This article is an instalment in a new series, “Peter Dutton is racist”, on Dutton’s history of racism and the role racism has played on both sides of politics since the 1970s.
While John Howard is denounced by progressives for his demonisation of refugees and exploitation of border security issues in the wake of 9/11, the fact is he also ran a huge immigration intake. The Howard government inherited a migration program of below 100,000 permanent arrivals a year in 1996; in 2007 nearly 200,000 people permanently arrived. Across the life of the Howard government, nearly 1.48 million people permanently settled in Australia — more than 900,000 of them after 9/11.
There was little opposition at the time, apart from Bob Carr (or Malthus of Maroubra, as early Crikey dubbed him) who declared Sydney was “full”. Some environmental groups called for substantially lower migration to curb the destruction of the environment for housing.
Howard’s supporters argued that not only was there no contradiction between being tough on border control and high immigration, but that voters’ comfort with his tough border security enabled him to let more people in. Howard, they argued, was a safe pair of hands on borders, determined to keep at bay refugees portrayed as queue-jumpers — economic migrants willing to endanger their own children, who were merged into the amorphous security threat allegedly posed by Muslims after 9/11. These were not the kind of people we wanted coming here. He could thus be trusted to determine how many migrants entered Australia.
If it ever applied, that logic no longer works politically: discontent with neoliberalism and the open borders and economic precarity that come in its wake has not merely fueled tribalism and xenophobia but pushed awareness of the costs of high migration up the political agenda. High migration is now just another example of an economic system that delivers for corporations but imposes the costs on working families. It stops ordinary Australians — half of whom have a parent born overseas — from accessing housing, services or social amenity. At the same time, they face lower wages and higher inflation as a result of high immigration.
Angst over migration thus stopped being about who could prevent refugees from arriving, and became about the total number of people coming in. Carr, it turned out, was simply ahead of everyone else.
This fusing of anti-migrant sentiment with economic uncertainty has turned what was primarily a cultural and security issue — Middle Eastern refugees were a threat to be kept out — into an economic issue, and thus undermined the Coalition’s political ownership of border security and migration. There were hints of this when Julia Gillard promised to curtail 457 visas in 2013 and forced Tony Abbott to defend them — a position that doubtless pleased the business community but may not have gone down so well in western Sydney, where Gillard was campaigning.
The current Labor government, after clamping down on abuses of foreign student visas, is happy to damage one of our key exports by capping foreign student numbers; Peter Dutton has promised to go even further — although his actual policy is only tinkering at the margins, and so vague that one of his shadow ministers stumbled badly on the issue.
For Pauline Hanson, who has devoted a career to milking hatred of migrants for every dollar she can get, the migration debate has shifted right into her lap: her line that high migration “benefits governments and big business but it’s not helping the Australian people” now sums up the positions of the major parties.
The only party of high migration now is the Greens, who went to the 2022 election with a commitment to remove impediments to maritime arrivals of asylum seekers and a promise to expand Australia’s humanitarian visa scheme to 100,000, including 40,000 refugees from Afghanistan and Ukraine. Ironically, the Greens’ policies — including a royal commission into Operation Sovereign Borders — would go much of the way to creating an open-door migration system favoured by big business (there’s a tradition of big business neoliberals being supportive of Australia being much more generous to refugees).
The Coalition would love to shift the migration debate away from overall numbers — where any commitments to reduce them incurs the wrath of the business lobby — back to its cultural and security strengths. That’s why Dutton has been blunt about a blanket ban on Palestinian refugees even after he was effectively rebuked by the head of ASIO on the issue, and why the Coalition used the indefinite detention issue to hype the threat of rapist ex-refugees. But while housing markets remain tight in major cities, it’s hard to see the economic dimension of anti-migrant hostility vanishing. It’s hard to worry about the threat of refugees when you or your kids can’t find somewhere affordable to live.
