Poll after poll shows Aussies are concerned about mass immigration.

You don’t have to think too hard to understand why.

They see the effects every single day.

The worse traffic, the long hospital wait times, the queues for housing, the competition for school places.

The impact is being felt everywhere.

But rather than address the concerns, one particularly brave Australian senator has decided the problem isn’t immigration, it’s the language people use about immigration.

Senator Andrew McLachlan, an obscure Liberal from South Australia, popped up this week to scold people for using the term “mass migration”.

The Guardian reported:

A Liberal senator has condemned the “inflammatory and irresponsible” language being deployed in the debate over immigration levels, challenging colleagues to approach the policy in a “respectful and honest way” or risk backlash from voters.

The South Australian backbencher Andrew McLachlan said the repeated use of the phrase “mass” migration to describe the rate of immigration was not only “technically inaccurate” but “extremely unhelpful”.

Thanks for your input, Senator. Glad you got your photo in the left wing blog that is The Guardian. That’s very nice for you.

But let’s be clear what’s happening here.

Firstly, when people say they want a respectful and honest debate while language policing you, you can be pretty sure they do not actually want a debate at all and this is really just a thinly veiled attempt to shut down discussion of a contentious issue.

Secondly, a Liberal senator worrying about voter backlash is quite rich when you already copped the backlash. Did you notice what happened in May? South Australia currently has only two sitting Liberal MPs!

Do you think the path back to electoral success is worrying about words? Or would you consider that it might require listening to voters and taking action on their concerns. Polite technocratic business-as-usual backroom policy deal making simply does not cut it after the trashing the Liberals got earlier this year.

That said, if there really would be a backlash from multicultural voters to a robust debate on immigration, that itself is a byproduct of uncontrolled mass immigration.

If we have levels of immigration such that significant powerful ethnic-based voting blocks are emerging because our system is unable to assimilate and integrate them properly, that is mass immigration.

McLachlan is simply playing into Labor’s hands, and indeed the hands of the progressive press who hate his party, by buying into their obfuscation with stats and numbers and dictionary definitions.

This is a question of values, not of numbers.

It is a question of: Who will put Australia first?

Because immigration isn’t happening at the statistical level. It is happening in the suburbs, in the cities, in the schools, on the roads.

It is a reality of daily life for Australians. It is making life tougher, it is eroding social cohesion, and Aussies know it.

So, frankly, we’ll use whatever term we like.