What the studies show

One of the ways to judge the longer-term thinking of Australian bureaucrats is to look at the reports and studies they are funding and the types of questions they are asking. Recently AIDAB and other Australian gov ernment agencies have been preparing reports on the immi gration issue. These studies make horrific projections for the future of the Pacific island countries.

A series of doomsday scenarios have been developed by Rodney Cole of the AIDAB-funded National Centre of Development Studies in the past two years. They were viewed with such alarm in official Canberra that they have been taken up by the Australian government’s official think tank on migration issues, the Bureau of Immigration and Population Research. It contracted the Centre for International Economics to prepare a report on the impli cations of the pending economic disaster in the region. The report, Demographic and Economic Development in the Pacific Island States: Are there Implications for Australia’s Immigration Policy?, considers policy responses which vary from that of doing nothing to permitting Pacific islanders to migrate.

In general the report sees migration as retarding develop ment and decreasing the pressure on the island states to make the economic reforms needed to avoid the doomsday scenario.

In the end migration is precisely that - an alternative to

undertaking the sort of structural changes needed to make the economics of Pacific island countries function and grow according to the standard World/IMF model. But even the most die-hard free marketers cannot come up with a rea sonable package of policies that will make Tuvalu or Kiribati grow rapidly. The fact is that despite the unbending faith in the free market, even AIDAB knows there are no such policies - these countries are so small, so remote, so disadvantaged that only as members of a larger economic unit can they ever hope to achieve living standards approaching those of developed countries.

AIDAB is in its own way adjusting. Inside AIDAB the immi gration issue has once again come up. It has recently com missioned a study of the New Zealand migration model for Pacific countries, differentiating between the smaller and larger nations. New Zealand permits free migration of Niueans and Cook islanders.

This in many ways points the way the aid and migration policy debate will go in the years to come - to a neve SPARTECA arrangement. Soon Australia will become not only tired but completely exhausted from giving aid to the smallest of the countries. It knows they will never “succeed” by its definition and they will almost certainly offer work or migration rights to citizens of countries such as Tuvalu and Kiribati where the potential for real economic development is limited and where absorption into Australia of such small numbers would hardly be noticed. ■