The world’s anti-migration shift to the right

[00:00:00] We cannot be a multicultural society. We are a multiracial society, but we must be monocultural. This is the Debunking Economics podcast with Steve Keen and Phil Dobbie. Well Pauline Hanson's One Nation party leads the polls in Australia, believe it or not, just as Nigel Farage's Reform Party leads them in the UK.

[00:00:26] It seems the world is behind those leaders who want to restrict migration, but have they got a point? Why is it such a big concern all of a sudden, particularly when in both places the rate of immigration has actually slowed a bit? So what's driving people to support parties that want to cut migration and people are prepared to ignore all the other policies that they seek to introduce? That's this week.

[00:00:55] Well it is quite astonishing if you look at the opinion polls now in the UK and Australia. We're now seeing happening in those countries what has happened in many other parts of the world, starting with Donald Trump, of course, but then lots of other right-wingers like Marine Le Pen and Giorgio Maloney in Italy and Geert Wilder's doing fairly well in the Netherlands as well. The latest opinion polls, Steve, the Roy Morgan poll for Australia.

[00:01:22] One Nation, 29.5% of the votes. The ALP, 28%. The Liberals, 15%. In the UK... 15%. Wow, okay, yeah. I mean, the other government have given up. In the UK, I think it's even worse really. Well, not quite as bad for the Tories on 19%, but Labour, 20%. Reform, Nigel Farage's Reform Party, 27% of the vote. Yeah.

[00:01:48] So the difference is, thank God, Australia has preferential voting because 27% for reform on a first-past-the-post election, you could well win. But if you look at the two-party preferred, for those figures of One Nation on 29.5%, two-party preferred, ALP gets 53%, One Nation gets 47%. So One Nation... So the second preferred party is no longer the Liberals.

[00:02:18] No, exactly. One Nation would be the opposition party in Australia. My God. So these are massive changes, political changes happening around the world. And it is a shift to the right, and it is being driven by this fear of migration. What's going on? Well, there's an enormous amount behind it. And I want to backtrack to where the policies that gave rise to this came from, because fundamentally, this is the ultimate failure of neoliberalism.

[00:02:47] Neoliberalism was supposed to give us a comfortable future where you didn't need the government and you'd be getting so much money from the private sector, you could slash spending on welfare because nobody needed any more. That is not what happened. The economy grew less rapidly under neoliberalism than it did beforehand.

[00:03:05] The people who have suffered from that are the middle class and particularly the working class have been screwed, not just by lower wages than they would have had if the pre-1975 growth rates had continued. If we hadn't changed from what they called Keynesian economics between 45 and 75 to what they call neoliberalism since, which is in the fundamental sense, it's shifting from worrying about the level of employment to not worrying about the level of employment.

[00:03:36] And it's also shifting from the government running a deficit if it wanted to build something new to the government's being paranoid about running a deficit at all. Okay. And therefore, it slashes spending and where does it slash spending? Well, on all the areas that the market economy is going to do so well, it'll take them over health, welfare, education. None of that has happened. So what it means is the people at the bottom of the pegging order in society have suffered very, very badly through it.

[00:04:00] And they're blaming not the philosophy itself that led to this disastrous outcome in terms of economic growth and distribution of income. They're blaming migrants. And this is a whole lot of reasons why. I mean, you've got to do with it. If you want to create migrants, it's a really good idea to bomb the area where the migrants are going to come from.

[00:04:21] Yeah. That's a good start. It's a good start. I mean, it's not exclusively that, but you look at places like Afghanistan, Syria, places where there has been quite a lot for sure. Yeah. Yeah. But actually, there's other countries, places like India as well, of course, places that have grown economically themselves and people just want to play a part in the world economy. And they are a big part of the international migration as well. Whether that's a problem or not is the question.

[00:04:50] Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm going to come because the migration issue is something where I think there is a reason to say you want to limit migration. Yeah. Because a large part of what's been done with the migration is to keep wages down.

[00:05:00] Yeah. And so if you see, like John Howard, Australia's most right-wing prime minister, well, maybe not the most right-wing, that would be Tony Abbott, but the most economically conservative prime minister, came in on an anti-migration campaign around the time of the, just before the 2000s and the turn of the millennium.

[00:05:26] And at the same time, he's just being racist about migration and using that as a campaign platform to get elected. So it was after the Afghanistan war and it was all a case of, you know, or the Iraq war. So going into Iraq and all that stuff was when Australia's case was Howard. It was all anti-migration, anti-this. And you take a look at the level of migration, it rose under Howard. The reason being he was bringing in business migration.

[00:05:52] And what that means is work capitalists who would otherwise have had to train people on the job or universities would have to provide education for people to become engineers and et cetera, et cetera. Let's bring them in as migrants. Yeah. Because they work cheaper. They work cheaper. Yeah. They've already been trained with and we haven't had to pay the cost of training them. We get the benefit of the training. They come and work for lower wages. We get higher profits. And gee, isn't that great for Gina Reinhart and all those other representative Australians. But isn't it sort of working the other way right now, though?

[00:06:21] Because we're not getting as many of those people coming in right now. And we're seeing the unemployment rate rise because those people were doing jobs that perhaps wouldn't be done by local people. And it's not just... Yeah, the whole... There's a tortured history of migration, which I want to talk about. But I think it's better starting off with saying, why is this sentiment risen? And it's a global phenomenon, as you're saying.

[00:06:45] And a large part of why it rose was the development of neoliberalism, which is a combination of supposedly progressive social policies combined with supposedly good economics. And this began with the Australian Labor Party. It began in the 1970s. It began after the defeat of the Whitlam government because one of the major factors in the overthrow of Whitlam wasn't just the Governor General sacking the Whitlam government, but it was the Whitlam government being seen as incompetent economically because they came to power in 72.

[00:07:15] You had the oil... First oil crisis increase in prices then. They splashed tariffs, which I think was a big mistake. I'm against that. That reduced the manufacturing sector. So in the end was they even got involved in trying to borrow money from Arabian sources, which was just ridiculous at the time. So the feeling within the Labor Party was we have to show we're good economic managers. We can't just be socially progressive. We have to have good economics as well.

[00:07:43] Gough never had any interest in economics, Gough Whitlam. So the party was revised under Hawke and Keating to be supposed on the economics. And the argument was let's do the textbooks better than the conservatives do, the Liberal Party in Australia. And let's... So balancing the budget, trying to... Balancing the budget, particularly deregulation, privatise as much as you can, all that sort of stuff,

[00:08:12] came out of accepting textbook economics within the Australian Labor Party. Now, I didn't have a major role at all the time. But I was involved with the Metalworkers Union drafting their proposal, which was instead to have a Swedish social democratic style economic management for Australia. And we were fighting with a guy called Lindsay Tanner. Lindsay Tanner is a West Australian. And I think he was Senator. I've forgotten now.

[00:08:35] But he was probably the most prominent person making the case that we have to combine progressive social policies with good economics. And I had a stand-up fight with him actually on the steps of a bookshop in Glee back in the late 1970s. He wouldn't remember. I do because I think it's such a pivotal point in time. And I'm saying, look, if you combine progressive social policies with textbook economics, it's the textbook economics that will let you down. At some point, you'll have a crash.

[00:09:05] And then what you'll do is you'll discredit those progressive policies. And what they thought they could do is they could support women, gays, blacks, migrants, et cetera, et cetera, and get a consortium of people who would always vote with the Labor Party while the economy did very well because they were also managing the economy very well at the same time.

[00:09:25] So their vision was more economic growth coming out of changing policies from old-fashioned regulatory Keynesian to presentable free market neoliberal arguments. That'll increase the rate of growth. We'll then get all these little sections of society. We'll get the migrants to vote for us. We'll get the gays, the blacks, the women, yada, yada, yada. And with that constituency, we'll block out the Liberal Party forever. That was the mindset. Well, that was a total and absolute failure because what happened –

[00:09:55] it's very cyclical over time, of course. But ultimately, those neoliberal policies failed. When you take a look at the rate of economic growth between 45 and 75 and compare it to 75 to now, you find the rate of economic growth for most of the world in terms of per capita growth has fallen by about 1% per annum. But what that means is – Yeah.

[00:10:14] But you were having – so you were having this – you were having your lefty woke argument, Steve, on a – as a part of the metropolitan elite on the steps of a bookshop in Glebe. Yeah, I know. I'm saying, this is the wrong constituency. Don't abandon the working class. But that's exactly what they did. Well, don't know if the working – is Glebe working well? The thing is, they chose the venue, okay? I didn't choose Glebe – it wasn't Glebe Walks. It was one of the ones in Norton Street, Larkin. Right. But that's the venue. Okay.

[00:10:43] Maybe the working class there. Certainly not working. Okay. They chose the territory. I fought for the working class and I lost. But that whole point, though, isn't it? There has to be something in between, doesn't there? I mean, because – Oh, there is. Yeah. It's because you've got to have – you've got to have the good elements of, you know, sensible economic management, which is obviously innovation, investment, investment in all the right places,

[00:11:10] whilst also obviously looking after the disadvantaged groups, but not over looking after the disadvantaged groups because you don't want that – Well, the thing is, they didn't do the former. Their theory was that if you deregulate the economy, you're going to get more growth coming out of innovation, yada, yada, yada. And let's make sure the government doesn't have too much debt, so let's cut government spending. And what that meant was you cut money creation, okay? This is the point where the mainstream is completely wrong. The government – the fiat money is created by the government running a deficit. The government doesn't run a deficit.

[00:11:38] It doesn't create fiat money at all. It means all the money is credit – debt-based, and then you get what is credit money used for. And fundamentally, unfortunately, the banking system has financed asset price bubbles. It hasn't financed investment in real goods and services. So that means innovation hasn't occurred. But the most efficient way to get more money into the economy to drive that growth is to come from the banking sector, isn't it? For banks to create the money. No. No. Because the banking – I mean, the wish it was, okay? I mean, it goes into housing. It goes into housing.

[00:12:08] It goes into dead money and housing. But if you could say, well, if you can get a loan from a bank and you were to invest it in an IPO for a new startup, and that startup grows, then the bank's created – And have you ever tried that? What, to get a bank to invest the money to do it? No. The bank loan to invest in a business. Okay, you won't. Banks will invest if they can mortgage an asset of yours.

[00:12:31] Okay, that's where the – so a lot of capitalists in Australia and the whole planet, but fundamentally the Anglo-Saxon countries in particular, get a start by borrowing against their house. Then they'll get the money. The thing is, it's not whether their idea is a good idea. It's whether their house is in a good street. Okay? So it ends up being something which is based on the quality of the innovator. It's just what the assets the innovator has. Right, but the bank is still – Even though it's against the value of their house, it's still a loan. Yeah.

[00:13:01] Isn't it? It's still new money being – It's a loan. It's still money being created. It's still money being created. The bank's created – But it's money being – The bank's created the money to get the home loan, and then it creates the money to – for a business loan against that house. There's nothing wrong with that. Well, no, there wouldn't be – there'll be a business loan mortgaging it with the house given as security. That's what they'll do. So they create the money. They also create the debt at the same time. And then if it was going into productive investment, there would be less of a problem.

[00:13:26] There can still be a problem with too much private debt, even if all the investment is genuine investment. But instead, what the bank's did is finance speculation. So once you start lending against a house, then you increase the price – the value of the house. And then the speculative bubble of rising house prices becomes what people are borrowing money for. The whole idea you build a company on top of that, nah, why bother? You make more – your house earns more money than you do. So we get caught in the bubble mentality.

[00:13:54] And what that has meant is the productive sources haven't been covered. And that leads back to people being unemployed, getting lousy wages and blaming the migrants for it when it's actually – the failure of neoliberalism has led to the rise of this right-wing anti-government sentiment. And in fact, it isn't because the government's been doing too much. It's been doing too little. And that's – again, all the right-wingers, including Pauline Hanson, see the government debt as really, really a dangerous thing. That it's the same mistake the neoliberals made.

[00:14:24] So I don't see any salvation coming out of these people. But they end up blaming the migrants. And that is a common theme throughout human history. Well, I remember when I moved to the UK 10 years ago and the removal people or the people who were moving us in, I made the mistake of asking them. These were all white English guys. I remember asking them what they thought about Brexit. Did they think it was a good idea? And, of course, they were all behind it. And I said, well, why are you so keen?

[00:14:47] And they said, you know, because their jobs were being taken away by other people, there were Polish removal workers, for example, who were taking their jobs away from them. They might have had an argument, by the way, if it wasn't for the fact they actually left several hours early with me with a whole load of boxes left to unpack. They just lost interest halfway through the move in. I mean, they did a shoddy job. I wish I could have had some Polish workers. They might have done the job probably. Well, this is one of the elements.

[00:15:16] There's rarely that I read a paper that I remember indefinitely, if it's sheer quality. But there's one by a paper in a book called The Political Economy of Australian Capitalism, edited by my old professor, Ted Wilrighton, who starred Buckley. And a paper by a woman with a wonderful name, Marie de la Poulonche. And it talked about how migration in Australia's economic history and what she showed was that every new wave of migration, the main opposition to it comes from the previous wave of migration. Yeah. Because-

[00:15:46] Close the door. We're in now. Close the door. And they don't have income. You know, they're willing to work for any wage rate. That then means that they take the jobs from the previous wave of migrants. So that's where the opposition came from. You only get away from that during periods of full employment and decent wage growth. Now, of course, we've had less than full employment and lousy wage growth. So this has led to the rise of right-wing sentiment. It's directed at the migrant side of things.

[00:16:13] But in fact, it's the economic policies that have set the situation up. And the trouble is, Hanson and all the others, you know, Farage, et cetera, et cetera, they swallow the same nonsense about government debt as the neoliberals themselves do. So they'll end up slashing government spending even further and then leading to more chaos, not less. So, you know, be careful what you wish for. Americans have wished for Donald Trump. They've got Donald Trump.

[00:16:40] But I don't think anybody who's voting for Pauline Hanson is going to do the analogy and say, are we going to get a redheaded version of the orange monster in the White House if we vote for her? I think the answer is yes, you will. Well, maybe not because of the preferential voting system. But she did, whereas Farage for the UK is a real concern. And it's been a long time coming because obviously he managed to push Brexit through because of

[00:17:07] this fear of workers taking our jobs. And then he's been helped along by 10 or more years of just complete budget constraints by the government, first of all, by the Tories and then latterly by the Labour Party. So it's an easy run for him, really, isn't it? And as you say, everyone's just looking at it and blaming the migrants because the blue collar workers are saying, well, they're taking our jobs away and they're pushing salaries down.

[00:17:36] That's easy to fix, isn't it? Surely if you just have regulations about the minimum wage that could be charged by people. Well, this is the thing. This is why it's been a good way for cheap capitalists to make money because you pay lower wages. In fact, when you look at what causes capitalism to develop over time, it's high wages. The reason being that if you have high wages, there's therefore an encouragement for capitalists to invent a technology that means you can reduce your labour force.

[00:18:05] And then because you do that, you increase the output per worker. And then if you have high employment, you get a chance for workers to have some of that increase and you get a beneficial predator-prey relationship between the two. Which is actually what's happening in Japan. So we look at Japan going through decades of just no growth whatsoever because wages has stagnated. The moment they started to get a bit of inflation and people started asking for wages, you had actually had the way that the inflation was actually good because it added to wage growth,

[00:18:36] that wage growth added to demand. And all of a sudden, we're starting to get some growth. I mean, they've got inflation as well, which is new for them. But they've started to get some growth in the economy because of that wage growth. Yeah. So when you think in a dynamic sense, you can see reasons to have high wages to stimulate investment. And if you go for low wages, you say, why bother investing? The workers are being paid shit wages. There's more of a margin for the capitalist. And so lower wages are a discouragement for the sort of innovation that makes capitalism dynamic.

[00:19:04] So there's so many elements to where we are that it's just a series of bad mistakes built on other bad mistakes. And now, with the complete collapse in neoliberalism, the intriguing thing for me is the collapse of the Liberal Party. 15% of the vote. They're probably going to get their cost of running election back to some extent. But that's the end of them. And the Tory party in the UK. Same deal. Yeah.

[00:19:34] Yeah. It's astonishing. And this is the, again, all these parties have embraced neoliberalism and they got the other end of it and think, what went wrong? And the answer was neoliberalism. It was a mistaken view of how the economy operates. It deregulated the finance sector, not the industrial sector. And that led to speculative bubbles which crash and wiped out people's savings. They made people's retirement dependent upon share market returns.

[00:20:01] And if you're not a multi-billionaire, then you end up with a lousy, you not only have a guaranteed pension, you've got lousy returns depending upon stock market returns. It's an awful situation. In that world, you lash out. You're not really thinking. You just think, I'm sick and tired of the rotten quote charge. Who else can I vote for? And the answer ends up being these right-wing ones. We want change. We don't care what it is now. We just want change. And then along come these people. Okay. All right. We'll take a quick break.

[00:20:28] We'll come back to this and look at, you know, even so, even if that's the reason, is migration still a problem? We'll look at that when we come back. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is the Debunking Economics Podcast with Steve Keen and Phil Dobby. So we've got this sharp swing to the right happening. And all over the place, it is the same thing. It's migration that's seen as the major cause.

[00:20:54] They are defeating the woke left, standing outside their bookshops arguing. And Pauline Hanson gave an address. This is what made me think about this this week, because I thought we've got to address this because it's just so, so big. And it is transforming the global politics and therefore global economy. So Pauline Hanson gave a talk to the press club for the first time ever, gave the National

[00:21:21] Press Club address in Canberra, which is a thing of prestige normally. And normally politicians normally sort of like, you know, there's a bit of decorum about them. There was no decorum about Pauline Hanson giving this National Press Club address. She had views where Australia has got to be a monoculture. Monoculture. Maybe we should start there. That's an interesting one, isn't it? Because Australia isn't a monoculture. So we've got to go back in time to when it was.

[00:21:50] And I feel like if you're going to go back in time, you've got to go through waves of migrants. You're going to end up with any monoculture. We're going to be a population of Aborigines. But since then, it's all been migration. So how do you have a monoculture? It's all been migration, yeah. I mean, unless she's just going to pick as we were in the 1950s. That monoculture in the 1950s would be a whole load of white Australians abusing Greek migrants. And that's about it, isn't it, really? I mean, where do you start?

[00:22:18] I mean, it's a complex problem because if you have too much migration, you end up suppressing working class wages, which is what's happened. And you get right-wing reactions coming out of that. And then on that basis, there is a reason to say you don't want more than a certain fraction of migration. But in terms of, I mean, what has happened is the left has got itself identified in culture wars. And again, I'm going to use an example from my past, not as significant as that one.

[00:22:48] But a bunch of lefties meeting after the student strike in 73 in Sydney. The typical lefty thing, drafting a manifesto is the most important bloody thing to do. And then at one stage, the women all walked out and came back and said, we want an addendum saying, unless women's liberation is achieved, all the risk is futile. And I just went, oh, shit, who's next, the gays or the blacks? Well, the gay guy was the next one and then the Aboriginal and so on. And so all the press groups, they spent all the time changing this bloody document.

[00:23:15] And it was all wokeism. The start of wokeism was there. And the Labour Party thought they could exploit that by forming a coalition of all those groups. And that's one large reason why the conservative parties, particularly now Hanson and Farage, and of course, obviously Trump, targeted the political party that identified with all these minority interests. But if you go, like the classic really is the American situation.

[00:23:43] Because the Democrats used to be the party of the working class and Republicans, the party of the bourgeoisie. The decision, particularly by Clinton, who followed on from what he saw happening in Australia, the major inspiration was the Australian Labour Party and also Blair. The idea was to form these coalitions and also tie up with the finance sector. So the Democratic Party become identified with the finance sector.

[00:24:13] That's all the deregulation. It was Clinton who abolished Glass-Steagall. Okay. Happy, smiling away, signing a document. All these people in the finance sector sitting around and thinking, I'm doing a great thing. And thinking, you're our turkey, mate. That's fundamentally what was going on. So this is banking deregulation for those people who are not... Yeah, 1999, 2000. Yeah. So the Democratic Party became identified with the finance sector.

[00:24:38] Now, the finance sector, the idea was, and the same thing applied in the British Party, and this is going back to Maggie Thatcher, not just Blair, but also Maggie Thatcher. The argument was, look, manufacturing is passé. Services are the future. We're going to focus on services. Let manufacturing go to the third world. Who cares? All the coolies can do the hard manual labour. We'll get the benefits, and we'll charge them for services, and that's going to be our growth centre.

[00:25:01] Now, in fact, that didn't work anywhere in the world unless the only services that you could have in scale was finance, creating debt. So the only way the services expanded was expanding levels of private debt. Then you have the 2007 global financial crisis. Bang. That fails. And so all the countries that pushed the services focus as a way of the future ended up screwing the working class because there were no jobs. They outsourced the jobs as well. Yeah.

[00:25:28] So all this anger that the working class has at the leading parties, particularly the ones that used to be described as progressive, the Labour Party. And that's both the Labour Party in the UK looks like it might get wiped out as well as the Tories. So the left which should have been identified with the working class, abandoned them in the 80s and 90s, and then started with the finance sector. The working class got screwed. They got screwed as well by migration.

[00:25:56] So they're lashing out and getting rid of these so-called lefties. In fact, they're not lefties. It's textbook economics that is at the core of these problems. And it's also not recognising that the main social division in capitalism is between gays and straights or blacks and whites or women and men. It's between capitalists, workers and bankers. It's a class system. And the economics of the Labour Party should have stayed as a class system since they've abandoned it. That class is now available to the right-wing demagogues.

[00:26:26] Right, because they have allowed themselves to be divided. And the moment they divide, they get conquered with somebody with a very simple message. And that message from Pauline Hanson, yep, Australia should be monocultural. Immigration levels have caused a housing crisis. It's all the migrants' fault. Oh, that's fun. Radical Islam is being practised by hate preachers. And governments are too frightened to act against radical Islam. So let's pick on a particular religious group.

[00:26:52] Abolish the SBS and the ABC, obviously, because we don't want to have public access to information. Very much better than the media's bought, just by Gina Reinhardt. Exactly. Who has bought Pauline Hanson, of course, as well. Let's not forget that. But also... Buy one, get one free. That's right. Well, she's put a lot of money into it. She's bought a private jet so she can fly around, for God's sake. That lets her really identify with the working class. Absolutely. They can fly. Yeah, for sure.

[00:27:20] Well, she can go and visit the working class in a jet. She wants to abolish the ABC and SBS. And yes, normally in Australia, you introduce a talk by acknowledging the Aboriginal people, the land on which you are. She didn't do that at all because it's divisive. So, yeah, she just likes treading on toes, doesn't she, really? But it's all of...

[00:27:48] It is a simple argument, isn't it? That we're saying. It is migrants to blame for everything, including housing. So, that's the interesting one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Get rid of migration, all the problems disappear. Yeah. There'll be so many houses. I mean, we're seeing an awful example of that in the States at the moment, of course. So, really, really very heavy-handed treatment. I would hate to imagine the same in Australia.

[00:28:11] As you say, the proportional representation or the preferential voting will stop that happening in Australia, probably. But it's still a question mark. What's the two-party preferred again between Labour and One Nation? I mean, it was close, wasn't it? It was 53% for ALP, 47% for One Nation. That's bloody close. I mean, all it takes is just over 3% of people swapping.

[00:28:40] And bang, you have a One Nation majority. So, you can't rule out the prospect of that both in the UK and Australia. And you've got... I mean, the shift is... Depends on the personality who activates it. I think by the looks of it, the right-wing Italian prime minister who's come in, the woman, is extremely good in most other stuff. She's not a nutcase. But you've got a nutcase in America. You've got a nutcase in Australia. So, you've got a... Well, what would you call a virage? Is he a nutcase or...?

[00:29:10] An opportunist. An opportunist. Yeah. I mean, he's making money. He's just out to make his own money, isn't he? Really. I think he's made a lot of money from trading. And he's doing what Trump does, you know, trying to enter a position where he can make even more money for himself. Yeah. Yeah. So, we'd like to see that shift. I mean, there's nothing that's likely to prevent it. The trouble is it's going to go at the same time as another thing I'm sure Pauline Hanson's

[00:29:39] eyes is happening, and that's global warming. So, when this strikes, we're going to have people who... Again, Trump, you know, he's actually... Trump is actually pulling already located, already functioning, already paid for ocean temperature and condition sensors out of the ocean. He's paying money to remove something that's already there. And that means we'll no longer be able to monitor the development of storms in the Atlantic, which will be... I'm really hoping the first one that doesn't get identified takes up Mar-a-Logo.

[00:30:07] And I want naming rates on Mar-a-Logo. If it gets with biocyclone, I want to call it Mar-a-Lago. Yeah. Yeah. I think you've used that one before, but it's good. It's gold. So, let's repeat. It's worth a repeat, which is all you're going to get on the ABC and SBS when they haven't got any money left. So, we didn't have a problem with migration in Australia when people were building apartments for Westfield. So, for Meriton, sorry, which, you know, is a company owned by Harry Trigaboff from his Russian Jewish parents. He's a migrant.

[00:30:36] Westfield, Frank Larry is from Czechoslovakia. Vizi, another one of Australia's big companies, Richard Pratt from Gdansk. Kogan, you know, the big online retailer. Kogan is from Belarus. Crazy John's. Crazy John is Turkish. You know, a lot of these big Australian companies are founded by migrants. And that's the thing, isn't it? Migrants very often get into a country, whether they've got money or not, they've moved around the world.

[00:31:02] Although, you know, by their very nature, they are go get it, people. But there is an economic argument in not pushing migrants too far. And that's the expression is called capital broadening versus capital deepening. If you're bringing in a large increase in population each year, then to make it function properly, which, of course, I'm not going to accuse the Australian government of doing, you've got to be providing a large range of infrastructure of the same type you currently have. You need more roads, more houses, more schools, more hospitals, et cetera, et cetera. It's got a key face. It's capital broadening.

[00:31:29] And that would be why the housing argument would apply, because, you know, maybe there are. Yeah. In that particular case, yeah. But then you also have capital deepening where you develop new technologies, get advanced ideas and so on. And that is actually, if you have a lower level of migration, then you don't have the same need at the state level anyway to fight all that expanding infrastructure. So you expand the quality of infrastructure for everybody. And you can see China doing that with a declining population.

[00:31:56] The quality of infrastructure for Chinese people is rising dramatically as their population is falling. So there is a, if you had a rising population, then you couldn't do the same quality level of work. You'd have to be, you know, expanding the existing framework to cope with a larger number of people. Without it, you can improve the existing framework. And so there is a good argument to limit immigration. So I'm not saying the people who are complaining about it have nothing to complain about. It is too high.

[00:32:26] And it's been used to screw the working class again by bringing in people who work for lower wages. So on that side, Hanson's appealing to something real and say the same with Farage. Well, it's about 1.1% of the population in Australia last year. Well, 2024. I haven't got last year's figures. So 306,000 people were migrants. Seven out of 10 people added to the population were migrants in Australia. So 1.1% of the population. Is that too high? It seems workable to me.

[00:32:57] Oh, the little rule is that'll double your population in 70 years. Yeah. Now, do you want to double your population? That's another issue for Australia. And people see the size of Australia and think it's a giant country. Why doesn't it have lots of people? The reason it's just the rim, which is inhabitable and the rim of the country would be probably a bit larger than New Zealand, maybe four times the size of New Zealand. And we're covering close to 30 million people. We don't want 60 million on that track.

[00:33:25] So even like a 1% rate is too high. I'm actually in favour of reducing the population, both by cutting back on immigration and also by encouraging less children. Because I think we've got too many people already for the planet. We need a lower. And the lower the number, the easy, the carrying capacity is so long as you've got the capacity to produce the goods and services you need as well. Australia's already got that scale in cities like Sydney and Melbourne. You want to have a one-child policy.

[00:33:53] Now, we don't want to have a one-child, but you'd have just a whole load of spoiled grass. I'd have 0.7 of a child's believe that it's harder to aim for. All right. So, but I mean, it's not going to go on forever, though, is it? So the world population is growing about 1%. And the predictions are, I think, it'll get to about 10.3 billion. So it's slowing already. Every year is a little bit less than the year before. Yeah, but we're going to get to 10.3 billion. I'm expecting a plunge. It would optimistic me. I see that. Before we get to that 10.3 billion, yeah, we're going to have global warming.

[00:34:22] Before we get to that point, yeah. Then we'll be down to 2 billion or whatever your number is. I won't go there in this particular podcast. Because we don't have four days to cover it. But yeah. But yeah. Anyway, so before we get there. Okay. But my point I was trying to make, sorry, is that we're going to – migration is slowing because the world population growth is slowing.

[00:34:44] And presumably as well, as the world economy grows, you would hope if we ignored climate change, which we will just for now, then more people are becoming wealthier in the world. And so there'll be less need to migrate. The only issue is wars, which argue against that. Well, yeah. I mean, the main drivers of migration have been poverty and wars without a doubt. And so you eliminate those, you eliminate migration. Because nobody wants to leave where they live. I mean, this is the – unless you live where somebody is completely miserable.

[00:35:14] And I've been in countries where people feel like Romania at one point. North of England. Some parts of the Middle East and India. Yeah. But if your society is functioning well, why the hell leave? That's the real – so it's dysfunctional societies that lead to that. And a lot of this dysfunctionality has come out of Western imperialism, America's stupidity with wars. If you want to see where the migrants are coming from, see where America's bombed in the last 20 years. And that's a pretty good guide.

[00:35:44] But so it's – you know, they're blaming the wrong thing. They're blaming the symptom, not the cause in that sense. But the thing is, that'll work. And we might have quite right-wing governments taking over the whole world in the next two or three years. Yeah. And even after – even abjects, there's an explosion of Trump. Trump is going to destroy right-wing politics in America for at least a few weeks, maybe a couple of years. I just don't know. Do you? I don't know.

[00:36:10] I mean, he hasn't plummeted as much in the polls as you might expect. And there's still a large part of the population that's bolted onto him and seems to be the same with Farage. Although maybe if they don't deliver anything in the UK, one nation in Australia as well, if they were to get into power and they didn't deliver anything, then maybe attitudes would change. But people are still wedded to this idea that migrants are the root cause of our problems.

[00:36:38] So if you say, well, okay, we're going to slow down migration, a bit like, you know, you don't want to do it too quickly. Just as you don't want to add too much too quickly to the population, you also don't want to slow the growth of migrants too quickly as well, do you? Because, I mean, that will, short term, that will, you know, cause real problems for the economy. Yeah. But, I mean, the migration has been used to reduce wages and weaken the working class.

[00:37:05] And what we need is a campaign to strengthen the working class, get back to trade, having trade unions existing, get back to decent wage rises. None of that's going to come out of the right-wing push. So we're seeing- It'll happen. So I expect dissatisfaction after dissatisfaction once, if they do win the election, as you say, for arch is the most likely. Right. So you don't think it's a coincidence that we're seeing migration slowing down and we're also seeing wages increasing in countries like the UK, for example.

[00:37:34] Do you think it could be because- The general trend I'm talking about the last 40 years, wages have not risen as fast as GDP for the last 40 years. Yeah. So they might be rising a bit, but they're not- The share going to the bankers has risen at the expense of the working class. Yeah, but that's not necessarily migrants, is it? That's just the structure of the economy. No, it's not migrants. Yeah, yeah. The migrants are used to strengthen it because you get cheap wages from migrants and so it benefits the ruling class yet again.

[00:38:01] And so all these policies which are seen as anti-migrant end up being anti-working class. And so the wealthy wins and then what that means is you get a skewed distribution of income and that makes people angrier. But increasingly we're not going to need those migrant workers because more is being done through mechanization, for example. Except when we look at things like health services and they tend to be government jobs. Yeah. And I don't know, so it's the government's choice as to whether they choose to pay people poorly or not.

[00:38:30] You'd assume if it was a government that looked after people and was getting told wages are very low, they'd make sure that they paid people a decent amount. Yeah. I mean, it's the work, it's often what we're doing is migration is exploiting education systems elsewhere in the world as well. So, you know, I don't know why anybody who does a degree in medicine would go to the UK given how bad the pay rates are. But if you come from a depressed third world country, you'll do it.

[00:38:52] So most, a huge part of the service done in those health sectors is by third world migrants, the very ones who will be no longer there anymore. And then that will then turn up in longer queues in NHS, which will increase arguments for abolishing the NHS and you'll end up with a totally privatized system and that'll be worse still. So, you know, gee, I'm a pessimistic bastard. It's just, I mean, I just feel like it's hard in an increasingly connected world to say that we're going to reduce migration.

[00:39:20] You almost need to, I mean, and, you know, it's hyper hypocritical of both of us to talk about it when you're, you know, living in Thailand and I'm living in Australia. We're both living in places that we weren't born and we've gone there for a better life or more opportunity. So, you know, and that's just human nature, isn't it? And the UK, Australia is, you know, getting on for well a third of the population of Australia wasn't born here.

[00:39:49] It's a country built on migration and it seems to have done all right as a consequence of it. Yeah, but there's a question of, you know, the scale of migration coming in, the skills that people have and how, you know, what the standard of living is. And, you know, we're feeding this into a class system. And the increase in the labour supply is going to give more bargaining power to the employers versus the workers. And you also, you know, the unions are being destroyed.

[00:40:17] So you end up, this ends up, the migration ends up reducing the income of the working class and they're the ones who are voting for Pauline Hanson. So there's, you'd assume that these new parties, if they get into power, would impose much tighter immigration restrictions. They might not block immigration entirely, although they might. Right. But they would start to be more particular about who comes in. You know, it's like the John Howard will decide who comes into our country and in what circumstances.

[00:40:47] Well, there's nothing wrong with that. Of course, you should be able to do that. And that means, well, OK, take, I mean, Australia has always had, you know, this point system to try and get the best of what's needed. And a list of occupations that are required because there's a shortage. And, you know, you used to, the first time I came here was I had to do labour market testing to show that I was doing a job. Couldn't be done by an Australian. So all of those checks and balances were in place.

[00:41:14] And surely then, you know, it's just a question of ensuring that those controls exist. So the population growth doesn't run away. The migrant population growth doesn't run away. And you don't get the people who aren't needed, the people who are going to drive wages down, for example. And if they are casual workers, you need to make sure that you've got protections in place to ensure that the salary that's paid to these workers fits a minimum wage, which applies to everyone, whether they're born in Australia or not. I mean, none of that is particularly complicated, is it?

[00:41:43] No, it sounds like a great movie plot. You should write it. Because it's a dream, you think. It ain't going to happen in the real world, OK? There's more fantasy in the real world than there is in Hollywood. And so all those ideas will be trashed and we'll just let the market rule. And anybody wants to work. Look at the HB180 visa, I think, in America. Like what Trump is doing, you're probably aware of this, is that he's – the visa that used to let skilled migrants get to America was free and now cost $100,000.

[00:42:11] So that's the end of skilled migration to America. OK. The whole idea that this will be controlled well – now look at the people who – it's the neoliberals who set up the disaster. They thought they were professionals and they don't understand the economy. So that's where a lot of the disasters have come from. But now the right-wing is coming in, know even less about that, but still accept the same politics as the neoliberals. So we certainly won't get anything planned coming out of this. It might just be a total shutdown. So –

[00:42:39] And then it'll be how you react to what damage that does to other parts of the economy and people with the capacity to lobby the government, which will be the Gina Reinhart's of the world. So there's – so cutting back on the skilled migrants, what's that going to do to GDP in America, for example? I mean, you'd assume it's going to inhibit growth. Because I gave a list of all those names in Australia, people who've set up businesses over the decades who are migrants into the country.

[00:43:04] And then if you look in the UK, Deliveroo was – OK – founded by an American but started in the UK. Revolut, which is the banking – the fintech company, which is huge now. The guy who started – it's from Russia. Similarly, the guys who started Wise, UK companies. The founders are from Estonia. Yeah. You know, a lot of the innovation is coming from people.

[00:43:28] And it's been shown time and time again, migrants very often are the innovators because they are the people who've had the gumption to move to a different country where they perhaps see the opportunity and they can grasp it more. Yeah, there is a certain amount of dynamism that comes out of migration. And like, if you remember, you're not old enough for the right nationality to remember Australia in the 1950s and 60s. But my God, the food was boring. Like, we used to stand up for movies, to stand up for the Queen at the start of movies. Forget that.

[00:43:56] The cultural – it was a cultural wasteland in some ways. I think there were four good restaurants that were in my recollection in Sydney. Like, I didn't enter the upper end of the echelons, but Kale's restaurants and stuff like that, that was high cuisine. And the extent to which Australian culture was dramatically improved by the migration from Vietnam and Cambodia after the end of the stupid wars there can't be overstated.

[00:44:20] I guess it's – and the thing is, if you live in Toowoomba and you don't get exposed to that side, then you end up – the racism comes from people who don't know people from different races. Yeah. That's almost – Yeah, absolutely. Always the area where there's the – and that's why the One Nation Party is doing very well in regional Australia because there's not many migrants in regional Australia. So, yeah. So, I'm in Powermata, which – I'm living in Powermata now, which used to be a really rough end of town. And now a lot of Chinese and Indian people, and they're, of course, well-to-do Chinese and Indian people.

[00:44:49] And, you know, there's – it feels like a place that's going places. Yeah, yeah. So, there is – the diversity helps, but there is still the argument in favour of maintaining a predominant culture in a country. So, I can understand the framing there. You know, India wants to maintain Indian philosophy, China the same. There's no problem with Australia and America saying the same thing. But that doesn't mean monoculturism. It means like a shared set of values. Yeah.

[00:45:19] Which – I mean, Australia – America pretends to have democracy as a shared set of values. Ha, ha, ha. But that's – that they expect people to share that, and they'll criticise anybody who says it's authoritarian, despite the total conflict between their own behaviour and their ideology. But the idea of you do want to maintain your culture, but there's a certain benefit from mixing other cultures in. And if you imagine – try to imagine Australia without the impact of the European and Asian migration. Hmm.

[00:45:48] It'd make England look interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Sorry. Yeah, wow. Wow. So, wow, you actually said that. England is fascinating. I know. I know. Final – Except for the weather. Except for the weather, yeah. It's very depressing. So, if there's – if you're slowing growth, though, I mean, part of the problem – and again, this gets back to, you know, to neoclassic economics, doesn't it? And just the way we're accustomed to see GDP growth. It's been very easy to throw the numbers at it.

[00:46:17] If you've got population growth and you're going to have a bigger consumer base, you're going to have a bigger work base, you're going to see GDP grow. You might not see GDP per capita grow, but you'll see the growth of the nation increase. If you start to slow that growth down by having less migrants – I think it's – I think it's, you know, a place like Australia, there's about two-thirds migration to one-third natural growth. If you slow that down, say so it's evenly matched, then you're losing a third of your population growth each year. I'm quite in favour of that.

[00:46:46] I think population growth's been too high. Right. And I think Australia's gone from the past what I've seen as a sensible carrying capacity. So I don't mind that. And we can navigate that without seeing a major slowdown in the growth of the economy. Well, it's broadening. It's growth, not growth. It's growth, not growth per capita. And it'll benefit the top end of the spectrum, but it won't benefit the mass of the people. So we've gone – and we're restraining the biosphere as well very dramatically,

[00:47:15] as we're going to find out the hard way in the next few years. So I think the idea of rising human population, I think, is a bad idea, both at the national level and also globally. I think it was Switzerland that tried to vote for a cap on the growth of the population. It didn't quite get off the ground, but I think it was close. That was in the news this week. All right. Well, okay. I'm sure we'll revisit it all soon, and we'll see which way these countries vote in the future.

[00:47:44] But Nigel Farage for the UK Prime Minister, that's one thing. Pauline Hanson, God help us, as an Australian Prime Minister. Then that might actually reverse the migration problem. I think it would. I might be going back. I might go back and live under Farage. Anyway, very good. We'll see you next time, Steve. Okay, Matt. See you then. Bye.

[00:48:11] If you've enjoyed listening to debunking economics, even if you haven't, you might also enjoy The Y Curve. Each week, Roger Hearing and I talk to a guest about a topic that is very much in the news that week. It's lively. It's fun. It's informative. What more could you want? So search The Y Curve in your favourite podcast app or go to ycurve.com to listen.