If the development of the country had been left to the average Australian, it’s debatable whether much of interest would have happened since then.  

There is, of course, nothing particularly wrong with complacency, used in the sense of contentment.

It’s when complacency becomes smugness, self-righteousness, indifference or apathy that it becomes a problem.

Thankfully, that slide into lazy arrogance has been offset in Australia by the infusion of migrants and the economic, social, cultural and energetic vitality they have injected into our way of life.

After World War II came the British and a little later the Italians, Greeks, other Europeans and the Lebanese.

Following the failure of the US and Australia to keep Vietnam safe from capitalism, arrived the Vietnamese (often in small, unseaworthy vessels) followed by Indians and other Asian migrants, including the Chinese, who have been migrating to Australia in fits and starts since the first 7,000 arrived in the 1850s to work at the Araluen gold fields in southern NSW.

More recently we have benefitted from the advent of people from the Pacific Islands (including New Zealand), Africa and South America.

And I mustn’t forget those unfortunate men, women and children fleeing from warfare, ethnic cleansing or wretched poverty – the asylum seekers and refugees who, still today, are often made to feel unwelcome but who, nevertheless, we allow to settle.

These migrants from every part of the globe make up the three-quarters of our population that was either born overseas (28%) or whose parents were born overseas (47%)

And we’re once more experiencing a ‘migrant boom’ as this huge component of our population, 19 million of 25.4 million according to the 2021 Census, continue to contribute to our diversity, prosperity and the effervescence that brings glitter and oomph to what might otherwise be our mundane lives.

 

People escaping problems in their own home countries and who take the enormous step of seeking new lives in a new land, bringing with them hope, optimism and a spontaneity that enlivens even the most curmudgeonly among us.

Australians are happiest when these people arrive here under our own terms.

Something similar, but not as numerically profound, has happened in Papua New Guinea. But rather than bringing hope and energy, many of these migrants came hell bent on exploitation.

Sometime after independence, the people of PNG lost, or perhaps never discovered, the ability to discern the type of people they let into their country.

First it was Australians and then it was Chinese, Americans and Malays.

Left to themselves, Papua New Guineans might have preferred to remain contented in a blissful mood of complacency and apathy.

But, unlike the experiences of their Australian neighbours, the PNG people were rudely and unwittingly dragged into a destructive plan devised by scheming and greedy politicians.

In Australia there has always been a lively debate about the intake of migrants. In PNG there was no such discussion or consideration.

Today, resounding noisily throughout the Australian media you will see furious argument about where our new migrants are going to live in a country experiencing a seemingly unsolvable housing crisis.

(It is solvable but complacency got in the way of planning, budgeting and doing.)

Past experience tells us that the migrants will largely take care of that themselves.

If they need houses they’ll build them, just as other migrants did in the past. If they need jobs they’ll create them.

In PNG the migrants arrived without bother and, after somehow getting their hands on big chunks of natural resources, went on to occupy most of the choice real estate.

In Australia, migration, despite its detractors, has been a cultural, social and economic blessing and in PNG a cultural, social and economic catastrophe.

In the coming years, worldwide migration – lawful or not - driven by climate change and other factors will increase exponentially across our planet.

No country will be exempt from the challenges and problems.

Planning and tangible action should have already begun.

In Australia and Papua New Guinea, despite their many cultural, social and economic differences, too little is being done to counteract and mitigate the disaster which is to come.

Complacency about climate change and its effects (including huge scale migration) is beginning to look more and more like a scourge, and even a killer.