B.W.Jackson

@TopherField @therealrukshan What is your estimate of how much more an apple will cost at Coles if we don’t have foreign fruit pickers?

@BWJacksonX @therealrukshan How much more are you willing to pay for your fruit? Because that's what all those options would mean...

Brief discussion with @TopherField on the mass immigration policy debate in Australia, as well as the controversy surrounding comments about immigration numbers made by David Farley, the One Nation candidate in the Farrer by-election. Video from Nepean By-Election coverage from @RebelNews_AU youtube.com/live/EPQidBDG2…

@LordRedfern @RavenZech2

Shutting migration off for 5 years except repatriation of Australian citizens, and 15,000 maximum high-skill targeted migrants per year on work visas. Introduction of the death penalty for repeat violent offenders, pedophiles and rapists. De-naturalisation and deportation of 1st generation citizen migrants for any crimes less than those that qualify for death penalty Total abolishment of the NDIS, abolishment of cigarette tax, fuel tax, alcohol tax, payroll tax and half of income taxes

If you were Australian PM for a day, what three policies would you initiate?

@KoalaBe00244527 @parnellpalme That's definitely a downside, but hopefully the really radical ones would quit and not move to the regions & those who did move might in time become more sensible as they are exposed to sensible regional people. And not as many young regional people would head to the cities.

@BWJacksonX @parnellpalme Imagine moving half a million core (non-frontline) state and federal public servants out of the cities. The boost to regional economies would be stratospheric. Only downside would be the increase in Labor/Teal/Green vote in those regions.

I’ve seen too many clever young people give up good jobs because travelling 1.5-2hrs each day, each way, to access them became too exhausting. If the government really wanted to spend political capital on intergenerational fairness, it would convince older Australians to allow more development in inner-city suburbs, close to the jobs with good pay and prospects.

@jonobri @parnellpalme What’s wrong with a city having half a million people there? Agglomeration effects do not justify concentrating more & more of Australia’s economic activity into just two cities, just because urbanists have a fantasy about high-density living.

@BWJacksonX @parnellpalme Canberra has a hundred years now of growth and we only have half a million people living there. I would like to funnel talent into Government. The way we do that is by operating where the talent is: in our cities.

@MultiLeninist @Urban_Immerser @CISOZ @peter_tulip So you want another 300,000 people in Sydney?

@BWJacksonX @Urban_Immerser @CISOZ @peter_tulip Canberra is a failure of a city. Even the politicians FIFO.

Big promises. Timid reforms. Welcome to the Albanese government. 'Yes, you can get affordable housing if you move out to Bathurst or Broken Hill. But all the jobs and wages are in the CBD' said @peter_tulip afr.com/policy/economy…

@GetRealNowAus You sound like a Liberal party operative. Good luck.

@BWJacksonX What are you on? Have you got dementia?

How can any renter or prospective home buyer NOT support One Nation? They are playing a game of musical chairs where the number of players increases faster than the number of chairs every single day.

@strda221 @PronouncedHare Sure. Good point.

@BWJacksonX @PronouncedHare By that reasoning, I'd suggest you ought to subtract the Pacific Island community, seeing as, well, the Pacific is integral to what New Zealand is.

Good for Joseph Mooney standing his ground against people who insist on raising questions of race and ethnicity to idolatrous levels.

@Urban_Immerser @CISOZ @peter_tulip Like Canberra, you mean? Or Sacramento? Or Albany? Or Austin? Or Tallahassee?

@BWJacksonX @CISOZ @peter_tulip Your idea is to move government away from where people live?

@stuart_gibson @CISOZ @peter_tulip Should we shut down Canberra & move the entire federal government to Sydney or Melbourne? Scrap that - should we just move the whole population into Sydney & Melbourne?

@BWJacksonX @CISOZ @peter_tulip Because there’s a deep labour market in our capital cities. Specialist employers want to be able to fill their jobs with qualified specialists, and employees want more choice of job, and to be able to change jobs and gain higher wages more easily.

@Mykuhl @PronouncedHare I'd prefer that we didn't surrender our national identity & sovereignty by importing huge numbers of foreigners to paper over problems that we should be fixing ourselves.

@BWJacksonX @PronouncedHare All government superannuation schemes are a Ponzi scheme to a point. Would you prefer that we did away with government superannuation instead?

Why would they? Greater diversity in the US is cited as a major factor explaining why it has a weaker welfare state. nber.org/papers/w8524 Why would you expect foreigners who are having plenty of kids of their own to want to pay high taxes to look after childless old white people?

@BWJacksonX @PronouncedHare And I think that foreigners will continue their long history of voting to keep New Zealand's welfare state basically intact. Why wouldn't they?

@strda221 @PronouncedHare So what? Back then, the vast majority of those overseas-born people were from Britain. They were British people who moved from Britain to a British colony that became a British-majority nation. They were not from a foreign culture. That's a very different situation.

@BWJacksonX @PronouncedHare Something tells me we are still lower than we were in the first half of the twentieth century.

@hot_rails @TopherField @therealrukshan @grok It will be negligible, but to be fair, you have to aggregate all of the impact of cheap foreign labour across the entire economy. That's why I said we need the full picture. Including housing costs. And productivity. And the reduced pressure to fix welfare/disability systems.

@BWJacksonX @TopherField @therealrukshan @grok estimate the retail cost impact on, say, apples, if the picking labour cost were increased by 50% (ie minimim wage to half decent skilled wage)

@TopherField @therealrukshan This is such BS. You are basically advocating open borders. There are hundreds of millions of people who would create more than they consume. If they all come here, we no longer have a nation of our own with our own culture & identity. We just become a bigger economic zone.

Thanks for having me on! It's always fun getting in to these issues, and I am well aware that I'm in a minority when it comes to immigration but being 'unpopular' has never stopped me before and I'm not about to let it stop me now! The bottom line is this: Anyone who creates more than they consume should be welcome here, because they make Australia richer. Moochers who consume more than they create should NOT be tolerated, no matter where they were born (including if they were born in Australia). The dividing line should not be 'where were you born?', it should be 'do you add value?' My concern with the focus on immigration is that we're missing the bigger picture, and we won't solve the ACTUAL reason this country is going backwards, which is that we tolerate and indeed CELEBRATE moochers at all levels of society.

@Mykuhl @PronouncedHare Ok, so you want a Ponzi scheme. You figure it will last long enough to keep you happy & you don’t care what happens after you die. Got it. Do you think foreigners will vote to pay taxes to pay generous pensions to people like you when they are a majority?

@BWJacksonX @PronouncedHare "High enough that we can afford to keep the quality of life we expect", would be my answer. We aren't having enough kids to pay for our superannuation costs, so we need to either import workers, or drop our expectations. Which would you prefer?

@__BreadMaker__ @therealrukshan @TopherField Agreed. I’m just talking about the options available if we absolutely insist on employing cheap foreigners.

@BWJacksonX @therealrukshan @TopherField In principle I agree. I object in that I find it incredibly cruel and degrading to have our elderly, especially those suffering from dementia, to be cared for by people who are nothing like them. If our society can't care for our own, WTF have we become.

@__BreadMaker__ @therealrukshan @TopherField They are so cheap that there is no incentive to do it in a smarter way. You could probably get a drone with a paint spray attached to do that job now but cheap foreign labor is a much easier option.

@BWJacksonX @therealrukshan @TopherField In Singapore the temporary foreign workers get a salary that's appropriate for the place they come from. So affordable that in fact on a Discovery TV show I remember watching one of them in a cradle painting the sides of the Marina Bay Sands by himself with bucket & brush.

@__BreadMaker__ @therealrukshan @TopherField It’s not just seasonal workers. In theory we could hire all the aged-care workers we supposedly need when they are 20, pay them fairly, & then send them home at 25. There is no reason to give them a “path to citizenship”.

@BWJacksonX @therealrukshan @TopherField I can't see any reason why a foreign seasonal worker should: a) be allowed in the country for longer than the season b) not be allocated to a contracting firm who takes full responsibility for their presence and behaviour in the country c) get the same rate of pay as a local.

@jonobri @parnellpalme So should we shut down Canberra? Do you really think “the most talented Australians” are working in our governments? Why not encourage“options” in other places? What makes you think Sydney & Melbourne are the essential locations for many of the jobs done there?

@BWJacksonX @parnellpalme Don't you want the best people possible working in government? The most talented Australians will pick the cities, because they value the options afforded by a large labour market.

@TopherField @therealrukshan Importing a lot of cheap foreigners certainly puts downward pressure on wages. So that probably makes my apple a bit cheaper at Coles. At least in the short run. But it also puts huge upward pressure on housing costs. And it retards productivity growth. Etc Full picture, please

@TopherField @therealrukshan Sure, let's have that discussion. Give me your estimates. And let's not just restrict it to fruit pickers. Let's have a full assessment of the costs & benefits of importing cheap foreign labour.