Here, lingering in the arid wastelands of Australian politics, where the dusty winds of opportunism blow unchecked, two prime ministers, John Howard and Anthony Albanese, stand as unwitting (or perhaps all too willing) marionettes in a grand theatre of demographic globalist elite engineering. Dubbed "Big Australia" by its critics, this shadowy consortium of corporate titans, Treasury bean-counters, and globalist ideologues has long orchestrated a relentless influx of migrants to swell GDP figures, prop up property bubbles, and furnish cheap labour to the elite. What Howard began as a sly "bait and switch" in the 1990s, clamping down on a trickle of boat-borne refugees while flinging open the floodgates to air-arriving economic migrants, Albanese has amplified into a torrent, shattering records and straining the nation's sinews. Far from safeguarding the once egalitarian, Anglo-Saxon heartland that forged Australia's identity, these leaders have danced to their masters' tune, eroding traditional communities under the guise of globalist Asianisation "progress." The result? A multicultural dystopia where social cohesion frays, living standards plummet, and the Aussie larrikin spirit yields to a Babel of competing cultures, all engineered not by accident, but by design.
John Howard, the silver-haired architect of middle-class welfare and cultural conservatism, mastered the art of demographic sleight-of-hand with the precision of a card sharp at a Sydney casino. Elected in 1996 on a platform of fiscal prudence and border vigilance, Howard's early years saw net overseas migration (NOM) hover at a modest 86,000 annually, a figure that aligned with post-war norms and preserved the delicate balance of a nation still grappling with its White Australia past. But beneath the rhetoric of "sustainable population" and "Pacific Solution" toughness, deployed against the pitiful handful of asylum seekers braving leaky boats, lurked a grand deception. By his final term, NOM had ballooned to 188,000 per year, more than doubling the intake and turbocharging population growth to nearly twice historical averages. Howard never breathed a word of this pivot to voters; polls screamed opposition to mass immigration, with fears of overcrowding and cultural dilution running hot. Instead, he scapegoated the maritime migrants, fewer than 1,000 annually at their peak, as the bogeyman, while unleashing a deluge of skilled workers, students, and temporary visa holders via airports, invisible to the tabloid glare.
This was no oversight; it was puppetry at its finest. Howard's masters, the Big Business, property developers fattening on inflated housing demand, and Treasury officials obsessed with aggregate growth, reaped the whirlwind. Migrants, funnelled through 457 visas and student pipelines, juiced corporate profits with low-wage labour and consumer spending, while propping up superannuation funds and state coffers via bracket creep. The housing market, that great Australian religion, soared on the altar of scarcity, turning modest bungalows into millionaire-makers for boomers, while pricing out the young. Culturally, the influx accelerated the multicultural Great White Replacement experiment, diluting the pub yarns and backyard barbecues of traditional Australia with a mosaic of languages and loyalties. Howard's "relaxed and comfortable" society masked a deeper unease: Suburbs once humming with shared Anzac reverence now echoed with fragmented identities, where "fair go" ideals clashed against imported hierarchies. By quietly ending the homogeneity that buffered social trust, Howard didn't just boost the economy, he began the quiet euthanasia of the old Australia, handing his corporate overlords a nation remade in their image of endless expansion. Howard was thus not a conservative, conserving tradition, but a radical globalist.
Fast-forward three decades, and Anthony Albanese, "Albo," architect of "vibes-based" governance, has seized Howard's playbook, dusted it off, and cranked the volume to eleven. Campaigning in the aftermath of COVID lockdowns and border hysteria, Albanese pledged a "lower immigration policy," invoking the ghost of sustainable growth to woo suburban swing voters weary of cashed-up Sydneysiders and overtaxed infrastructure. Yet, like a Labor trojan horse, the post-election reality was a migration supernova: 1.227 million net migrants in just 33 months, the largest boom in peacetime history. Temporary visas exploded by 750,000 to a record 2.46 million, including 370,000 on bridging visas, many limbo-bound asylum seekers swelling the backlog to 100,000. Airports, not oceans, became the true gateways, with Indians and Chinese funnelled through rubber-stamped pathways, all sanctified by a $42 million hiring spree of 600 visa processors under the pretext of "backlogs."
Albanese's gaslighting is Howard-esque in its audacity. On ABC's Insiders in September 2025, he crowed about "stopping the boats" under Operation Sovereign Borders, claiming no unauthorized maritime arrival has stayed since his tenure began, a fig leaf that ignores the elephantine airlift overhead. This isn't control; it's confection. Pre-election whispers of restraint morphed into the Jobs & Skills Summit's contrived consensus for high intake, a summit stacked with business lobbyists hungry for talent pools to suppress wages. The Albanese government's "Big Australia" fealty is blatant: Treasury models tout migration as the elixir for an aging populace, while corporate backers, from mining magnates to tech unicorns, lobby for endless inflows to sustain their empires. The costs? Socialized across the populace: Housing affordability craters (median prices now 8x incomes), infrastructure buckles under 316,000 annual NOM (triple the "normal" 70,000 benchmark), and real wages stagnate amid job competition. Productivity? A myth, shallowed by capital dilution as funds chase population growth over innovation.
Beneath the economic ledger lies the cultural cataclysm, the true endgame of these puppet masters. Traditional Australia, with its mateship forged in Gallipoli mud and Eureka rebellions, was a low-slung, high-trust society where shared language, laws, and legends bound disparate souls. Howard's switch initiated the fracture; Albanese's surge shatters it. Multiculturalism, once a tentative bridge, devolves into dystopia: Parallel societies sprout in Lakemba and Dandenong, where schoolyards ring with tongues alien to the Bard or Banjo Paterson. Crime stats whisper of imported gang tensions, you know who, while social cohesion indices plummet, per Scanlon Foundation polls showing trust at two-decade lows. Women and girls, once buffered by homogenous norms, navigate fractured public spaces where gender norms clash and safety nets fray. The masters cheer: Diversity as dividend, dividing the working class to conquer it, ensuring votes fragment along ethnic lines and unions wither under global labour arbitrage.
This isn't organic evolution; it's orchestrated obsolescence. Howard and Albanese, whether dupes or devotees, execute the script: Bait with border hawkishness, switch to mass intake, then gaslight with "normality." The dystopia blooms, overcrowded commutes on the Circle Line, hospitals rationed by postcode, and a national psyche adrift in identity politics. Crispin Hull nails it: 250,000 annual migrants is "mad squandering," diluting per-capita wealth and the very essence of what made Australia loveable and liveable. Productivity stalls, environmental strains mount (more feet on fragile soils), and the once lucky country morphs into a pressure cooker of resentment.
To snap the strings, Australia demands rebellion: A plebiscite at the next election, as van Onselen urges, letting voters cap the influx and reclaim sovereignty. Howard's legacy is a bloated behemoth; Albanese's a breaking point. Traditional Australia, resilient, irreverent, rooted, won't perish quietly, as the march for Australia showed. But without ditching the puppets for direct democracy, the multicultural mirage will harden into a multicult mausoleum, where the fair go is but a faded bumper sticker in a nation of strangers. The masters' task nears completion; it's time for the people to cut the cords.
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2025/09/albo-deploys-john-howards-immigration-bait-and-switch/
Albo deploys John Howard's immigration 'bait and switch'
Former Coalition Prime Minister John Howard used a 'bait-and-switch' on the Australian public, scapegoating and closing the door on the very few refugees arriving by boat while throwing the door wide open to economic migrants arriving by air.
The ultimate result was a significant increase in Australia's net overseas migration (NOM), which surged from the mid-2000s and propelled population growth to nearly double long-run averages.
During Howard's first three years in government, Australia's net overseas migration (NOM) averaged 86,000 per year. NOM averaged 188,000 people per year during his final three years in government, and was higher thereafter.
John Howard never notified Australians that the government intended to increase the country's immigration intake dramatically. Why? Because he knew the electorate to be overwhelmingly opposed to it.
Instead, Howard gave the impression that the government was reducing the inflow by cracking down on the small number of refugees arriving by boat, while allowing massive numbers of economic migrants to inflate aggregate GDP growth, support the housing market, boost Treasury coffers, and please the Coalition's large corporate backers, who benefit the most from a growing customer and worker base.
Fast forward to today, and the 'bait and switch' has returned. The Albanese Labor government has overseen the largest migration boom in the nation's history, with an extraordinary 1,227,800 net migrants arriving in just 33 months.
Australia's pool of temporary migrants has also ballooned by 750,000 since Labor was elected to a record 2.46 million:
There are a record 370,000 people on bridging visas:
Included in this bridging visa figure are a record 100,000 people either awaiting a decision on their asylum seeker claim or refused asylum but yet to be deported:
Despite the record migrant volumes, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told ABC Insiders on Sunday that Labor has taken control of Australia's borders by 'stopping the boats':
"The truth is that around the world… including in Australia, people want borders to be controlled. They want control over their migration system", Albanese said.
"That's a way that you build support for migration as well. It's why my government has been concerned about that. It's why we've continued operation sovereign borders".
"It's why no one who has arrived by boat or attempted to arrive by boat since I've been Prime Minister has been permitted to stay in Australia", Albanese claimed.
This isn't the first immigration 'bait and switch' pulled on the Australian people by Anthony Albanese.
Anthony Albanese indicated in January 2022 – four months before the 2022 federal election—that his government would run a lower immigration policy if elected:
However, once elected, the Labor Party used the hand-picked Jobs & Skills Summit as a Trojan horse to gain a false consensus to lift immigration to its highest-ever level.
Labor then spent $42 million to hire 600 workers to rubber-stamp visa applications under the contrived 'visa backlogs', as well as opened up new migration pathways for Indians to secure permanent high levels of immigration.
The Albanese government is now gaslighting Australians into believing that current historically high levels of NOM, which never existed in Australia before Labor came to office in June 2022, are "normal".
Crispin Hull explained the 'bait-and-switch' being deployed by Labor on voters:
"Normal immigration is the level before Howard ramped it up from a then post-war average of around 70,000 to 200,000 plus"…
"Voters must get this right: 70,000 is normal; 250,000 is a mad squandering of the living standards of all but a tiny elite of Australians"…
The current annual figure of 316,000, therefore, is utter madness.
The net result of this "Big Australia" policy is a decline in living standards as the economy, housing, and infrastructure are overburdened; workers face increased competition for jobs (with poor real wage growth); productivity suffers via capital shallowing; and the country's natural resource base is diluted among more people.
Australia desperately needs a genuine and honest national debate on population policy, with a focus on whether large-scale immigration enhances the living standards of existing citizens.
What we don't need is our political leaders' dishonest' smoke and mirrors' approach, which purposely conflates immigration intake with boat arrivals and privatises the benefits of mass immigration for their corporate backers while socialising the costs for everyone else.
Give Australians a plebiscite on Australia's future population at the next federal election, the results of which can be used to calibrate migration settings to achieve the desired population target.
Let direct democracy determine Australia's future size."