After the third round of right-wing March for Australia rallies on October 19, several things have become clearer.
First, most of the rallies were smaller. Second, right-wing racism, including from MPs, has not abated. Third, not a single Labor government is prepared to address the crises that are being falsely blamed on immigration — unemployment, housing shortages, crime and cost-of-living.
Instead, governments and media outlets deflect and appease. The anti-racist counter-protesters in Naarm/Melbourne were accused of the , but it was Victoria Police that provoked and kettled activists while deploying capsicum spray, flash bangs and rubber bullets.
, federal minister for multicultural affairs, said those taking part in the anti-immigrant rallies “do have legitimate concerns around the strains immigration could be placing on housing and infrastructure”. Coalition opposition leader Sussan Ley many who attended “were there in good faith”.
Their intervention gives cover to position that today’s problems are caused by “hordes of ethnic foreigners”, who are “fundamentally against the founding culture of this nation”.
The facts are that immigration is on the decline. According to the , as at March 31, Australia recorded an annual increase of 423,400 people (1.6%), of which net overseas migration was 315,900 people — a 36% decrease on the previous year.
2GB shock jock claimed in August that 1544 people were coming to Australia each day. , said “Australians [are] losing their well-paying jobs, just to get replaced with cheaper immigrant workers”.
ٰܲ’s and while it is rising from a 50-year low in late 2022, large numbers of workers are not losing their jobs but there are still significant skill shortages. According to the October , 29 occupations in health, education, engineering, science, technicians and trades, machinery operators and drivers and many construction trades face shortages. This explains why 40.7–48.8% of were brought here over 2023–24.
The complains that unskilled immigrant labour is “killing” productivity, but this is not the case. Businesses are exploiting those on working holiday and student visas because local workers do not want to work for poor pay and bad conditions, including trolley collection, fruit picking and late-night hospitality.
The skill shortages in the construction industry are one part of the housing shortage. Workers in the industry head to well-paid commercial sites because construction unions are still defending their hard-won good pay and conditions.
A lack of government and business investment in housing is also impacting the housing shortage. After the showed that more than 1 million homes were empty, a in 2023 showed that figure was more likely to be between 100,000–140,000 — a huge amount of land banking.
can stop developers from land banking but they don’t because of their close alliance with the industry.
If governments refuse to prevent the super rich from land banking, nor invest in public housing, it opens the door for the racist right to falsely blame migrants. The “blame migrants” dog whistle is convenient for governments that refuse to take the basic steps to make housing a human right.
The is also blaming immigration for an alleged rise in crime. Yet despite some high-profile killings in Victoria, blamed on African youth gangs, this is not the cause of Victoria’s crime rise. Rather, it is due to , including thefts from vehicles and retail stores, and organised crime.
Crime is often associated with poverty and cost-of-living rises. Tellingly, incidents of rose last year as the cost-of-living and housing crises bites.
Meanwhile, the call for rather than tackle poverty and inequality.
Governments know that migrants fill job vacancies, develop small businesses, create wealth and rarely apply for welfare. But allowing migrants to be the scapegoats for a cost-of-living crisis is a convenient deflection from a system failure in which profits are prioritised before people’s needs.
It means anti-racists need to continue to demand real solutions — for truly affordable housing, well-paid jobs and equal treatment.
It means we need to continue to call on our unions and community groups to join every opportunity to condemn the racists for trying to bolster capitalism — a system that prioritises the rich — and governments that stigmatise migrants and refugees.
We must also win over those, on our own side, who can be persuaded by the right’s simplistic and racist arguments against immigrants.
While Labor reduces net migration and caps student visas to appease racists, the is correct when it said this scapegoating is “a tale as old as colonialism”.
The same playbook was used against Chinese immigrants during the gold rush (leading to discriminatory taxes and violence), southern Europeans in the post-war period (“They’ll never assimilate”), Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s (“They’re taking our jobs”) and Middle Eastern communities in the 2000s (“They’re a security threat”).
“We choose education over exclusion, truth-telling over fear mongering and solidarity over division,” Koori Curriculum said, and we agree.
But we need to organise to make sure this happens.
[Sue Bull is a national co-convenor of the .]