verging_on_random

Karma

For decades, countries like Australia and Great Britain have been shamelessly cherry-picking the middle classes of developing countries. With never a thought for the morality or long-term consequences, immigration programs have been tailored to entice doctors, engineers and other professionals away from countries where they are in critically short supply to make up for our failure to invest in the training and education of our own population.

Enormous numbers of Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and sundry Middle Eastern nationalities have been lured to our shores by the promise of a material standard of living far beyond anything they could realistically hope to attain in their own countries. Peter Beattie was quite open about it on The 7.30 Report a few minutes ago: Australia didn’t train enough doctors in the 1970s and ’80s to look after our ageing population, so we need to poach them from other countries where they’ve never been able to train enough doctors to provide even basic health care to anyone. The practice isn’t limited to doctors of course - there’s a whole industry helping immigrant wannabes get permanent residency by getting whatever vocational qualifications the Australian government deems to be in short supply from time to time.

So the news that the latest amateurish terrorist events in the UK were apparently the work of immigrant professionals must be alarming to anyone who thinks topping up our skilled labour needs by endless immigration is good policy. Moreover it would be the ultimate irony if this army of imported professionals proved to be a fertile recruiting ground for terrorists and their accomplices. It would demonstrate in stark terms how short-sighted has been the vision of the Howard Government concerning the basic future infrastructure of this country.