Barnaby Joyce’s convincing win in last Saturday’s New England by-election can only be good news for the Coalition, for the parliament, and for the nation.
He is the man whom Malcolm Turnbull desperately needs at his side as a plain-speaking voice of conviction, reason and no-bull commonsense, at a time when many conservative voters might well be starting to wonder what the government stands for.
The answer to the government’s problems is not – as NSW Nationals leader John Barilaro would have it – for Turnbull to “give Australians a Christmas gift and go before Christmas”.
Another leadership change would merely confirm our “banana republic” status to a bemused world, while facilitating Bill Shorten’s journey to the Lodge. Barilaro would be better tendering advice to his NSW Premier, telling her that her rural constituents (along with probably most of her urban ones) can think of many better ways to spend $2.3 billion of taxpayers’ money than replacing two perfectly good sports stadiums.
If the Nats – state and federal – want an issue of national importance to get their teeth into, and to give them some “product differentiation” from the big-end-of-town Liberals, they should look at taking up Dick Smith’s cause and agitating for a rethink of our immigration program.
It’s quite apparent to anyone familiar with the increasing congestion, crime, social discord and suburban sprawl in our big cities, or who follows employment trends, that our present migrant intake of nearly 200,000 a year is unsustainable.
However, it is defended by successive federal governments, and by business leaders, on the grounds that it is good for “economic growth”, as if that justifies all the downsides. What our over-generous immigration program really amounts to is an essential pillar of a giant, government-backed Ponzi scheme called the property boom. It’s the constant inflow of migrants that underpins the building industry – now the nation’s biggest employer.
Building construction and related property services now also constitute the biggest sector of the economy, and nobody in government wants to stop the music.
Never mind that there aren’t the jobs that there used to be for migrant workers; let’s just keep building more houses and apartments while our cities sprawl out over once-productive farmlands.
Paralleling the boom in construction has been a boom in real estate values, driven largely by population growth. Sydney average house prices have doubled since 2009.
This obviously can’t go on, and when it ends, it will end badly – like it did in Spain, where a bursting of a decade-long real estate “bubble” in 2008 ushered in a severe recession from which the country is still recovering. In 2006, at the height of the property boom in Spain, the construction and related sectors had accounted for 18 per cent of the country’s GDP and 20pc of all jobs.
Today the unemployment level in Spain is still a worrying 16pc, and 38pc for job seekers under 25. Lessons here for Australia, surely.
