Richard Branson defends Australian immigration.
Richard Branson is the latest in a long line of top businessman to come out and publicly urge the government to rethink their policies on Australian immigration.
Mr Branson was speaking just days after Coca Cola MD Terry Davis warned the Australian Immigration Department that large businesses would think twice about investing in Australia if the migrant workforce was not there to employ.
Virgin boss Richard Branson has spoken out to lend his support for Rudd’s ‘big Australia’ idea that proved so unpopular with the Australian public and media. He says that if immigration is given a boost in Australia it would lead to a stable economic future.
On the subject of population growth he added that people should “relax a bit”, telling Australians that “You can definitely take more.” And that such a low number of people inhabiting such a large land mass could in itself lead to instability. “A bigger population would create a much bigger economy without negatively affecting the people’s way of life.”
But far from encouraging general skilled migrants from emigrating to Australia, his plan is to encourage wealthy businesspeople to move to Australia instead, pointing towards Canada as an example. Canadian immigration allowed wealthy people from Hong Kong to migrate there in the 1990s when the country was handed back to China. It proved to be a hugely successful move for the Canadian economy.
Mr Branson was giving his interview to the Sunday Telegraph on immigration levels in Australia.
Meanwhile all this so far has left the two main political parties, battling it out in the polls, unmoved. Tony Abbott is pledging a cut in migration rates from 300,000 to 170,000 whilst Ms Gillard is also reviewing migration policy with a view to cuts and stricter regulations. If Mr Branson is urging Australia to be choosy with migration, Ms Gillard’s party is certainly doing that, focusing more on highly skilled migrants who can fill labour shortages.
The migration issue is still taking up media space in Australia and is certain to be key to the election campaign.
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One Response to “Branson Supports ‘Big Australia’ – For The Rich Only”
Comment by Adam — August 3, 2010 @ 6:53 pm
Quit listening to this wedding dress-wearing, tax-dodging clown with too much money. Canada went down this ‘Immigrant Entrepreneur’ route, with predictable results: massive urban sprawl, a huge organized crime problem, ethnic terror and extremist groups (LTTE, Babbar Khalsa, al Qaeda), immigrants unable/unwilling to function in English, and a raft of social ills (honour killings, FGM, doda and khat trafficking). The environment Branson pretends to care about can’t “take more”–Australia, Canada and other countries have finite freshwater, arable land and other resources. After making a mess of Britain with mass immigration, Branson and his business cronies want to export the same failed model around the world.