Political developments
Hungary’s regime change
Hungarians have thrown out their extreme right pro-Russia populist government. Have Australia’s right-wing extremists noticed?
The Cold War came to Australia in 1956 during the Melbourne Olympics, when Hungary was drawn to play against the Soviet Union in the water polo semi-finals. The encounter came to be known as the “blood in the water” conflict, happening just weeks after the Russians rolled their tanks into Hungary to put down a popular anti-Russian uprising.
The right-wing press at the time portrayed the Hungarian uprising as an anti-communist movement, but it was actually led by left-wing students. It was mainly an anti-Russian movement.
The success of Péter Magyar’s Tisza party in ousting Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party can be seen in much the same context. It wasn’t about any significant economic re-alignment – both parties contesting the election can be described as centre-right – but Orbán’s authoritarianism and his close relations with Vladamir Putin, Donald Trump, and even some of our own populist authoritarians were an issue.
Polls had shown Tisza winning, but the size of its victory, particularly its huge parliamentary majority, amazed the global political establishment. Orbán had used his two-thirds parliamentary majority to change the constitution to stack the courts, to control the media, to appoint his supporters to government positions, and to re-draw electorates, using grossly unequal apportionment to increase the representation of conservative rural regions, while comparatively disenfranchising the people of Budapest and other urban pockets of liberalism.
Writing in The Conversation – He exposed corruption and walked across Hungary. Now Péter Magyar has defeated a powerful state machine – Robert Howvath of La Trobe University describes how Magyar used this malapportionment to his advantage. Rather than writing off the conservative countryside and consolidating his urban base he focussed his campaign on those rural electorates. There’s a lesson here for progressive politicians.
Going into the election Orbán’s supporters believed that although Tisza would win more seats, Orbán’s Fidesz Party’s hold on the courts, and the veto authority of the president (still an Orbán appointee), would constrain the incoming Tisza government from implementing its pro-Europe agenda. But the electors actually gave Tisza a two-thirds parliamentary majority (136 seats in the 199 seat chamber), giving it the capacity to reverse Orbán’s changes, and to align its political institutions with EU principles. The other surprising outcome was a 79.6 percent turnout. (Wikipedia keeps a well-updated site on the election numbers.)
You can follow a post-election analysis by Matt Steinglass and Rosie Blau of The Economist, in which they describe the details of Orbán’s constitutional “poisoned pills” designed to disempower a changed government. In view of the Orbán government’s economic mismanagement it was expected that the cost-of-living would be the determining election issue, but Steinglass finds that as the campaign progressed the emphasis shifted. Obán’s corruption became the major issue, followed by his authoritarianism, his dismantling of democratic institutions, and his tilt towards Russia.
You can hear UK journalist Ian Dunt on his regular segment on Late night live describing Orbán’s way of doing politics (much of which is borrowed from Hitler’s Nazis) and the tactics Magyar used to displace him. Magyar realised that corruption is the sine qua non of right-wing populism, and made it the focus of his campaign. There’s another lesson for Americans who want to oust Trump, and for Australians who seek to stop right-wing populists from extending their political influence.
Dunt said that Orbán’s defeat should boost the left’s spirits, because it has been tacitly accepting the right-wing narrative that in the long term the authoritarian right will win – a right-wing version of Marx’s historicism. But Orbán’s crushing defeat puts paid to that idea of historical inevitability.
More explanation of the complexities of the election, and wider issues for European right-wing politics, are covered in a 24-minute interview where Ben Fajzullin of Deutsche Welle interviews Kim Lane Scheppele of Princeton University: Hungary after Orbán: what’s next? In passing she notes that in the campaign JD Vance came to Hungary to warn about foreign influence (i.e. European influence!) on the election: political experts believe that this support cost Orbán two or three percentage points. Can we encourage Vance to come to Australia to give One Nation some support?
Because Orbán has been such a strong supporter of Putin and has used Hungary’s EU vote to block aid to Ukraine, Ukraine will be one beneficiary of this regime change. But Orbán’s Danube Institute will go on supporting European hard right populist movements in Germany and France. The Guardian’s Sarah Basford Canales writes that Tony Abbott is a member of that institute, and that he has often publicly praised Orbán’s policies, particularly his hard-line migration policies.
In a PBS News Hour clip – How Hungary's vote to oust Viktor Orbán could have global implications – Kim Lane Scheppele explains how he will continue to exercise his global influence. But Jacob Wendler and Daniel Barners, writing in Politico, point out that the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a body prominent in the USA and Australia, may suffer some loss of funding, because it appears it has been funded by Hungarian taxpayer money: CPAC lands in new Hungarian PM’s crosshairs. CPAC gatherings have been venues for Liberal and One Nation politicians, and mining oligarchs, to come together with no compunctions about the body’s support from Putin’s allies.
Nevertheless Robert Benson and Gréta Bedekovics of the Center for American Progress write that Orbán’s defeat signals a blow to the global authoritarian movement. They conclude:
Magyar’s victory is a stunning repudiation of a corrupt, gangster-style authoritarianism and the far-right transnational movement that championed it –with Trump and Orbán as its chief architects and leaders.
The Coalition’s immigration idiocy
It’s laden with disinformation, racism, impracticalities, and hypocrisy.
Pauline Hanson has been quick out of the blocks to claim credit for the “first instalment” of Angus Taylor’s Australian Values Migration Plan. We can only wonder what will be in the next instalment.
Taylor’s statements are on a Trumpian level of emotive language (“Labor has opened the migration floodgates”), of racist dog whistles (“standards have been too low”), and of non-sequiturs (“migration has added extreme pressure to the housing market, to infrastructure, and to essential services”).
They are hardly worthy of reasoned analysis, but on a Radio National interview former Immigration Department Secretary Abul Rizvi goes into some of the impracticalities of Taylor’s proposals, and corrects lies about the number of immigrants who have been coming to Australia.
In fact it’s probably an understatement to accuse Taylor of “dog whistling”: you don’t need to have the audio capacity of a border collie to hear his call for a return to “White Australia”. He says we should prioritize immigration from “liberal democracies”. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit only 22 countries (apart from our own) can be classified as full democracies, and of those 20 would be classified as “white” by the common use of that senseless term.[1]. Taylor doesn’t seem to realize that most of these countries have ageing populations and skills shortages. They are unlikely to be able to fill our skills needs.
The complementary aspect of Taylor’s policy is to discriminate against “those migrating from places ruled by fundamentalists, extremists, and dictators”. Has he thought this through? Does he understand how much poorer countries like Australia and the US would be had they refused to take people seeking refuge from political persecution?
He follows that criterion with the statement “In that vein the Gazan cohort of 1 700 people here on visas presents a high-risk to our nation”.
Singling out Palestinian refugees is surely a concession to the pro-Netanyahu lobby in Australia, which has had considerable success in conflating opposition to Israel’s bellicose brutality with antisemitism. That same lobby conveniently overlooks the way Taylor’s policy would have applied in the 1930s, when German Jews were seeking to escape from the impending Holocaust.
And as for Taylor’s reference to people who “hate Australia”, it’s somewhat hypocritical coming from a group of politicians who are deeply attached to the monarchy of a foreign country.
If Taylor wanted to criticise the government for its shortcomings in immigration he could address some of the problems identified by Mark Glazebook in an ABC interview: Long time migration agent says migration policy must address skills shortage. But that would be to behave like a constructive opposition. His preferred style is to fall back on the Coalition’s established practice of fear mongering and disseminating disinflrmation.
1. Among those 22 countries Japan and Taiwan would be excluded, and maybe Costa Rica and Uruguay. ↩
The immigration debate we’re not having
Our slow and cumbersome process in recognizing skilled migrants’ qualifications is costing us dearly.
If we were to ask a random group of Australians about the important issues in immigration, most would nominate the number of migrants coming to Australia, probably without much consideration of the actual numbers or the distinction between permanent immigration and net migration.
Public understanding is not helped by the complexity of immigration: these roundups have often had links to experts who patiently explain that complexity, and the way it is so easy for people to be misled by partial information, taken out of context. Public understanding is not helped by those who see cutting immigration as a solution to housing shortages and infrastructure bottlenecks: their concerns are understandable but they are usually based on misinformation, or on deliberate disinformation. And public understanding is not helped when populist political aspirants on the extreme right try to stoke the flames of xenophobia and racism.
Unfortunately these confusions are making it difficult for us to have a civilized and well-informed debate about immigration, because the number of immigrants we take in today has a profound effect on the sort of society we are becoming. If you have any doubt, watch some of those old YouTube clips about Australia in the postwar years.
Agreement on these matters is difficult, but there is another aspect of immigration for which it should be possible to find easy agreement. That is the extent to which we make the best use of the skills of those who come to Australia.
In a Press Club session former senior public servant and now Chancellor of Macquarie University Martin Parkinson, and Violet Roumeliotis of Settlement Services International, make it clear that we are far from making the best use of those skills: The productivity boost we’re missing: activating Australia’s skills.
Under our skilled migration program we set high standards and screen migrants well, but once immigrants arrive they have to go through the skills recognition process again, in slow, expensive and unfair processes to have those skills accredited.
Parkinson and Roumeliotis do not criticize the existence of this two-stage process, but they argue convincingly that the second stage should be made faster, less costly and easier to navigate. The first stage, under control of the government, is handled well. The second stage relies on private sector organizations with little, if any, concern for the public interest. With Parkinson’s support Roumeliotis describes an already designed and costed reform process they are presenting to the Commonwealth – a process that would still be in the hands of the private sector but would bring pressure on accrediting organizations to improve their performance, and would help immigrants navigate the accreditation system.
Their Press Club presentations are within the framework of productivity. There is a huge opportunity cost – they estimate at least $9 billion a year – in having skilled immigrants work below their skills level. Qualified physiotherapists working as unskilled labourers on building sites, engineers working as cleaners, teachers working as fast food delivery drivers. That compares with the $5 million annual cost of the reforms they have put to the government, which they hope to see realized in the coming budget.
Roumeliotis’s presentation, which includes some specific cases of dashed hopes, terrible delays and unfair costs faced by immigrants is in the first 18 minutes of the Press Club session. Parkinson’s is in the second block: his main points are also in a 6-minute interview on Radio National: What Australia gets wrong in the migration debate and in a post by Gareth Hutchens: Australia wasting migrant talent on an “industrial scale”, former Treasury secretary says. If you watch the Press Club session don’t bother with the Q&A: the media representatives have plenty of questions directed mainly at Parkinson, which he handles well, but they are not on the topic of our lost opportunity to boost our productivity. As is often the case, our media have trouble in dealing with long-term economic policy.