When Tony Abbott was giving a press conference yesterday, alongside his wife, at a child care centre at Kippa Ring in the Brisbane outer northside electorate of Petrie, he was asked if his support for benefits designed to encourage Australians to have more children was inconsistent with his desire for less population growth.
Bernard Keane explains:
Abbott also wandered into dangerous territory when he was asked to reconcile his sudden dislike of population pressure with his enthusiasm for higher fertility. He ended up taking a leaf from Julie Bishop’s book and quoting Paul Keating from 1969 to the effect that Australian babies were the best immigrants (what does that even mean anyway?)
This lays bare the cynicism at the heart of both the Liberal and Labor pitches on immigration. Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott can’t be for a sustainable population and for higher fertility at the same time. More people are more people, whether they’re born here or they flew here. You don’t cause less congestion or take up a smaller seat on the bus if you’re Australian-born. And immigrants arrive here ready to go to work. Kids take two decades of rearing and educating before they’re ready to start making an economic contribution.
So why are the Labor Party and the Liberal Party singling out immigrants?
You know why.
Societies that fail to have enough children to replace themselves face serious issues, socially and economically. If Australians had more children then we would not need to be importing labour from oversees. If you want to read a very good book on demographics and the negatives of low birth rates try:
Oh No, We Forgot to Have Children! – How Declining Birth Rates are Reshaping Our Society by Deidre Macken.
As for why babies and not migrants – I would argue that Australians should not be stealing skilled labour from countries like India. We should not be poaching doctors and nurses from third world countries to come here and look after our elderly because as a society we were too busy to have kids ourselves. Developing nations need their skilled people.
Re-Actionary Man’s Plan!
For Australians worried about rabies,
Caused they think by too much immigration,
Abbott says the answer is more babies,
Born in Oz to boost our population.
Businessmen should not fret they are not skilled.
That’s solved with a clever innovation,
About which he and Margie are both thrilled -
Very Early Childhood Education!
This is no clever ploy to get more votes.
It will end waste, train boys for vocations,
Provide the manpower to “Stop the boats!”
That’s Abbott’s plan; he’ll end transportation!
Ahh. So sad to read of Kim’s covert scepticism of the new Abbott “volkisch” Lebensborn, a new master race confabulated at the outer limits of the mortgage belt, after a heavy night at the local taverna.
Will you not support the leader; could this not mean a motherhood certificate from the leader himself?
Australian babies are the best immigrants?
Why not go the whole hog Abbott and run with “We grew here you flew here” and get a Southern Cross tatoo.
No wonder journo’s were asking Hanson for her opinion last week.
Then again…I wonder what Hanson thinks about Abbott?
tssk, I’d rather go with the tall poppy theme… if it’s made overseas it’s got to be better. We all know that “made in Australia” is code for “heavily subsidised and old-fashioned”. Sort of like Abbott, in fact.
tssk @ 4 I am amazed she has said recently she’d consider running for the Liberals if Abbott asked her, when one remembers that Abbott set up that ‘Trust Fund for Australians for Honest Politics’(sic!) which helped send her to gaol.
Worth remembering how long after her release Abbott’s role was still being questioned by the law and the media. He did admit that the political threat One Nation posed to the Howard Government was “a very big factor” in pushing the legal attack, but he also claimed to be acting “in Australia’s national interest!” Haven’t we heard that phrase a lot recently?
Who could ever forget that Abbott was defended by Howard who said, “It’s the job of the Liberal Party to politically attack other parties – there’s nothing wrong with that.”
Depends on the weapons and tactics you use, I guess.
Around that time Abbott claimed that lying on the ABC wasn’t really dishonest! If he’d lied in Parliament that would have been different! (And there he’s protected by parliamentary privelege.)
And this man is running for election as our PM!
Patricia @ 6…I’m actually surprised Abbott and Hanson haven’t held a joint press conference about joining forces to move Australia forward as well as questioning the role Kevin Rudd had in the gaoling of One Nation party members.
Mind you Rudd seems to have become such a scapegoat I’m surprised the Liberal party isn’t marketing lemons shaped Kevin Rudd Pinata’s.