More Bull Sh*t!
ABC issues Laura Tingle statement - she still thinksAustralia is racist.
Wednesday, 29 May 2024
I regret that when I was making theseobservations at the Writers' Festival the nature of the free-flowing paneldiscussion means they were not surrounded by every quote substantiating themwhich would have – and had – been included in what I had said earlier on theABC.
This has created the opportunity foryet another anti-ABC pile-on.
This is not helpful to me or to the ABC. Or to the nationaldebate.
Well excuse us for not being helpful to you Laura.
Statement by LauraTingle, 7.30 Chief Political Correspondent
For much of the past two weeks, the politicaldebate has focused not on the federal Budget but on the Leader of theOpposition's budget reply in which he pledged to cut migration to deal with thehousing crisis.
I have written and broadcast on this decision andits implications on ABC platforms numerous times since then. I was also apanellist at the Sydney Writers' Festival on the weekend when migration andhousing were also discussed in a panel on the year in politics.
In my writing and broadcasts over the past twoweeks I have observed on several occasions that there were considerable dangersfor the way our political discourse would unfold – and for social harmony – inlinking migration to the housing crisis.
At the Writers' Festival I was asked to comment onthe Opposition leader's policy on migration and the economy, including housing.Mr Dutton has been vocal on this topic, particularly over the past fortnight.
"It's not just housing," he said."People know that if you move suburbs it's hard to get your kids intoschool or into childcare. It's hard to get into a GP because the doctors haveclosed their books. It's hard to get elective surgery. These factors have allcontributed to capacity constraints because of the lack of planning in themigration program."
He has also said migrants are the cause of"congestion on our roads".
As the alternative Prime Minister, with an electionapproaching within a year, Mr Dutton's comments deserve rigorous scrutiny andexamination.
I have also pointed out that there were flaws inthe Opposition's position as a piece of viable policy. That is, while on theface of it an obvious answer to a shortage of housing might be to immediatelytry to cut the number of people seeking it – and the obvious answer there ismigrants – things are actually a lot more complicated when you try to do that.
The Morrison government announced an almostidentical cut in permanent migration numbers in the 2019 Budget, saying the"planning level of the Migration Program will be reduced from 190,000 to160,000 places for four years from 2019-20". The pandemic rather disruptedthat plan.
But the very same 2019 budget papers wereforecasting that net overseas migration would be 271,700 in 2019 beforedropping to just 263,800 three years later in 2022, despite the cut of 30,000permanent places a year.
A big reason for the fact that net overseasmigration was not forecast to fall, despite the cut in the permanent number, isthat more than half the people who are accepted as permanent migrants arealready here when they apply. So cutting permanent migration doesn'tnecessarily mean fewer people in, or coming to, the country. Some of themigration pool just changes "class". Others are still able to comehere on temporary visas.
There has also been confusion about whether theCoalition planned to cut the (relatively small) permanent migration number, orto cut back the much larger, demand-driven net overseas migration number, whichincludes programs that have no formal caps and includes overseas students.
Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor added to thatconfusion last week when he said the plan was to cut net overseas migration by25 per cent, not just permanent migration. Mr Taylor also accused Labor ofusing migration to prop up the economy – and it is true that the post-pandemicsurge in returning temporary visa holders has indeed played a crucial role inkeeping a barely simmering economy from dropping into recession. But thatraises the question of what happens if you cut migration as dramatically as theCoalition appears to want to do.
Discussions at writers' festivals are much lessformal and more free-flowing than a piece of analysis on an ABC platform andthis was a format where adding detailed context to the discussion wasn't reallypossible.
Panellist Niki Savva had quoted those points MrDutton had made about too many migrants meaning things like it was too hard tobuy a house, get in to see your GP, or get into childcare, and noted that theOpposition Leader seemed to bring everything back to immigration.
In agreeing with that observation, based on MrDutton's own quotes, I once again raised the risks for the political debate ofa major political leader doing this, which I truncated as "everythingthat's going wrong in this country is because of migrants".
That was simply a result of trying to summarise apoint in a much less structured forum and was not intended to imply he had saidthat verbatim. If I had been speaking on an ABC platform, or not in a five-waydiscussion, I would have provided all that context, as I do in my stories forthe ABC.
I did indeed make the observation on Sunday that weare a racist country, in the context of a discussion about the politicalprospects ahead. I wasn't saying every Australian is a racist. But we clearlyhave an issue with racism. For some months now, for example, The Australiannewspaper has been devoting considerable space to its alarm about a rise inanti-Semitism in Australia.
Without even going into the historic record, thereis also ample evidence that racism remains a particular problem in our legaland policing systems. A coronial inquest underway in the Northern Territory hasbecome mired in an expose of racism in the NT's elite policing unit. Racism andracial profiling repeatedly show up as an issue of concern in our policing andjustice systems.
The morning radio news bulletins on the ABC onMonday featured several stories that were related to racism, including oneabout racial profiling of young South Sudanese men in a police presentation tolegal practitioners in Melbourne.
Surveys, including by the ABC, have repeatedlyfound the majority of Australians of non-European backgrounds reportingexperiences of discrimination and racism in their lives, sometimes starting asearly as primary school.
Is it relevant to raise this record of Australianracism in political analysis? Absolutely, if it becomes an issue of controversyin our political contest – as it clearly did when Pauline Hanson appeared onthe national stage in 1996 and declared the country was being "swampedwith Asians". John Howard had similarly flirted with the issue of Asianimmigration in the 1980s and Julia Gillard did too in 2013 when she used aspeech on a visit to western Sydney to announce a clampdown on the issue oftemporary skilled worker visas.
In my commentary at the ABC, and at the SydneyWriters' Festival, I expressed my concern at the risks involved in Peter Duttonpressing the hot button of housing and linking it to migration for thesereasons.
Political leaders, by their comments, give licenceto others to express opinions they may not otherwise express.
That does not make them racist.
But it has real world implications for manyAustralians.
Finally, panellists were asked to nominate apositive change that had come from the change of government, on the basis ofthe famous quote that "when you change the government, you change thecountry".
Not having the time in that setting to attempt adetailed and serious assessment of what has changed with the change ofgovernment, I made an off-hand observation that simply observed we now hadfewer stunts like the "needles in strawberries" affair and that,whatever its failings, the current government seemed serious about policy.
I regret that when I was making these observationsat the Writers' Festival the nature of the free-flowing panel discussion meansthey were not surrounded by every quote substantiating them which would have –and had – been included in what I had said earlier on the ABC.
This has created the opportunity for yet another anti-ABCpile-on.
This is not helpful to me or to the ABC. Or to thenational debate
I am proud of my work as a journalist at the ABC,on all its platforms, and I let that work speak for itself.
It is based, always, on solid research and alifetime of experience reporting on Australian politics.
That work is built on, and delivered in, theframework of the ABC's very high editorial standards.
