How’s your crowded train ride this morning?

If you’re a long suffering Melbournian or Sydney-sider who crams onto public transport or battles through the snarls of grid locked traffic everyday to get to work, then this mornings news about our immigration intake should shock you out of your early morning stupor.

Australia receives over 1000 new arrivals EVERY DAY.

While I will not decry the need for immigration for Australia to continue to grow, we seriously need to think about the rate and manner that we allow people to come to Australia.

Immigration needs to slow down until our bursting amenities and ageing infrastructure can catch up.  Crowded trains, gridlocked traffic, rising unemployment and a slowing economy are real problems for every Australian, new or old.

More importantly we need to think about who we allow into our great country; they need to be people who want to assimilate with the rest of us and live by the existing laws of this country.

This is not to say we dont or wont tolerate new and different cultures into Australia or not change laws as we need, but it does mean we need to seriously put the people who are here already first and be able to provide a safe and meaningful existence for all Australians, no matter their background.

Australia has been historically built by successive waves of migrants, but I think things need to slow down until we can satisfactorily look after ourselves and our own disadvantaged such as the homeless and unemployed first before we start to help others.

The changing face of Western Sydney

While I live in Melbourne, the continuing stories that come out of Sydney about drive by shootings, gang rapes and bloody violence sends shivers down my spine about the direction that our country is heading.

Being the member of an immigrant family who desperately wanted to leave the troubles of their native homeland behind them and integrate fully into the Australian way of life that attracted my grandparents to Australia after World War II in the first place, it is almost beyond belief that people now coming to Australia don’t seem to want to do the same.

I realise that our multicultural society changes as time moves forward and more people from diverse walks of life come to our great country, but this story from a former resident of Greenacre in Western Sydney should start to ring alarm bells for many Australians.

If people dont want to fit into the fabled “Australian” way of life and societal mores that the vast majority of Australians live their lives by, why do these people bother coming here?

We have so many great cultures here in Australia that all contribute to the “Australian” way of life. European, Indian, African, Asian and Middle Eastern.  But it is an extremely small, yet incredibly vocal and increasingly visible minority that give all immigrants a bad reputation by their increasingly anti-social behaviour.

We will give you a fair go, but please leave your ethnic greiveances at the door as you come into this great country.  That’s what my family did 50 years ago and we have never looked back.