I have reflected on why the divergence being fond of the AD track record on social policy. Yet myself more of a ecological greenie type and bugger the political correctness.

And I think it relates to this. Your Brisbane and or Qld based. I’m Sydney based. This matters because the issue of immigration is not monolithic in the nation.

Sydney is chockers. I personally share with a majority of both coloured and diverse folks in my smallish flat building. They are damn good neighbours and I probably am more noisy than any of them too. I try to make it up by doing shared washing machine maintenance and weekly bins.

But here’s the thing – Sydney is a dedicated multicultural city – paradoxically this has been proven by Cronulla riot, and the last state election. The result of both was to re-elect against ferocious ramping by right wing strands of society a trenchantly multicultural ALP Govt. Sydney people won’t cop covert white supremacism. We just won’t right down to the hard men of the Bra Boys surfing tribe.

True this could change but not easily and demographics have pretty much locked in same in Sydney. I’m totally fine with that. For the last two years I’ve been enjoying the phrase “it’s a coffee coloured future” and that was before Barak Obama announced his run for the White House. How cool to have it come true in such a symbolic way.

Soooo …. all this brings me back to a Sydneysiders view of multiculturalism good, ecological breakdown bad. It’s a post One Nation kind of attitude here, while maybe it’s running it’s course still there in Qld. Here in Sydney the ALP have bought off the One Nation types with increasingly lax gun policy, not just gun laws as such. We now have shooters in most state forests (as distinct from national park). This is the ALP’s way of totally unscientific removal of ferals – and I mean greenie protesters scared of forest blockading, not just wild exotics. How cynical. Of course rednecks love it as annexing public land to their ’sport’.

Similarly the ALP run their appeasement of One Nat demographic with tete a tete with Shooters Party MPs AND rev head events on annual basis in Olympic Park. It’s all about rednecks with out the racism splitting the vote off the coalition. This is Pauline Hanson and John Howard’s legacy in Sydney of 4 million wider metro area. It’s a post white supremacism kind of dinosaur politics.

You in Qld probably haven’t got to that phase, and are conflating anti immigration with racism. Here we just see sell outs to developer mall operators and high rise and think record immigration and structural population growth as an economic racket destroying ecological life supports of air and water for those who can buy in to the exclusive Southern Highlands.
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On a proper read of your story just now I notice two serious weaknesses in your thesis about skilled migrants not hypothecated to jobs here. One is business would invest in training if they had to if cheap imports were no longer as good an option. Also I am deeply trouble personally about rich countries cherry picking the skilled migrants out of the world’s less fortunate countries. Would it not be alot more ethical for such as Australia to be excess training and subsidised exporting of skilled people overseas to those less well off? s

This might sound like I’m dreamin’, but you got to have a dream like MLK but for the modern times ….