Xenophobia is Bad Economics - there I said it

I've never seen a business run successfully on bigotry. Some may find a few but they would have a small consumer base and not much longevity - unless it was supported by government.

Fear can win attention, but it never wins prosperity. Xenophobia is bad economics. Simple as that.

We can dress it up as ‘keeping our culture secure’, or ‘maintaining solid borders’ or ‘migrants cause housing shortages’ but what it really does is interfere with the engine room of the economy and the backbone of communities. Which is small business.

Since 1945, we have had over 7 million new people arrive as migrants and refugees. We have an economy that is the envy of many other countries.

Along with migration came, at regular intervals, some in politics seizing the opportunity to get votes from fear.

This approach gets headlines and sometimes wins an election. It doesn’t build a business or keep a business operating.

Our bigger fear should be about recessions and intergenerational debt.

Look at history. The White Australia policy and the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 were sold as nation-building. But what they really did was restrict labour, restrict ideas and restrict enterprise. You don’t grow a country by narrowing who is allowed to contribute. The post war boom in manufacturing and construction came from a workforce of migrants.

Now we have a housing crisis combined with the ongoing violence of Islamic extremists and Israel , which has been made worse by the general craziness of the US President. This has encouraged the fascist far right and worries a lot of fair minded people. They want to limit migration.

But we still need people to start cafés, run franchises, open small factories, look after the elderly, care for the unwell, clean offices, deliver food and keep regional towns happening.

Because governments and extremists don’t create sustainable jobs. Large, medium and small business does.

Walk down any main street and you’ll see Indian-run grocery stores, Vietnamese bakeries, Lebanese cafés, Malaysian logistics firms, Somali hair salons, Sri Lankan IT contractors. This is the economy.

What Australians now think of as normal food - espresso culture, fusion banquets, late-night takeaway, al fresco dining, endless variety - didn’t come from government policy. It came from decades of migrants arriving and opening small businesses.

Same with fashion. Same with professional services. Same with retail.

The current political commentary doesn’t help the economy. This isn’t just about One Nation. We recently saw unfounded criticisms from Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price about migrant communities from the Indian subcontinent. This group arguably make up the biggest number of new businesses and actually run a significant share of Australia’s small businesses. Now, Senator Price is serving as shadow minister for small business - go figure.

Also, xenophobia doesn’t just hurt feelings. It changes behaviour. If people feel unwelcome, they invest less. They hire fewer people. They take fewer risks. They stay in their own small communities because they are afraid to venture out. Xenophobia creates the thing it is afraid of - people sticking to their own community.

The concerning social issues are around malevolence and violence from a nasty minority of migrants and Australians. We have seen this before in Australia with instances of extremism, largely driven by international conflicts, spilling over into our country caused by extreme right-wing ideology. Notable examples include the 1971 Soviet Embassy bombing, the 1972 Yugoslav Agency bombing and the 1978 Hilton Hotel bombing, which targeted the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. There were other events - awful events.

The lesson from history is not complicated. Fear might win attention, but it never wins prosperity.

Small business does that.