Andrew Bolt: LIES, DAMN LIES and IMMIGRATION !

HERE’S a simple example of how our reckless immigration intake is used by politicians to fool you into thinking they’re smart.

In January last year, we had 726,000 Australians out of work — a scandalous waste of talent. And just think of all those frustrated dreams and hopes!

But by year’s end, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was boasting that he’d created, this clever man, enough jobs for more than half of them.

Yes, he announced, “403,000 jobs created in the last year, 403,000 — the equal longest run of monthly job growth in Australia since 1978.”

And Turnbull and his ministers have since talked endlessly of this jobs “creation” as if it had really made a difference to the voters they’re trying to impress.

Treasurer Scott Morrison was still at it just last week: “Under this government, over the last year there’s been more than 1000 jobs created every single day.”

But hang on. You can add and subtract, can’t you? You can’t be fooled so easily, can you?

So try working this out. How can the government start last year with 726,000 unemployed Australians, then “create” 400,000 jobs yet still end the year with almost as many unemployed people as before — 720,000 in all?

Turnbull and his ministers have since talked endlessly of this jobs “creation” as if it had really made a difference to the voters they’re trying to impress. Picture: Kym Smith

And why are we now with even more unemployed than ever — 735,000, according to last week’s figures?

How? Because this is just one more way the government uses immigration to trick up its books.

You’re the victims of a hoax that was exposed in the fine print of a deceitful Treasury document that Morrison released last week to claim he was right not to want fewer of the immigrants who are already choking our cities and forcing up house prices.

Treasury confessed to this massive pea-and-thimble trick in just a single damning paragraph — that the vast majority of these jobs “created” by Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott were actually given to the immigrants now pouring in.

“Recent migrants accounted for two-thirds (64.5 per cent) of the approximately 850,000 net jobs created in the past five years,” Treasury said.

“For full-time employment, the effect is even more pronounced, with recent migrants accounting for 72.4 per cent of new jobs created.”

Most of the rest of the extra jobs, of course, went to the younger Australians now entering the market and needing work.

What a sick joke. The government should be creating jobs for Australians, rather than jobs for immigrants.

But this is just one more way that it pretends to be Doing Something by letting in more people last year than live in Hobart, but without building a new Hobart to house them.

This trickery doesn’t stop at the government creating “record” jobs without actually cutting the number of Australians on the dole.

This huge immigration intake — now double the average we had until just 15 years ago — is also used by Morrison and Turnbull to fiddle their books.

Malcolm Turnbull with treasurer Scott Morrison. Picture: AAP Image/Dean Lewins

More immigrants means more taxes, and the Turnbull Government desperately needs that $1 billion a year or more to keep its promise to finally balance the books in two years, after 12 consecutive Budget deficits.

But that’s just another con. While the feds get the cash, it’s the states who end up with the bill. It’s the state governments that must build the new roads, trains, schools, police stations, dams and power supplies that these immigrants need.

The rest of us also pay. As the Treasury document conceded, we don’t actually get much richer from mass immigration, per head of population.

But voters must pay by having their bigger cities turned into rabbit warrens, and by having to sit in traffic jams so bad that Infrastructure Victoria now warns that Melbourne motorists risk spending 20 per cent more time in their cars by 2030.

Then there’s the fall in our already frayed social cohesion, as we’re joined by ever more people with no shared history or cultural ties to this country.

There will come a time when there is no “us”.

This cannot end well, so why are we doing it to ourselves?

The Way I See It.......at least we now know why the federal politicians are doing it. They can import hundreds of thousands of people each year to balance their books, and then boast of the jobs they’ve artificially “created”.

Even sweeter, they get to cut the ribbon of yet another costly road project, looking like saviours when, in fact, those extra roads had to be built to handle the chaos they themselves unleashed.

Are you really falling for this?