Listening to Angus Taylor talk about migrants as a “net drain” on Australia this week, I couldn’t help but wonder whether anyone in the Coalition has actually driven through regional Australia lately.
Because out here in New England, we know exactly what labour shortages look like.
Shorter shop hours. Cafes shutting days early. Aged care homes unable to roster enough nurses. Schools scrambling to find teachers. Hospitals relying on overseas-trained doctors just to keep emergency departments open. Farms short of workers. Small businesses burning people out because there is simply nobody left to hire.
And yet somehow we are supposed to believe migrants are the problem.
The numbers simply do not back it up. Treasury analysis has consistently shown migrants, particularly skilled migrants, contribute more in taxes than they consume in services over their lifetime. Many arrive young, work immediately, fill labour shortages and help sustain regional economies already battling ageing populations and workforce decline.
That reality is visible in places like Tamworth, Armidale, Inverell, Moree and Glen Innes every single day.
Regional Australia has always depended on migration more than the loudest anti-migration commentators care to admit. And honestly, most regional Australians know this instinctively because we see it in our own lives constantly.
There is the wonderful and wildly popular Smeaton’s Bakery in Glen Innes run by the terrific Vietnamese couple Cindy and Owen (The Pork Crackle Roll is to die for!). There are Chinese restaurants in just about every bowling or RSL club across regional and rural NSW that have become part of the social fabric of country towns. Warialda is a classic example. There is my lovely Filipino doctor, who I genuinely do not know what I would do without. There was the extraordinary Samoan aged care nurse who looked after my father as he was dying with such compassion, care and dignity that our family will never forget her.
Then there was the Indian Uber driver I had the other day, waiting for his qualifications to be recognised, telling me he thought Tamworth was “pretty good actually” and that he might stay. Good. I hope he does. We need people like him.
There is the young Nepalese worker serving coffee in a regional café while studying nursing because country hospitals desperately need staff. There are migrant meatworkers quietly keeping regional processing plants operating while everyone else complains about labour shortages. There are the international teachers in regional schools coaching sport on weekends, helping at school musicals and becoming part of communities that initially treated them as temporary but now could not imagine losing them.
And there is the incredibly creative Lebanese tiler, Joe, who renovated my daughter’s bathroom and did such magnificent work that every visitor comments on it. And of course there is Mee from Thailand, who is a lifesaver when my back is giving me grief.
These are not abstractions in an economic debate. These are the people keeping regional Australia running.
And this is where I think the current Federal Government has actually been more grounded than its opponents. Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers at least seem to understand that migration is tied directly to workforce participation, economic growth and the sustainability of regional communities. You cannot simultaneously complain about labour shortages in health, disability care, agriculture and construction while demonising the very people helping fill those gaps.
Of course, migration needs to be managed properly. Infrastructure matters. Housing supply matters. Planning matters. But blaming migrants for every pressure in the economy is intellectually lazy and politically cynical.
The truth is governments of all persuasions failed to build enough housing, failed to invest fast enough in infrastructure, and failed to plan for population growth properly. That failure did not suddenly become the fault of the nurse from India working at Tamworth Base Hospital or the engineer who moved to Armidale because nobody local applied for the role. At least the current Labor government appears to recognise that these pressures require serious investment in housing, infrastructure, skills and workforce planning — not lazy migrant scapegoating masquerading as economic policy.
What concerns me most is how quickly parts of Australian politics are drifting toward grievance politics imported straight from the United States and the Donald Trump playbook. First the language changes. Then the targets. Then suddenly permanent residents who pay taxes, raise families and contribute to communities are spoken about as though they are outsiders freeloading off everyone else.
I would like to hope regional Australians are smarter than that.
We understand contribution because we live in communities where people’s value is measured by what they do, not where they were born. If someone coaches the local footy team, volunteers at the SES, works at the hospital and keeps a local business alive, most people out here consider them one of us pretty quickly.
Increasingly, I cannot tell whether Angus Taylor is ignorant, nasty, or simply clueless about the reality of regional Australia.
Which is why it is disappointing to watch him sound increasingly like a politician trying to out-One Nation One Nation – and, increasingly, sounding just as racist.
We expect lazy grievance politics with no real policy base from Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and its endless parade of angry people — often not entirely sure what they are angry about beyond the vague feeling that someone else must be to blame.
But the Coalition should be better than this.
This is, after all, the political side of Australian history that has held government more than any other since Federation. A movement that once claimed to represent economic management and serious policy thinking should not be reducing itself to imported culture-war talking points and scapegoating migrants because it has run out of credible answers on housing, productivity and regional development.
Taylor, with comments like these, has proven that he and the Coalition have no serious economic vision or plan and are so bereft of ideas that they are now rolling blindly down the One Nation rabbit hole of migrant bashing. In doing so, they have revealed a Coalition that no longer seems to know who it is, what it stands for, or whether outrage has simply replaced policy altogether.
Denise McHugh is an experienced educator in Tamworth. She is Chair of the NSW ALP Education and Skills Committee and Deputy President of the Independent Education Union (IEU).
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