A clamp on immigration will strangle our best ideas

Posted on 13 Aug 2026

By Denis Moriarty, group managing director, Our Community

OCH We Are All From Somewhere July2026 IMG 0590 — The new artwork on the side of Our Community House by Ling.

One of the advantages of managing the building where my organisation, Our Community, has its headquarters is that I can put what I like on the front of it.

I’ve just had wall artist Ling paint WE ARE ALL FROM SOMEWHERE in shiny metallic paint on the wall that faces Curzon Street in North Melbourne – it’s my protest against the increasing acceptance of anti-immigration rhetoric. I mean, leaving aside (as one shouldn’t) the racism, I’m running a business, and as a boss it’s in my interests to come out against people who are trying to put me out of business.

Our Community creates and sells software for grantmakers. It’s a complicated area, and we need to keep up to the crest of the wave in technology and AI. If I’m to do that I need to be able to draw on a wider range of skills, knowledge and perspectives than I can get from any one culture. In the country that Australia has become, I can now line up the best minds from about 30 countries. When I needed a data scientist, for example, I hired an astrophysicist from Honduras (who is extraordinary at her job).

Immigration fuels innovation. I would have thought it too obvious to need further discussion, but economists have done the calculations just in case.

The OECD, for example, has mapped innovation around Australia, using the number of patents filed as a reasonable proxy, and found that “a one percentage point increase in the regional employment share of higher‑educated migrants … leads to a 4.8 per cent rise in regional patent applications”.

"If we don’t weaken, Australian innovation can put us in the front rank of innovation worldwide."

Denis Moriarty

In the US, a study published in June by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that “an inflow of skilled immigrants … contributes to the creation of ideas”. In other news, water is wet, knives can cut you, and koala bears shit in the bush.

I’m sure Australia’s immigration program could be managed better, because the same can be said of anything human, but babies and bathwater, people! We’re surfing a tidal wave of innovation (talking of water), and unless we’re able to keep on top we’re going to end up dumped and spluttering.

Mind you, my opinions may not carry much weight with the Hansonite back-to-the-white-picket-fencers, partly because they have very little truck with science or scientists and largely because innovation is exactly what they’re complaining about. Change, for them, isn’t a step forward in humanity’s progress upward and onward, it’s something to die in the last ditch opposing.

Pauline Hanson regrets the end of the White Australia policy, under which prospective migrants were selected against colour charts. As one typical letter from the Immigration Department archives says, “Relaxation of standards in respect of colour, even when the person concerned may be of 80% European blood, brings immediate public criticism in Australia.” Innovation? At the time, we were good at producing wool, and that seemed to be enough.

It’s not enough now. Even if the White Australia advocates were prepared to cope with the precipitous drop in living standards that retreating from the modern world would involve, even if we were prepared to toss that monkey-wrench into our relations with all our Asian neighbours, would we be prepared for the balance of emigration to swing the other way?

I can remember, just, the last days of White Australia, and the dreary complacency of the official line that drove so many of our young people out to seek wider horizons and a chance to be at the cutting edge of developments that weren’t the Hills hoist or the stump-jump plough.

If we don’t weaken, Australian innovation can put us in the front rank of innovation worldwide. Our Community is doing pretty well overseas – particularly in Britain, a country that with Brexit pioneered the approach of curling up in its shell and telling other nationals to go away. I think we can help them.

I don’t think that the anti-immigration zealots who want no migration at all are going to win power. I do worry that they will affect the general mood to the point that parties of government will campaign on the policy of “Not as bad as Hanson” – that our prime minister will defend multiculturalism by playing down its impact rather than by boldly celebrating its triumphs.

In the US, leaders of commerce have been prepared to accept Trump’s crusade to discourage immigration because they hope to gain more from his tax cuts than they lose from the strangulation of the free movement of ideas. Even in the short term, that’s a bad trade. Australia’s leaders need to speak out for innovation-friendly immigration levels right now.

We’ve spent several hundred years (well, sixty thousand, but who’s counting) building a country that wonderful people want to come to. Let’s not throw away those gains now.

Denis Moriarty is group managing director of OurCommunity.com.au, a social enterprise that helps the country's 600,000 not-for-profits.

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