Australia's future tied to immigration

By GREG ANSLEY

CANBERRA - Frank Lowy towers at one end of the scale.

The 69-year-old Czech who fled Russian annexation of Eastern Europe and arrived penniless in postwar Australia embodies the migrant dream - the nation's second-richest man, with a $A2.8 billion fortune amassed through Westfield shopping centres.

His Westfield creation owns 81 shopping centres in Australia, the United States, New Zealand (St Lukes Group) and Malaysia.

At the other end of the scale, impoverished Afghanis given temporary visas after last month's dramatic breakout from the Woomera detention centre in remote South Australia huddle in emergency housing found for them in Melbourne by church welfare groups, all but abandoned by Government agencies.

In between are the 4.4 million people born overseas who have come from more than 200 countries and now make up almost a quarter of Australia's population.

They have added to the even larger pool of descendants of earlier migrant waves that began with the flood of refugees from Europe after the Second World War.

Later flows, increasingly from Asia in the wake of the Vietnam War, have made Australia one of the most variegated nations in the world.

With the United States and Canada, it has also become one of the most popular choices for would-be migrants - and, increasingly, a target for people-smugglers.

Australia's appeal is hardly more apparent than in New Zealand, where policymakers have for three decades watched not only the mass exodus of too many of the young and talented, but also their own migrants using New Zealand citizenship to dog-leg across the Tasman.

According to Monash University's Centre for Population and Urban Research, one in every four New Zealanders moving to Australia is now born elsewhere, mainly Polynesia or Asia. The appeal, centre researcher Virginia Rapsom said in a study on the transtasman flow, is simple - a larger labour market and big ethnic communities able to offer much greater support and comfort.

For people moving directly from Asia, Europe or the Middle East, Australia holds similar attractions. It has run large migrant programmes for more than 50 years, becoming increasingly polyglot and able to offer a new life in a big, prosperous and young nation whose multicultural bona fides are now clearly established.

This year, Australia will accept 76,000 migrants - not including 30,000 or so New Zealanders likely to move across the Tasman - and 12,000 refugees.

While the intake varies from year to year according to Government policy, and political, economic and social conditions at home and overseas, numbers have remained consistently large.

The Government of Prime Minister John Howard remains strongly committed to an immigration policy "which is wholly non-discriminatory on grounds of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender and religion."

In the past 30 years, these sentiments have been given substance by both Liberal and Labour Administrations, reflected in huge swings in the parts of the world from which Australia draws its new citizens.

In the 1960s, eight out of 10 migrants came from the top six source areas: 51 per cent from Britain and Ireland, with the remainder from Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia, Germany and Malta.

Between 1994 and 1998, fewer than half of the total came from a rather different top six: New Zealand, Britain and Ireland, China, Hong Kong (listed separately), Vietnam and the Philippines - and only 39 per cent were English-speaking.

The incentives to continue an aggressive and widely dispersed hunt for new blood are growing as Australia faces falling fertility rates, an ageing population, the need to develop binding linkages with Asia and the accelerating need for skills to service the information economy.

With the number of deaths expected to exceed births by 2041 and about 30,000 people leaving every year, growth depends increasingly on migration.

Some parts of Australia, the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs says, are already suffering economic and social blows from loss of population.

Tasmania, for example, recently launched a headhunting blitz in New Zealand to replace talent lost to the mainland and overseas.

Migration policies increasingly target the ambitious, skilled and talented.

In the past five years, family-sponsored migration has fallen from about 70 per cent of the total to 45 per cent. Skilled migration has increased to 42 per cent, with 40,000 places allocated for 2000-01.

About 6700 will be business migrants, lured under both permanent and new non-permanent, long-stay programmes designed to meet the demands of a more mobile and international executive workforce.

The Government has also introduced a new points test for skilled migrants, focused heavily on strong English-language skills and high-demand occupations such as information technology and accounting. This has attracted large numbers of migrants who studied at Australian universities.

Would-be migrants can gain up to 10 extra points for points-tested categories if their skills appear in a list of jobs designed not only to match present openings but also expected shortages.

These range from IT managers, childcare coordinators, electronics engineers, Java and web-design experts, nurses, midwives, radiologists and pharmacists to chefs, pastrycooks, cabinetmakers and refrigeration and air-conditioning mechanics.

And the mix is likely to change further as the global workforce becomes even more footloose.

Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock says the realities of the "dot.com world" are swinging the growth in Australian migration from permanent settlers to the temporary job-seekers already identified in the business entry programme.

"We can't afford to return to the days when permanent resettlement numbers were the end goal, and skilled migrants and economic advancement were unregarded concepts."

When they do arrive, migrants are met with an entrenched system - both formal and informal - designed to ease them into a nation that places a heavy stock on multiculturalism.

There is little mollycoddling: migrants or their sponsors pay for most services, they must wait two years for the dole, with extended waiting periods for other benefits, and the guarantors of sponsored family migrants must repay welfare benefits the newcomers receive in their first two years.

Life can also be tough.

Many foreign qualifications are not recognised, migrant unemployment rates are high, and discrimination - especially in the workplace - is often a problem.

But the mechanisms to deal with these are in place, from specific programmes for non-English-speaking women migrants to English-language tuition, translation and interpreting services, settlement programmes and employment assistance.

The Federal Government runs migrant resources centres and service agencies and refugee resettlement programmes in major centres. It also funds community settlement services. State governments, local councils and church and welfare groups also have programmes.

There is a pervasive and widely exercised multicultural policy, based on the rights of expression of cultural identity, social justice and the desirability of extracting as many skills from as many people as possible.

This is overseen by the National Multicultural Advisory Council, but is manifested as a matter of course in the life of the nation - from Greek restaurants in Melbourne to Indonesian food stalls in Darwin, or from huge multicultural festivals in Sydney to ethnic show-and-tells at primary schools in Canberra.

But the development of the large ethnic communities that are so appealing to New Zealand's far smaller migrant pockets are both a strength and a weakness for Australia.

The western Sydney suburb of Cabramatta, for example, is as well known for drug-dealing as for its vibrant Vietnamese character, and in the surrounding Fairfield City problems with high unemployment and breadline subsistence persist in a population of more than 100 identifiable language groups.

There is also the broader issue of spreading the benefits of migration into large parts of the country now in steady decline because of internal migration to the magnets of Sydney, Melbourne, southeast Queensland and Perth.

Eight of every 10 migrants live in a capital city. More than 30 per cent of the populations of Sydney, Melbourne and Perth were born overseas, and almost a quarter of the people of Sydney and Melbourne are non-English-speaking.

Australia has attacked this with a scheme making it easier for skilled migrants to settle here if they agree to live for two years in areas outside the big migrant capitals.

Another scheme allows state and territory governments to directly sponsor migrants to fill critical job shortages.

While the mix may change, Australia remains convinced that its future is tied to migration.

The immigrants - a Herald series

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