ValtVee

Australians need to stop blaming small groups of people for every problem this country faces. Muslims make up about 3.2% of Australians. Trans and gender-diverse Australians make up about 0.9% of Australians aged 16 and over. Temporary visa holders are roughly 10% of the population and that includes New Zealand citizens, international students, tourists, skilled workers, working holiday makers and others. And you can’t simply add those percentages together because the groups overlap. Yet apparently these relatively small parts of our population are responsible for everything housing prices, rents, hospitals, wages, crime, traffic, government debt and whatever else happens to be trending on social media this week. They’re not. Australia’s problems are far more complicated than finding a minority group to blame. Housing supply, infrastructure investment, productivity, taxation, planning, skills shortages and decades of decisions by governments and businesses all play a part. You can debate immigration levels. You can debate government policy. You can debate how quickly Australia should grow. But blaming entire groups of people for virtually every problem in the country isn’t serious policy. It’s finding a convenient scapegoat instead of dealing with the actual problems.