These three with their dog-whistling rubbish are provoking imminent disaster

Then you get your tiny darling. Not that mine were all that tiny - finished up with a 4.7-kilogram dumpling who barely slept for two years.

Last year, according to those fabulous people at the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there were nearly 300,000 darlings and for the sake of their mothers, I hope they were tinier than mine. I did quite a number of those perineal exercises and pelvic floor routines but it was all a bit of a stretch. Sorry.

Death comes at you fast, too. My old dad wasn't that old, just 57, when he died from a pulmonary embolism. Mum was just 62, lung cancer got her in the end. My sister? Just 57.

My parents were Holocaust survivors and refugees always die early. But while they were alive, they worked hard, contributed to the economy, provided three more taxpayers. And they were so loved. As I write this, I think about the Australia which welcomed them. For some reason, there is an insignificant group of Australians not at all interested in welcoming migrants. Apparently, migrants take Australian jobs.

So I decided to ask actual experts about what politicians might describe as the settings of Australian migration policy - and what I discovered rocked my socks.

Alan Gamlen, director of the ANU's non-partisan Migration Hub and professor in the school of regulation and global governance at ANU, is clear on this: "Getting it right in Australia? Roughly speaking yes, we get it probably more right than most countries in the world. We have a very finely tuned, well-oiled machine for managing migration of people when compared with most countries around the world.

"That's not to say that machinery is completely up-to-date or modern or fully functional. It gasps and wheezes and crashes to a halt sometimes and has lots of problems. But compared to, say, the average European country or even the UK or even the USA, our machine is pretty top of the line, so we get a lot right."

This is the best bit: "We are geared heavily towards receiving large numbers of people, relatively speaking, and turning them into Australians."

So we get the whole migration thing right, right? Don't migrants take Australian jobs? I went to Dimitria Groutsis, professor of work and organisational studies at the University of Sydney, for this one because this is her actual field.

Now she drew my attention to the birth stats which were released by the queens and kings at the ABS yesterday. I'd already pored over them but wanted to know what she thought.

Our birthrate is tanking. Not enough babies to build a future for this country (and if you want grandchildren, may I recommend helping your kids with cash, housing, childcare or all three). So do migrants actually take our jobs?

"They have never taken our jobs," she said. "They did the dirty, dangerous and undesirable jobs because Australia needed to grow." Yep, as old Arthur Calwell once said, populate or perish. We aren't populating, and if we are not careful, there will be no one at our deathbeds as we perish.

Groutsis also mentioned our skills shortage (ohmigod, how do you get a tradie out to your place in a hurry?).

"We can't build houses without hands to do it. We just don't have the population to service our needs."

Not enough midwives and nurses, not enough doctors, not enough sparkies or plumbers, not enough.

"I am embarrassed we are having this discussion," says Groutsis.

So who is actually having this discussion? Alan Gamlen of ANU is working on this really nifty thing. He's going through every single politician in the Federal Parliament and looking at how they vote on multiculturalism and how they vote on labour market deregulation. Let's not count Pauline Hanson because she doesn't really count except to showboat.

Guess what? Only four politicians are really on board with the whole dog-whistling rubbish, and only three are really vocal about it. Andrew Hastie, Jacinta Nampjinpa Price and Barnaby Joyce. Three out of an ocean of politicians of all stripes and colours.

The Coalition, which was seriously spanked at the last federal election, has four camps (a freaking campground).

Some are weakly pro-multiculturalism AND pro-loose labour market regulation because how else can you hire foreign workers and pay them peanuts and fire them with impunity? Then there's a group who favour labour market deregulation but sit on the fence about multiculturalism. Then there are some who are weakly against multiculturalism but favour labour market deregulation.

And then there are the three musketeers. According to Gamlen's research, they are completely on their own within the Coalition in terms of having no strongly articulated position on the issue of labour market deregulation which otherwise unites the party.

They are also in the clear minority of the Coalition with their position of disfavouring multiculturalism. The biggest of the four camps? They are all pro-multiculturalism. They know where their parents came from. Can these three move the views of the vast majority of the party? I so doubt that. There are no votes in it.

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Now I note Andrew Hastie took himself off to Harvard to get one of those fancy executive US credentials. Did he refuse his generous parliamentary paypacket while bathing in some of the Trump mania? Or was he researching how to better represent his Canning constituents? Does he now think he can share that nonsense with us? Remember what happened at the last election, young Andrew.

Hastie can't mobilise non-voters in Australia the way Trump could do that in the US because we don't really have non-voters in the way the poor old US does, no matter who turns up at the pathetic racist rallies on the weekend.

Thank god.