Insight Down Under
By JEFFREY FRANCIS
LET alone the question of migration, the issue of recruiting foreign workers per se brings some conflicting views from different people with different perspectives.
Therefore, it is not surprising that a proposal, yet to be decided by the Rudd government, has re-ignited the spectre of ugly racism and fears of backlash against immigration.
In a private address to the ruling Labour Party's New South Wales branch last week, Senator-elect Doug Cameron warned that recruiting a big number of unskilled or low-skilled foreign workers could resuscitate parties such as One Nation or, more ominously, lead to the rise of a far-right force akin to the British National Party (BNP).
His fears, which he confirmed later, are apparently justified. They are based on a British Broadcasting Corporation's analysis that found BNP, which is linked to neo-fascist groups, has managed to get 56 councillors elected across Britain.
Most of them have won office on a backlash against immigration through Europe's open borders.
BNP's recent victory was three weeks ago when the party, with 5.3% of the vote, grabbed its first seat in the London Assembly.
With such a significant success, Cameron, who will take his seat in the Senate on July 1, is understandably troubled and concerned that it could happen in Australia under a similar situation.
To prove his case, he cited research by British academic Chris Dent on East-Asia Regionalism, who identified three key concerns in countries that imported guest labour. These are pressure on social cohesion, demand for public services and other aspects of the country's social infrastructure.
Unskilled migrant workers, he said, sometimes nudged locals out of the blue-collar labour market, suppressed wages and were exploited by employers, often within their own communities.
He also argued that proposals to bring in temporary Chinese labour to work on major national infrastructure projects could undermine efforts to develop engineering and construction skills among young Australians.
But Immigration Minister Chris Evans and the business community disagree with Cameron's arguments.
The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Peter Anderson said increased migration would not unleash resentment in the community if it were done on a logical and orderly basis.
Evans believes that Australia has matured on these issues and has accepted large-scale migration over the years.
The controversy arose over the Rudd government's first Budget two weeks ago, which increased the intake of migrants for next year to a record 60-year high of 190,300, most of whom would be skilled migrants.
It is also over a proposal to consider a New Zealand-style guest workers scheme that would bring a big number of foreigners to Australia to farm seasonal crops. These workers must go back to their home-countries after the harvests are completed.
Treasury secretary Ken Henry believes that lifting the skilled migration would offset some of the wage pressures that have been building across the country, particularly in areas such as Western Australia and Queensland, which are suffering from a severe shortage of skilled workers.
Ethnic Communities Council of Western Australia president Ramdas Sankaran, however, believes that it is in Australia's interest not to ignore the experiences of countries such as France and Britain where big intakes of unskilled workers had created racial tension and "an underclass of exploited and dissatisfied workers".
But he pointed out that, unlike Europe and other parts of the world, Australia has not in the past relied on guest workers as a means of meeting its labour shortage.
"Australia has historically relied on permanent migration, not temporary migration, to complement the Australian-born skilled work force," Sankaran told me.
Statistically, the Philippines is the biggest source of international migrant workers in the Asia-Pacific region.
It has 4.75mil migrant workers in 2004. Burma has three million workers available, Indonesia two million, China one million and Vietnam 340,000.
Jeffrey Francis is editorial consultant, Australasia-Pacific Media.
