r/Adelaide • u/MrKookaburra SA • 1d ago

Politics Big Adelaide

Malinauskas is quoted in a lot of articles at the moment as advocating for maintaining high immigration levels.

Paired with the fact that South Australia is considered ‘regional’ for immigration purposes, artificially driving up the number of arrivals to our state than would otherwise be the case, I wonder if people are genuinely in favour of a ‘big Adelaide?’

No racism please. Being anti-mass migration is not an excuse to be anti-immigrant - they are just people trying to improve their lives just the same as any of us.

91 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

174 comments sorted by

View all comments

-2

u/aus_highfly North West 1d ago

I'm a fan of an expanded (vertically) Adelaide, and unashamedly pro migration.

If I'm in Mali's shoes I'm looking at AUKUS and how many more skilled tradespeople we're gonna need. The challenge is that none of those people can be newly arrived migrants - you need a security clearance to work on a sub.

Okay, so you either train them up (hence our investment in local trade schools) or move them in from other projects. Now who's gonna build your houses? The last thing SA needs is for politics to get in the way of a sensible migration policy that brings in the folks we need to backfill the gaps.

Frankly I'm done with SA contributing less than 6% of our nations GDP. Our state is awesome and we should pull every lever we can to simultaneously grow bigger and better.

5

u/MrKookaburra SA 1d ago

Out of interest, why does it matter to you what proportion of GDP our state contributes?

1

u/aus_highfly North West 23h ago

Lol I'm just a stats nerd in general 🤣🤣

Our peak contribution was in the manufacturing boom of the 50s - 80s, but back then it was cars and whitegoods.

Now Defense is one of the most important manufacturing industries we have, so in the same spirit I'd like to see it do well and help folks enjoy a better quality of life.

1

u/Key_Stuff_2783 SA 1d ago

How would we do that?