Howard, immigration & electoral suicide

aug 07
by Mark Richardson

Could the Prime Minister lose his own seat in the forthcoming election? There's been much interest in the media in a new poll putting the Prime Minster behind his Labor Party rival.

But why would John Howard be facing this difficulty? The answer, according to an informative SBS article, has much to do with a demographic shift brought about by immigration. One part of the PM's electorate has become Korean, another part is increasingly populated by immigrants from China and Japan.

If it weren't for John Howard's status as PM, it's likely that he would already have lost his seat of Bennelong. As the SBS article explains,

The characteristic that separates Sydney inner-metropolitan electorates between Labor and Liberal is not income, or even property prices, but race. The dividing line is an ethnic mix of roughly 20 per cent of the population. Any seat with more than 20 per cent of its voters born in non-English speaking countries at the 2006 census has a Labor sitting member today with one exception - Bennelong ...

So is the Liberal Party taking stock of the situation and slowing down immigration to preserve its long-term viability? Not at all. It's doing the very opposite. The current Government has almost doubled immigration over the last ten years to about 180,000 per year ...

So the Liberal Government has chosen to give big business what it wants, even if this means fatally undermining its own electoral prospects.

It's an indication of how much the Liberal Party is wedded to a right-liberal market ideology rather than a traditionalist conservatism.