BRW’s Rich 200 list is full of migrants who have risen to the top of Australian business. Many of these wealthy refugees fear that Australia’s politically driven focus on asylum seekers is obstructing a mature discussion about the sort of immigration regime the country needs to maintain growth and overcome the risks of an ageing workforce.
“People have lost common sense of the issues,” says Nathan Werdiger, a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, who arrived in Australia as a humanitarian migrant in 1949 and subsequently founded the Juilliard Corporation, one of the biggest landlords in the Melbourne CBD.
“Everything is so politicised. The whole thing is so mixed up completely.”
Immigration matters, and doing it properly matters. For a big island with a small population, a considered immigration regime – of the type successive Australian governments have refined – is as crucial a resource as capital, oil and trade. But the topic has been reduced to politicised soundbites.
Former prime minister Julia Gillard likened the 457 visa program – designed to meet short-term skills shortages in industries as they arise – to asylum seekers, with talk of wanting “to stop foreign workers being put at the front of the queue with Australian workers at the back”.
With a federal election looming, last week the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union started campaigning in marginal seats in five states and the NT against what it calls the “heavily-rorted” 457 scheme, prompting the Migration Council of Australia to warn that “scare campaigns will undermine the confidence of the Australian people in our migration program, weaken social cohesion and undercut our broader national interests”.
Migrants bring a perspective that helps them spot gaps established players often don’t see, Werdiger says.
Michael Bleby, Caitlin Fitzsimmons and Nassim Khadem
Huy Truong, who came to Australia as a boat person at age seven, says the country should ‘do our best to embrace, settle, integrate and provide ... a safe environment’ to today’s asylum seekers.
Asylum seekers are just one part of a necessary debate on immigration that Australia is not having.
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