Housing the Australian way

This loosely ties in with my previous blog with regards to the housing market, but this week I am coming at this from a slightly different angle.

I was listening to the Today Show as I drove into the office this morning and they were previewing the key topics for the forthcoming election and it was all the matters that you would expect – the economy, immigration, housing, the NHS – all the normal political battle grounds.

Following that there was an interview with Trevor Philips, former Chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission where he was putting forward the argument that the fear of causing offence was stifling debate around issues of race and immigration.

A few days before that it was Nigel Farage of UKIP (clearly at the other end of the spectrum from Trevor Philips) espousing his view that the UK should scrap legislation designed to prevent racial discrimination in the work place.

His argument was that the UK is now post-racist and that this legislation is out-dated as younger people are far more integrated.

I am sure that it is true that younger generations are more integrated and I believe that compared to a lot of countries the UK has a good record on race relations, but to say that we are post-racial seems like a step too far.

However, let’s take it at face value and assume that we don’t need race legislation. Farage’s position is that we need freedom for employers to choose UK citizens for jobs above immigrants. There is a certain logic to this and you can see it as a distant cousin of the ‘Buy British’ campaign, but would you consider it to be racist?

As you will know from previous blogs I lived and worked in Australia for a few years and I think it is true to say that they are a naturally more nationalistic than the ‘poms’.

They refer to themselves as the ‘lucky country’ and ‘proudly Australian owned and operated’ is a common tag line on print and TV advertisements and there is no sense there that this is in anyway racist.

Nigel Farage has been using their points based immigration system as an example of something that we should use here to ensure that we only take the most qualified, most relevant immigrants into the country.

Of course, that is on the basis that we can somehow put controls on EU migration, but his position (as per the radio interview I heard) was that qualified immigrants from the rest of the world were better for the UK than unqualified EU migrants.

The trouble with all of this is that there is a lot of smoke and mirrors around the statistics and individual prejudices can further skew the immigration arguments.

Finally, I did say this would relate back to housing and previously I have spoken about the impact of overseas buyers on the housing market.

Using the Australian model again they have restrictions on property purchases by non-residents and I wonder how different London’s housing market and economy would look if we had similar legislation?
 

Attributed to Robert Collins