Former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr has launched an unflinching attack on Labor’s destructive mass immigration agenda, and the resulting housing crisis.
Expressing bewilderment at Australia’s record-high immigration intake, Mr Carr told Sky News host Erin Molan: “I’ve been trying to get Australians to understand that we do not need the highest rate of immigration, in proportion to our population, in the world.”
The former federal foreign minister pulled no punches in the interview, saying that immigration was happening at “third world rates” and that such high levels were unnecessary.
“I just wonder why this is the only economic model we’ve got, to force feed population growth, to run the highest imaginable immigration intake, and to condemn our big cities to a relentless chase to keep up in terms of infrastructure,” he lamented.
“We don’t have to do it to guarantee Australia’s prosperity,” he said, blasting the Federal Government in Canberra for leaving the states in a bind.
He claimed that Liberal former NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet told him in frustration that the states had no way of keeping up with the levels of immigration imposed by Canberra lawmakers, leaving infrastructure lagging behind.
Mr Carr also squarely blamed immigration for Australia’s housing crisis, and the growing number of high rises in major cities.
The University of New South Wales recently brought attention to rising congestion on Australian roads, vindicating the former premier’s claims by noting the pressures on infrastructure that arise without “intervention to manage demand”.
This past week, The Age published a number of letters to the editor submitted by readers who were outraged at increasing congestion linked to mass immigration.
One reader asked the question: “Why we are all being subjected to this cram and stack policy that is reducing our liveability and amenity year-on-year?”
Mr Carr labelled the immigration-driven economic strategy championed by the Canberra lawmakers as “a pretty lazy way of running an economy”, and referred to British studies which showed that immigration did not benefit the existing population.
And earlier this month the Australia Bureau of Statistics revealed that Australia’s economy has entered a per capita recession, only masked by an increase in overall GDP which politicians have used to misleadingly claim that Australians are better off.
Mr Carr’s comments come after ABS data released this week showed that over 113,000 long-term arrivals entered the country in January alone, more than ever before.
