mojopono

Top architect of Australian immigration system openly states that Australians would not vote for current migration system if they had the chance to vote on it democratically. WALKER: “Do you think if that system was put to the Australian public as a proposition they would have voted for it or supported it politically?” PARKINSON: “I don’t think they were they would have at all.” Full exchange: WALKER: So we’ve kind of drifted into this almost guest worker system as you mentioned earlier. Yeah, there about 2.3 give or take 2.3 million people here at the moment on temporary visas with work rights. Do you think if that system was put to the Australian public as a proposition they would have voted for it or supported it politically? PARKINSON: I don’t think they were they would have at all. Um and indeed we say in the report that uh we’ve ended up with a sort of a group of permanent temporaries almost a quasi guest worker system without anybody consciously sitting down to decide that we should do this — and that if you ask the Australian public, um, as a review we thought it would be highly unlikely that they would have agreed to that. Now, we should be careful that 2.3 million, they’re not all people who would fall into the guest worker group. And there’s only a, you know, sort of 100,000 maybe 200,000 of those who’d fall into the permanently temporary underclass group. He then explains that 700,000 people in this class are New Zealand citizens, about 800,000 are international students, another 200,000 are working holiday makers, etc. They wouldn’t be counted towards NOM figures because they aren’t present in Australia for 12 months out of 16, etc.