ADDRESS TO THE AUSTRALIA DAY COUNCIL (VICTORIA) AUSTRALIA DAY DINNER, MELBOURNE.

Australia Day has many meanings. To some, it’s just a holiday. To others, it’s a celebration of the good things about our country. To Aboriginal people, although perhaps a dwindling number, it’s sometimes considered invasion day. Strictly speaking, though, it commemorates the formal establishment of modern Australia. It marks the first arrival of the ways of life, the habits of mind and the processes of government that have defined this country.

Our unreflecting assumption is that the people who founded modern Australia were Australians. In fact, the people who raised the flag and toasted the Crown on January 26 1788 were Australia’s first modern migrants. The loyal toasts soon descended into a riotous party, a very Australian thing it might be thought. That does not alter the essential fact that our nation is as much the product of the people who’ve come here as of the people who’ve been here.

Except for the half million or so who identify as Aboriginal, every other Australian is an immigrant or the descendant of immigrants since 1788. Unlike any other, we are a nation of relatively recent immigrants. New Zealand has a proportionately larger indigenous population and North America has been settled for almost two centuries longer. This means, of course, that the immigrant who feels like a stranger in our midst is really at the heart of the Australian story.

To the extent that it is a celebration of our nation, Australia Day is necessarily a salute to an immigrant culture. In stating the obvious, I intend no disrespect to the Aboriginal people, whose sense of community and connectedness to land and whose laconic and stoic approach to life has become part of the Australian character. What’s curious, then, is the ambivalence that many Australians feel about immigration even though it’s so central to our national experience.

Within a generation, Australia’s settlers felt somewhat different from their connections in Britain. To this day, a strong sense of kith and kin with other English-speaking peoples has co-existed with an equally powerful sense that we are unique. The populist view that everything about Australia is beyond reproach, especially from outsiders, exists in tension with a restless striving to be better and a sense that we’re not yet our best selves. It’s “the moral middle class” versus the instinct to give “three cheers for Australia”. We do indeed have a history to be proud of, not just because it’s ours, but because it’s been a record of exceptional achievement.

Long before modern notions of human rights, white men had been hanged for the murder of blacks. Within a century, the former penal colony had amongst the world’s highest standards of living. It was the Australian army on which many of the decisive battles of World War One turned. It was in Australia that notions of the equality of the sexes and the equal dignity of every person regardless of birth or wealth first and perhaps most fully took hold.

Central to Australians’ self-perception has been this idea of a country where the most disadvantaged could get ahead provided they were prepared to “have a go”. The First Fleet contained a smattering of many nationalities as well as large percentages of Scots and Irish. The gold rushes brought an influx of Americans as well as Chinese, not all of whom returned to their homeland. A generation before World War Two, Australia had significant Italian and Greek communities. Then there was the post-war influx, first of Eastern Europeans, then from the Mediterranean, and later from Asia.

As the historian Ed Campion describes Australia: the English made the laws, the Scots made the money and the Irish made the songs. As Cardinal Moran put it, it was in Australia that the Irish first knew justice under the Crown. Australia happens to be the only country in the world (apart from Israel) where Jews have held the positions of army commander, chief justice and head of state. These days it’s of only passing interest when a premier is the son of Italian immigrants; a governor is of Lebanese descent; or a minister identifies as Aboriginal. It just confirms for us that people’s contributions are not determined by their backgrounds.

For all the misguided and sometimes cruel treatment of Aborigines, the ethnic typecasting and occasional snobbery which still exists, Australia has rarely seen domestic discrimination based on race or culture. Conversely, despite Chinatowns and Little Italys in our big cities, based more on economic opportunity than conscious desire to stay aloof, Australia has largely avoided the ethnic and cultural enclaves that now exist in many of the countries of Europe. The welcome customarily extended to migrants has been amply reciprocated. Successive waves of migrants have quickly adapted to their new country and, at least by the second generation, thought of themselves as Australians.

Immigration to Australia has been a success almost unparalleled in history. Why, then, does it regularly feature on the list of issues that people are concerned about? Three factors seem to be at work here. First, unauthorised boat arrivals have raised fears that Australia’s borders are again uncontrolled. Second, some recent immigrants seem resistant to Australian notions of equality. And third, there is concern about whether the natural and built environment can cope with the population pressures that immigration contributes to. There is, I suspect, an anxiety that the great prize of Australian citizenship is insufficiently appreciated and given away too lightly.

Australia’s problem with unauthorised arrivals is smaller than that of the United States, where would-be immigrants merely have to swim the Rio Grande; or that of Europe where would-be immigrants only have to cross the Mediterranean or move to the more attractive parts of an increasingly borderless continent. Still, in a world where crime and terrorism are international in scope and where every developed country’s social security system is under pressure, a policy of benign unconcern about new arrivals would defy common sense. The first duty of every government is to its own citizens. Its responsibilities to non-citizens have to be consistent with safeguarding the welfare of its own people.

The problem with simply accommodating boat arrivals is not (at this point) the numbers it would add to the immigration programme. There is a principle at stake here. John Howard’s declaration about Australians controlling who comes to this country resonated because it struck most people as self-evidently and robustly true. As well, we can’t be confident that the numbers would stay at the 3000 or so who have arrived since the Rudd Government adopted what it said was a more compassionate approach; or that they would peak at the 4000 who arrived in the year before the Howard Government first imposed tough and effective border protection policies.

Many conscientious people continue to be dismayed by what they see as the harsh treatment of boat people. Of course, Australia has an obligation to people in fear for their lives or to those who have been found to be refugees but this has to be balanced against our obligation not to become a soft touch for everyone seeking a better life. Unfortunately, there are no easy ways to deter people who want to force themselves on Australia. The alternative to mandatory detention is the risk that people might disappear into the community. The alternative to “locking up women and children” is separating family members. The alternative to strict border protection is tacit encouragement for people to risk their lives at sea. It’s this element of danger which creates the distinction between boat arrivals on the one hand and, on the other, people who arrive without putting themselves in peril, on a valid visa, and only subsequently become unauthorised over-stayers.

It’s far from obvious how to strike a judicious balance here. Giving boat people what they want is not self-evidently morally preferable to strict deterrence if it encourages more of them to take great risks on the open sea. The critics of border protection policy under both the current government as well as its predecessor need to ask themselves at what point would the size of any unauthorised influx become a concern. They further need to explain why it’s better to wait for the problem to become worse before tackling it. Still, a country that’s alive to the shades of grey inherent in aspects of government policy is more likely to find an acceptable balance between competing moral claims.

For their part, the supporters of border protection need to understand that it’s no reflection on boat people that they want to come to Australia. Why wouldn’t people who might otherwise wait in camps for years try to short-circuit the process especially if they’re plausibly told that getting to Australia means the beginning of a new life? At worst, boat people are guilty of choosing hope over fear. Although the main villains, of course, are the people smugglers, a government which allowed desperate people to think that getting on a boat might be a shortcut to permanent residency in Australia would hardly be blameless.

A strong border protection policy is perfectly consistent with a large and inclusive immigration programme. In fact, it’s probably essential if the public is to be convinced that Australia’s immigration policy is run by the Government rather than by people smugglers. It’s not surprising that the 67 per cent of Australians who thought that the immigration intake was too high in 1993 had dropped to just 34 per cent by 2004 even though the intake had increased.

Under the Howard Government, there was little public questioning of a large immigration programme because people were persuaded that it was being run firmly in Australia’s national interest. As well as strict border protection, the former Government doubled to four years the period of residency required for citizenship, reduced new migrants’ access to welfare and gave more weight to the ability to speak English in the immigration points system. The Labor Party may not have liked these changes but it did not oppose them perhaps because it understood that perceptions of an open door policy were undermining Australia’s traditional openness to immigrants.

The last thing that any Australian should want is to make recent immigrants feel unwelcome in their new country. After all, they have voted with their feet for Australia in a way that the rest of us have not. That’s why we should be especially concerned at the possibility that ethnic Indians have become the victims of racially motivated crime. This would be worse than a law enforcement problem. It would be an affront to our self-perception as society where people are judged on their merits rather than on their skin colour. Conversely, the rise of ethnic gangs and perceptions of ethnic street crime threaten the community understanding that migration should be overwhelmingly a net benefit to Australia.

The former Mufti of Australia Sheik Hilaly’s highly publicized attacks on women and Jews have struck many people as un-Australian and prompted much anxiety about importing social problems. Ninety years ago, so did the attacks of Archbishop Mannix on the conduct of the First World War and there were calls for him to be deported. There has hardly been a time when there were not some reservations about the loyalty of particular ethnic or religious groups. A generation or two on, all of them have eventually become as Australian as everyone else.

It’s not necessary to be an immigrant from a traditional society to find much about modern Australia challenging. There are plenty of descendants of the First Fleet who deplore the constant questioning of authority and what they see as the licentiousness that is an element of contemporary Australia. Still, Australians are profoundly uncomfortable with any perspective on the world that is said to be ordained by God without the need for recourse to reasoned argument.

Australia makes very few demands of its immigrants. There is no ideal of Australian-ness to which they are expected to conform. There is no expectation that migrants will lose their affection for their country of birth. The policy of multiculturalism expressed our willingness to let them assimilate in their own way and at their own pace because of our confidence in the gravitational pull of the Australian way of life. Even so, the inescapable minimum that we insist upon is obedience to the law. A corollary of our non-discriminatory immigration programme is our requirement that Australians should treat other Australians with respect even where they disagree with them. It would help to bolster public support for immigration and acceptance of social diversity if more minority leaders were as ready to show to mainstream Australian values the respect they demand for their own.

At a time when there was more anxiety than now about the composition of the intake, former Prime Minister Bob Hawke conceded that immigration policy had become a kind of bipartisan conspiracy of the elites against the public. It would be a pity to stifle debate on population policy in the way that concerns about immigration policy sometimes have been. Population growth has such ramifications for so many other policies (such as whether it’s realistic to meet substantial emission reduction targets) that debate should certainly not be shut down even though some people fear that it might be code for hostility to immigration.

It’s not surprising that people worry about immigration when our cities seem to be bursting at the seams and when existing and planned infrastructure can hardly cope with the present population let alone the additional 14 million (almost entirely due to immigration) that the Prime Minister expects by 2050. An alternative to discouraging immigrants, as the former NSW Premier Bob Carr tried to do, is to ensure that the facilities exist to cope with current and forecast numbers.

It’s easy to be despondent about the capacity of many of our state governments to provide the infrastructure that a significantly higher population will require. In the past 15 years, for instance, the NSW Government has announced $28 billion worth of rail projects that have never gone ahead. It’s easy to worry about the future environmental sustainability of Sydney and Melbourne, each with seven million people, when land and water resources are already under such pressure. In the mid 1960s, though, when Sydney’s population was just two and a half million, the extra one and a half million it now has would also, no doubt, have seemed completely unmanageable.

Dysfunctional state governments notwithstanding, Sydney’s roads, sewerage, health and education infrastructure has coped (if only just). In some respects, it’s even improved. Thanks to deep ocean outfalls, water quality on beaches has improved. Thanks to a better understanding of pollution and effective measures against it, the sharks are back in Sydney Harbour. Outside peak hours, it’s easier to drive around on a motorway network that’s not too far away from being joined up. A higher population has been consistent with a better life for most people because we’ve had the economic and technological strength to sustain it.

Prime Minister Rudd’s endorsement of the Intergenerational Report’s population projection should be much less of a worry than his lack of endorsement of the specific wealth-boosting reform plans that would make it sustainable. We can’t count on 180,000 migrants a year for the next four decades without also planning for the infrastructure to make this feasible.

It can be done though. Since 1970, an Australia that’s four times richer has more than coped with a population that’s two times greater. What’s needed is the same foresight and commitment to economic reform over the next 25 years that the Hawke, Keating and Howard governments brought to the last 25 years. It’s good that the Prime Minister is talking about the need for planning and for courageous decisions to meet the challenges of the mid century. It would be even better if he would actually make some prior to the next election. That would give Australians more confidence that the national government had not succumbed to the cycle of spin over substance which so often afflicts state politics.

Australia’s population is a function of the death rate, the birth rate and the immigration rate. Obviously, the death rate should be as low as possible. The birth rate should be determined by the choices that Australian families make. The immigration rate should depend upon the strength of Australia’s economy, the confidence of our society and the readiness of potential migrants to make a commitment to their new country. The right population for Australia is the one that these choices determine. With the best technologies, including the harvesting of urban rainwater otherwise wasted, there’s no reason to think that Australia has a fixed carrying capacity, the population equivalent of the Goyder line.

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

Source: Tony Abbott