Per capita there was no economic gain, but considerable costs in terms of infrastructure.

From a report in the Daily Mail:

"One of Labour's key economic justifications for mass immigration is to be rejected by a major inquiry.

The headline figure used by Ministers against critics of the unprecedented influx of foreign workers to the UK is that they boost the economy by £6billion every year.

But the most in-depth study of its kind by a parliamentary committee will conclude this is not the best measure of the policy's success or failure.

In a blow to the Government, the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee will say on Tuesday that the amount migrants boost the economy per person - rather than overall - is far more relevant.

Experts say this shows only a tiny net contribution to gross domestic product, worth as little as 28p per week.

This has to be balanced against the enormous strain they place on schools, hospitals and other series - valued at almost £9billion ...

The Treasury says immigrants supported 0.5 per cent of growth in the economy - worth £6billion in 2006. But, at the same time, they have added around 0.5 per cent to the total population ...

This means the contribution per person is roughly the same. But, at the same time, by adding to the number of immigrants in the country, there is more strain on public services.

The committee has also heard the costs to wider society of immigration could easily outstrip the economic benefits.

David Coleman, an Oxford University academic, puts the total annual bill to the taxpayer at almost £8.8 billion.

In a submission to peers, he said there had been an "absent-minded commitment" to increase the population by one million every five years.

Professor Coleman said the costs to the public sector include £1.5billion to run the asylum system, £280million to teach English to migrants and at least £330million to treat illnesses such as HIV.

Immigrant communities are overrepresented in the criminal justice system, he added.

Mass immigration also imposes "congestion costs, diverts investment to new infrastructure and housing, impinges on space and amenity and accelerates the output of waste and greenhouse gas emissions."

One of the Government's own advisers concluded Britain does not need any more immigrants.

Predicting unaffordable house prices and a risk of overcrowding, Lord Turner attacked Labour's "economically illiterate" case for mass migration.

He accused ministers of using arguments, knowing they do not stack up, to justify the influx of newcomers.

Lord Turner, a former CBI director, said: "In general, the language of an absolute 'shortage' of workers, of a 'need' for immigrants to fill gaps in the labour market, plays little useful role in the immigration debate and in most cases is simply economically illiterate." "

Who works the most in Sweden?

There's an interesting graph at Gates of Vienna showing workforce participation rates in Sweden.

Between 1992 and 2002 70% of native Swedes of working age worked full-time. For immigrants to Sweden from Western Europe the percentage falls to 55%. For those from Eastern Europe it falls again to 50%. For Southern Europe the figure was 40%.

And for migrants from the Middle East and North Africa? Only 25%.

So the claim that you need open borders in order to rescue the welfare state just doesn't seem to bear scrutiny. If anyone is doing any propping up of government revenues it's the native Swedes.

What really drives Putnam?

According to Professor Putnam of Harvard University, diversity leads to a loss of trust, happiness and friendship. In diverse communities, individuals "hunker down" and become socially isolated.

And yet Professor Putnam remains a "diversiticrat". He wants to continue to extend diversity, despite the significant, negative effects that his own research uncovered.

Why? What can explain the contradiction between the research findings and the professor's continuing allegiance to the cause of diversity?

The professor himself never really gets to first principles. He does attempt to make a case for his position, but it's pitched to us as persuasive argument. So there is a frustrating sense that on such an important issue the fundamentals are being left unexamined.

Still, it's worth looking at the arguments he does put forward.

Inevitability

Resistance to diversity is futile, according to Professor Putnam. The most certain thing is that diversity will grow in Western countries, fuelled by immigration and immigrant birth rates. (pp.137, 139, 140)

I find it difficult to accept this argument at face value. First, it is obviously not inevitable that Western governments have to encourage ongoing large-scale immigration. There is no "force of nature" type reason that current immigration policies have to remain in place. They could definitely be changed if there were a shift in political climate.

Second, Professor Putnam is not consistent in his fatalism. He wants to extend diversity by rooting out traces of ethnic solidarity in the West (in churches, in neighbourhoods, in workplaces). He thinks that this is a difficult task and a great challenge, but reminds us (quoting Weber) that "Politics is a slow boring of hard boards".

So we are to be fatalists when the task is relatively straightforward (reducing immigration levels) but unyielding in our efforts to implement a much more difficult and intrusive policy which the professor happens to support.

Economic benefits

The professor goes on to argue that an increase in ethnic diversity is not only inevitable but also desirable. This is despite the negative effects of diversity on social capital.

The desirable benefit he points to is economic growth. Again, though, it's difficult to believe that this is the main driver behind Professor Putnam's support for diversity.

First, the professor himself admits that this is a contested area, and that some research shows a negative effect of immigration on the economy. The best he can claim is that overall a "weight of evidence" suggests the effect to be positive. (p.140)

Second, it's not reasonable to conclude that a modest positive effect on "economic capital" is enough to offset the serious damage to "social capital" that the professor outlines at length in his report.

If diversity makes us less happy and less socially connected, does a modest economic gain really justify a deliberate increase in diversity? The answer is obviously no, and therefore it's unlikely that Professor Putnam is devoted to diversity for economic reasons.

Furthermore, it's difficult to believe that a serious loss of social capital is associated with long-term economic growth. In fact, Professor Putnam tells us elsewhere in the report that, based on his own earlier research, a high level of social capital makes "the economy work better". (p.138) Therefore, if ethnic diversity destroys social capital you might expect the economy to work worse.

Professor Putnam himself details some of the negative effects that this loss of social capital has on the economy. He notes research that in workplaces diversity "is generally associated with lower group cohesion, lower satisfaction and higher turnover", and that it has also been linked to "lower investment in public goods" and "higher default rates". (pp.142-143)

Finally, it might be noted that there are plenty of examples of homogeneous societies which have managed impressive rates of economic growth. Japan, South Korea and China have all had major periods of growth as (relatively) ethnically homogeneous countries. Australia had the world's highest living standards in 1900, again with a relatively high level of homogeneity.

Creativity

Professor Putnam also thinks that diverse societies are more creative. He gives as evidence the disproportionate number of American immigrants who have won Nobel prizes, who are members of the National Academy of Science and who are Academy Award film directors. (p.140)

Is he right? Not in terms of the Nobel prize. There is a Wikipedia list of American Nobel Laureates and their country of origin. Of the 169 American winners, only 20 were born outside Anglophone or northern European countries. If we then take out the southern and eastern European born winners we are left with 4 foreign born winners (a Japanese, a Chinese, and two Indians).

So there are only four American Nobel Laureates out of 169 who are of non-Western national origins.

It has to be remembered, too, that it's highly unlikely that someone will become a Nobel Laureate or a member of the National Academy of Science without a strong educational background and a capacity to work in the top professions.

But most of the current wave of immigrants into Europe and North America don't fit this category. A large majority of the Mexican immigrants to America don't have high school qualifications, let alone advanced university degrees. A disproportionate number of immigrants into Europe become welfare dependent or work in low-skilled jobs.

Furthermore, mass immigration can lead to a loss of young, middle-class professionals, who are much more likely to contribute to the arts and sciences.

Why? Imagine you live in a high-taxing, crowded, cold, northern European country, like the Netherlands, Germany, Britain or Sweden. Why would you stay? The most basic reason would be that you are bound to your country in terms of identity, culture, language and history.

But what if your government decided to make such traditional forms of attachment obsolete? Then you would no longer have the same motivation to stay. You would be more likely to find yourself tempted by warmer climes, less punitive tax levels or more living space.

According to a recent article by Paul Belien, northern European countries are already losing large numbers of young professionals, who are being replaced by low-educated and unskilled migrants. In 2006, for instance, over 130,000 Dutchmen left Holland.

There are European countries, therefore, experiencing the reverse effect to that imagined by Professor Putnam. The population transfer is likely to be negative in terms of creativity in the arts and sciences.

But anyway, I don't think that arguments about creativity or economic growth are what really motivate Professor Putnam to support diversity. It's probable that he believes in diversity as part of a political world view.

This world view is brought out to a greater degree when Professor Putnam moves on to another topic, namely how the negative effects of diversity might be overcome. But I'll leave discussion of that topic for a future post.

Part 3: Professor Putnam's challenge

Cheap labour a ripoff?

An American study has come up with some startling facts about "cheap" labour. It seems that households headed by someone without a high school degree pay on average $9,689 in taxes, but receive between $32,138 and $43,084 in government benefits (the figure varies according to which benefits are included). Therefore, there is an overall cost to the government of at least $22,449 per annum (that's $27,212 in Australian dollars) for each of these households.

There are 17.7 million such households in the US. Half of these are made up of illegal immigrants. Whereas only 10% of the native-born population have no high school degree, about two thirds of illegal immigrants fit into this category.

Therefore, the willingness of illegal immigrants to work for cheap rates isn't really as economically beneficial as it might seem to be. Although the immigrant earns on average only $20,564 per year, the taxpayer then kicks in at least an extra $22,449. It is a labour scheme which is massively subsidised by other Americans. Each year American taxpayers will spend almost US$200 billion subsidising illegal immigrant labour.

Nor is it only America which is facing the financial burden of low-skilled immigration. According to a British newspaper (revealing details of an OECD report):

International migration is eroding Britain's skills base with an exodus of professionals matching the arrival of low-skilled foreign migrants, the Government is to be warned.

The number of Britons emigrating has jumped in recent years, with a growing proportion leaving professional or managerial jobs to work overseas. By contrast, the number of immigrant workers - many of them manual workers - has risen sharply.

British employers are responding faster than the Government:

a report last month by the British Chambers of Commerce revealed that seven out of 10 of its members are now opposed to unchecked immmigration.

David Frost, the organisation's director general, said: "Outside London, we are increasingly seeing large numbers of white, unemployed males wandering the streets. This is not pointing to a bright and positive future. We need to engage with these people once more and get them trained up. Immigration is not solving today's problems but actually postpones them."

David Frost is on the right track. First, it does make sense, as he suggests, to focus on training the existing population of unskilled workers rather than bringing in more from overseas. Second, I think he's to be admired for showing some loyalty to his co-nationals. Perhaps if others take his lead there might be more of a culture of belonging in Britain which might then persuade some of those highly skilled emigrants to think of staying in Britain rather than seeking their fortunes elsewhere.

Does diversity allow for local attachments?

In yesterday's Herald Sun came news of a horror car crash in Footscray, a western suburb of Melbourne.

An African migrant, panicking when her car mounted the kerb, hit the accelerator instead of the brake. The car ploughed into an outdoor dining area, killing a man, himself a migrant from Korea.

A Herald Sun journalist at the scene reported as follows:

A big crowd had gathered behind the blue and white police tapes. There were tall men in colourful patterned shirts and tall women in vivid turbans and long dresses.

It could have been in downtown Mogadishu or Addis Ababa. There wasn't a word of English being spoken in the hubbub.

But this was Footscray, not Somalia or Ethiopa ...

Once this street was almost entirely a Vietnamese strip.

Now it's in transition again, and yesterday, in the wake of the tragic accident outside Cafe D'Afrique, racial tensions ran high.

So Footscray is changing yet again. It was once an Anglo working class suburb, then a mixed European one, then Vietnamese and now increasingly African. All in the space of about 35 years.

Which raises the issue of local attachments.

The attachments people have radiate outward. First, you might identify with your local town or suburb, then perhaps your city or region, then your state, then your nation.

But to invest yourself emotionally in a place requires some degree of confidence in its continuity. If we think that we will all too easily lose something we love and identify with, then we tend to withdraw emotionally from it.

So how is anyone supposed to form that key, original, local attachment to Footscray? If you held a reasonable belief that the cultural character of Footscray would change dramatically many times over within just a few decades, then how could you lay down roots there in the sense of identifying with its character and culture?

And if we can't develop a deeper attachment to the place we live in, then won't this also disrupt our larger attachments, such as to our nation?

Yet Footscray is our future unless the current policy of diversity and mass immigration is reconsidered.

Whilst on this theme it was interesting to read the comments of Emeritus Professor Jerzy Zubrzycki in yesterday's Age. The professor was one of the architects of multicultural policy in Australia. He now admits that his immigration policy is necessarily a very expensive one.

He said of black African migrants to rural Australia that:

You cannot dump people in a rural community unless you make a special provision for resettlement services on the widest possible scale.

Immigration includes, very prominently, the lengthy process of resettlement - an always expensive process.

When markets aren't enough

Property developer Harry Triguboff is one of the ten richest men in Australia. He recently told a journalist that Sydney has "too many forests and parks". He thinks that national parks should be developed for housing:

You go north and we have all these reserves and you go south and you have all the reserves and they are the best part of the coast. That is crazy. We should be building on this area. If they want to see trees, they can go to Katoomba, there are plenty of trees there.

Triguboff also believes in open borders. He thinks that Australia should admit 130 million immigrants by 2050, and that Sydney's ideal population by this time would be 20 million.

He doesn't care if these immigrants speak English or not:

What's more important for me - a guy who can fix my tap or a guy who can speak English.

It's easy to see why Triguboff would think that such measures are in his economic interest. If you're making a fortune building city apartments then having ever larger quantities of both land and people would seem to be a good way to increase your profits.

So if all that we were to follow was a free market mentality, then Triguboff might appear to be a reasonable man.

I don't think, though, that anyone who follows the free market alone can accurately describe themselves as a conservative.

After all, the logic of Triguboff's position is not to conserve the natural environment, but to develop for profit even the national parks fringing Sydney.

Similarly, the logic of his position is to overwhelm the existing population with so many immigrants that the established Australian people, culture and tradition would not be conserved.

What this means is that to be a real conservative it's not enough to follow the free market alone. The slogan of freedom and the market won't do by itself.

There must be other 'goods' we seek to conserve which aren't derived from individual profit seeking within a market.

It is a hollow rendering of our nature to see the market alone as constituting the good in human experience.

Most real conservatives, for instance, will be responsive enough to nature to want to live close to it - closer, anyway, than an occasional visit to Katoomba to see a tree.

And most real conservatives will feel connected to their own tradition and want to protect it, even if this means placing some limits on profit seeking within the market.

This is not to say that conservatives must be anti-market. My own position is that an intelligently regulated market is the best option. The ideal is to harness the power of the market so that it drives economic growth and provides a ground for healthy competition, without undermining other more important goods within a society.