Extract from "Beautiful lies"

by Tim Flannery

Australians need to acknowledge their own natures. Not the noble vision we have of ourselves as the nation of the "fair go", but the rough beast that raises its head whenever we forsake our commitment to a world view based on humanism or kindness, that kinship that links us with the stranger.

The Hawke years brought a significant shift in immigration policy. While the majority of migrants still hailed from Europe, for the first time since the gold rush significant numbers of Chinese were also coming. Their visibility on the Australian social radar was heightened unforgettably by the Prime Minister’s tearful announcement that 40,000 visas would be issued to the Chinese students already in Australia at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre. It was a compassionate gesture that did something to ameliorate the horror felt by many ordinary Australians who had watched events in Beijing unfold nightly on their television screens, and as a gesture it was spontaneously welcomed by many people. Nevertheless, no one could argue that it was the best way of expending Australia’s limited capacity for population growth in the cause of human rights, nor the most astute political move in a deeply xenophobic nation.

As Hawke gave way to Paul Keating and levels of migration remained high, strains began to show in the Australian social fabric. The nation was, famously, to "become part of Asia". It was an announcement easily misunderstood, for the speaker was also the prime minister who felt that Australia was positioned at the arse end of the world and who patently preferred the sophistication of Europe.

In poll after poll an overwhelming majority of Australians - around 70 per cent at times - stated that they believed the level of immigration was too high. Many otherwise reasonable Australians believed that their way of life was under threat by large numbers of people whom they thought of as different from themselves. Not a beautiful lie, perhaps, but in an insular, relatively homogeneous society, an understandable one. Many educated Australians were deeply shocked and dismayed by the veer to the right that Australian politics took in the 1990s, yet it seems almost impossible that they did not see it coming. Pauline Hanson was elected to Federal Parliament and went on to become a potent force in Australian politics, and partly in response to the same wave of feeling John Howard dramatically lowered immigration. The Labor Party was routed federally and remains in disarray today, with immigration in its various manifestations the great and ongoing stumbling block to its recovery.

The re-election of the Howard government has seen a different set of concerns arise in relation to immigration. The Chinese and other recent Asian migrants have long since been accepted by the majority of Australians. Now it’s the Muslims who "really are different, you know" - who represent a threat in the public mind and supposedly will never fit in. Following the Tampa crisis, a rigorously applied policy of detention has seen potential migrants who arrive unofficially be trapped within an inhuman bureaucracy. Implementing this terrible system may well have choked off the arrival of boat people, but it has disgraced our nation in the eyes of the world and materially damaged our commitment to the fair go. And still the Howard government has no population policy. In fact, Philip Ruddock has stated on television that a national debate on population would not result in a population policy. It is my worst fear that the development of a policy has been held up because in a policy vacuum a government can do many things to serve sectional interests at the expense of the national good.

The self-interest of various sectors of Australian society is powerful indeed, and all too often they justify their lobbying with more retailing of beautiful lies. Business needs population growth to generate huge and easy profits, and it is from the business community that some of the most rosy-spectacled optimists about population hail. In the United States, illegal immigration is openly welcomed by business, for it provides a pool of unprotected workers that can be used on a "just in time" basis, like any other commodity of modern business enterprise. Australian industry is not yet calling for more illegal immigration, but its cries for more migration overall are incessant and clamorous. The boosters justify their position either by denying that the environment represents any constraint at all on population growth, or by asserting that changing technologies and human cunning will solve all problems the future may throw up.

It is possible, I suppose, that the majority of captains of industry see their interests and those of Australia as one and the same, especially when it comes to population. Why shouldn’t the free marketeer believe in the free flow of people and also subscribe to an ideology of freedom for all? Still it is remarkable to hear CEO after CEO, Chairman of the Board after Chairman of the Board, call for more migrants just as they are cutting their own workforces - something we have seen happen again and again at great human cost over the last few decades.

I believe that the self-interest of the business immigration program is morally dubious on a number of grounds. First of all, it can serve to undercut Australia’s commitment to its own education programs. By bringing in trained graduates from overseas we both deprive developing nations of desperately needed expertise and undercut our obligation to train our own youth. If you take the narrow view, it makes "business" sense to get someone else to pay for the education of your workers, but it is liable to be deeply damaging to Australian society. Secondly, as American employers all too clearly know, immigration can undercut the conditions enjoyed by workers. When the growing crisis in Australian nursing became evident last year, the knee-jerk reaction of some was to call for increased immigration of nurses. This conveniently ignored the fact that to work in the creaking public health-care system was becoming an increasingly insupportable option for many dedicated health-care professionals, which was why they were leaving in droves. To bring outsiders in to a failing system is clearly not a way to pool resources or to proffer a solution to a problem that can never be solved by minimising expenses.

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It looks to me that immigration is to Australian business what Snowy water is to the irrigators - an essentially "free" good that has resulted in addiction to an environmentally unsustainable business model. By world standards, Australia has one of the highest rates of immigration anywhere on the earth. In the absence of a population policy, this should at the very least be a matter for lively discussion between all Australians. It should not be swept under the carpet, nor should the implications for the future fail to be spelled out.

Environmentalists tend to take a precautionary approach in population matters: that is, to allow for increased immigration when the gains from improved technologies, or a commitment to more moderate affluence, are clearly in place. To paraphrase Philip Ruddock, let’s increase Australia’s stocking rate only when we see substantial improvements in the quality of the farm. Environmentalists are often criticised because their approach threatens to leave many desperate people beyond the reach of our compassion and assistance. Yet no conceivable refugee program could allow Australia to assist all or even proportionately very many of the desperate people of the world. Instead we need to create a better world by wielding our foreign aid budget and foreign policies as weapons that aim squarely at delivering the greatest benefits for the greatest number of people we know we can touch, however indirectly. I believe that as things stand today, it is important to limit Australia’s immigration intake. I do not know at what level that intake should be, but I think that establishing this figure should be the first job of those entrusted with developing a population policy, and that the development of such a policy is crucial to the responsible government of Australia.

It is also fair to ask what the composition of the overall immigration program should be if it is regulated under the umbrella of a just and humane population policy. Again the question is difficult to answer, but one determining factor should be the relative cost-benefit of spending dollars overseas as opposed to spending them on assisting refugees to settle in Australia. Another would be the effect of events beyond our control. Wars and revolutions, famines and acts of God, might mean that Australia would have to give refuge to large numbers in one year, fewer in the next. This would need to be offset against other elements of the program, or perhaps by "borrowing" against intakes for future years.

Would illegal immigrants still be locked away under inhumane conditions under such a program? Possibly, but not necessarily. It all depends upon us, and how successful we are in recognising, then changing, the beast of xenophobia that raises its head in Australia whenever we lose sight of those ideals - let’s call them humanist as a shorthand - that constitute our better nature.

As we feel our way towards socially just population and environmental policies, we will make such progress as we can armed only with an imperfect knowledge of key issues and needful constraints. Would a population of 30 million, at current levels of affluence and technology, irretrievably cripple the environment to be inherited by future generations of Australians? Will technology radically change so that a larger population can be accommodated? Or will Australians be content to settle with less affluence so that there can be a larger number of us? These are some of the great unknowns. But we cannot just go on as if these questions do not exist. The fact that we cannot escape our uncertainty will mean that mistakes will be made - and this may lead to further environmental or social damage - but a brave leadership true to a properly humane vision deserves to be forgiven such mistakes. After all, what is the better option?

Australia today is a sweet-and-sour nation. Many rural Australians are making a difficult and fundamental transition in human ecology aimed at achieving environmental sustainability. That will require - in the short term at least - a sacrifice of affluence for many of us. But this is the sweet side of things, for it lays the foundations of a truly Australian nation and a genuine end to colonialism. Yet even as Australians are doing this, we are spreading misery all around us, and the sour taste that misery engenders will come back to haunt future generations of Australians as surely as the bitterness of salty soils and rivers.

This is an edited extract from Beautiful Lies: Population and Environment in Australia by Tim Flannery from the Quarterly Essay.

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By way of a coda, I offer this manifesto for creating a better Australia.

1. Resolve that the human consideration - creating the greatest good for the greatest number - must underlie all of our environmental, immigration and foreign policy decisions.

2. Appoint a federal minister responsible for the welfare of non-Australians. This person should be charged with creating the greatest human benefit by the use of our combined immigration and foreign aid budgets.

3. Calculate the cost to future Australians of all initiatives that affect the environment. This should include matters related to population. Such costs should be explicitly addressed in all environmental and immigration decisions.

4. Focus our environmental effort as strenuously as possible on the key issues of maintaining healthy water, air, soil and biodiversity. These issues need to be fought as we would fight a war, for the future of Australia is at stake.

5. Implement programs that empower individuals to fight, on their own terms, the threats of global warming, salination and biodiversity loss. Such programs are now urgently needed in the cities of Australia.

6. Deliver, through our education system, a clear program that does full justice to the humanistic and Enlightenment heritage which has been ours since the time of the First Fleet. Young Australians need to discover how these principles have underpinned our nation.

7. Maintain Australia as an outward-looking, confident part of the global network of humanity. We should foster understanding rather than fear, engagement rather than isolationism, as the most fundamental requirement of our democracy.

8. Try, at every step, to expose the lie of terra nullius and so move towards a post-colonial Australia that is truly at home with its environment and history, where the Aboriginal and the Asian and the White Australian can believe in the truth of a history, and the justness of a future, that is so much more than a beautiful lie.

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