By Lisa Macdonald
The ALP has done it again. Invoking those old discredited Malthusian arguments which blame population growth for almost every social and environmental ill, newly elected NSW Premier Bob Carr has launched an attack on immigration and migrants which Geoffrey Blainey would be proud of.
In response to a Premier's Department briefing paper which argues that unchecked urban development in Sydney is causing a host of environmental problems, Carr announced on May 20 that he has directed the NSW Department of Planning and Urban Affairs to set a limit on Sydney's population and to lobby the federal government over annual immigration targets.
Basing his attack on the facts that Australia's migrant intake has increased by 20,000 in the past two years and that four in every 10 migrants come to NSW, Carr said, "We have been too ambitious in setting immigration targets beyond the capacity of the great cities to absorb".
"Immigration is too high on economic as well as environmental grounds", he added.
The premier, who is also NSW minister for ethnic affairs, is arguing that the federal government should offer incentives for migrants to live in other cities by giving them extra points which they need to accumulate in order to migrate to Australia.
But Carr isn't limiting his sights to those migrants who want to live in Sydney. Hot on the heels of the ACTU's call earlier in May for a freezing of the migrant intake levels in the name of reducing unemployment, Carr announced that he intends to lead a national debate on immigration levels and argue for lower targets. "I am concerned about the ecological problems ... which the entire continent is experiencing."
The federal minister for immigration, Senator Nick Bolkus, has questioned Carr's assertion that Sydney's population growth is out of control. But Carr's outburst coincides with a federal government pilot scheme, to begin on July 1, which aims to do just what Carr is demanding.
The federal government has established Regional Economic Development Organisations which will sponsor young skilled migrants with good English skills to regional and low growth areas. One hundred places have been allocated to this scheme for the next financial year, at the end of which it will be reviewed. According to the 1993 report "Sydney into the 21st Century", however, past attempts by government to decentralise urban growth, notably in the 1950s and '60s, has usually failed.
In addition to the predictable applause from groups such as Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population, Carr's crusade is supported by the head of the NSW Ethnic Affairs Commission, Stephan Kerkyansharian, and the Australian Conservation Foundation.
The ACF's population policy, adopted in June 1993, states "Australia has ... the highest population growth rate in the developed world ... [It] has a low birth rate per female but is committed to immigration ... It is the immigration rate which will be crucial in controlling the growth of Australia's population" (their emphasis). While noting that account should be taken of the need to accept refugees, the ACF policy advocates that "we progressively reduce immigration so that the annual target for permanent immigration will be equal to the permanent emigration of the previous year".
Carr's comments are ill informed, draconian and hypocritical all at once. True, Sydney is a rapidly worsening environmental and planning disaster. Much of the urban infrastructure, some of it centuries old, is overburdened and crumbling. Major traffic jams are a daily occurrence. Numerous official reports attest to the extensive pollution of the city's waterways. Air pollution levels are approaching maximum allowable levels under national and international health guidelines.
This deterioration has occurred at the same time as Sydney's population has grown. But this does not mean that these problems are primarily caused by, or will be solved by limiting, total population growth, let alone limiting the growth of the migrant population in particular.
It is grossly hypocritical for Carr to make such arguments while simultaneously pursuing policies which will exacerbate the real causes of the urban environmental crisis.
Calling for population limits while pursuing a massive freeway building program, including the widely opposed M2 and M5 tollways, while public transport funding is decimated and services privatised, for example, is absurd.
Likewise, supporting the corporatisation of basic utilities such as the NSW Water Board, thereby releasing it from broader public accountability and control, can only contribute to the destruction of our waterways as profitability takes priority over safeguarding public health.
And endorsing a second airport at Badgerys Creek, in the heart of Sydney's fastest growing housing area and right next to Warragamba Dam (which provides over 30% of Sydney's water supply) is madness from the point of view of both environmental sustainability and social justice.
The population figures being used by Carr are themselves misleading. The migrant intake in NSW is greater than all other states, but in the past decade it has increased only from 30,000 per year (or 38.8% of the total national intake) to 32,000 (42%). Over the past few years, movement between states has meant that NSW has had a lower population growth rate than the national average. Sydney's population growth rate has in fact declined from 1.13% per year in 1986-91 to 0.68% in 1993-94.
Apart from the attractiveness of Sydney to new migrants as a result of the lower unemployment rate in that city, the NSW Ethnic Communities Council has pointed out that Carr's attack ignores the importance of family reunion as a motive for migrating.
Taken to its logical conclusion, Carr's desire for fewer migrants in Sydney means either cutting Australia's intake of family reunion migrants (many of whom will inevitably come to Sydney because their family is already living here) or implementing policies which would force migrants and their families to relocate and live in regional areas.
Of course, Carr has not attempted to address the questions: Who is to be relocated? Who makes the decision? Given that all people, new migrants or not, will want to live somewhere where they can earn a living, and given the above-average unemployment levels in almost all regional centres, how would this policy be policed?
Confronting such questions would expose Carr's statements for what they are — a fundamental attack on basic democratic rights, including the rights to a have job, to live where and with whom you choose and to freedom of movement.
The premier's focus on population is not simply a mistake on his part. It serves to divert attention from the real causes of the environment crisis and from the measures necessary to achieve ecological sustainability and a higher quality of life for all people.
These measures would require a massive diversion of capital and other resources from the private sector to public works and services, a move which is totally unpalatable to those with economic and political power in this society — big business and its servants in the major parties.
It is much easier and more consistent with their own interests for ALP politicians and bureaucrats to blame ordinary people, who make up that "plague on the planet" which populationists are so fond of referring to.
It is easier still, in the search for a more targeted, publicly identifiable scapegoat, to blame new migrants, who have minimal resources and political clout with which to fight back.