Infrastructure Australia just assumes the high population growth – now at 435,000 a year – has to happen and that there is nothing we can do about it.

But we can. John Howard could have just as easily have said, “We decide how many people come to Australia and when they can come.”

But no. He pretended to be securing the borders by clamping down on people smuggling by boat while quietly ramping immigration through airports from around 70,000 to now more than 200,000 a year.

Small wonder Infrastructure Australia says we cannot keep up. It says we have “a mounting maintenance backlog”.

Howard confirmed his subterfuge this week telling the BBC, “My experience as almost 12 years as prime minister was that whenever the Australian population thought that immigration was being controlled and properly monitored they supported high immigration.”

They may have “thought” immigration was under control, but it was not. It was out of control and running way too high at the behest of those who profit from it: property developers; big retail and big agriculture.

Meanwhile everyone else suffers. Wages in Australia have stagnated since the Howard ramp-up of immigration and the costs people cannot escape have spiralled: health, education, energy.

We now have “per capita” recession in Australia. That is, on average people’s incomes are contracting. And that is average. Given the top end is doing much better it means those in the middle and bottom are really being squeezed.

We have an illusion of decades of notional economic growth because we have a lot more people producing things. But they are consuming it as well and demanding more infrastructure and government services, so the absolute growth in GDP may give the government a proud boast, but it is an empty one because most people are becoming worse off.

They are also being squeezed by the contraction in public-sector spending on the middle and lower incomes for two main reasons: disproportionate tax cuts for the well off and a massive diversion of resources to pay for the infrastructure required by all those immigrants.

Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese called this week for a mature debate about population. Good, even if corporate Australia will take no notice. Hitherto anyone calling for lower immigration has been branded racist. The answer to that is that the immigration burden cripples all but the top end in Australia whether they are black, brown, yellow or white.

Moreover, the top end which benefits from high immigration has a much larger portion of white males in it than the rest of Australia.

The big corporations and their shareholders are dominated by wealthy white males. So you might well argue that the high immigration that favours them and helps keep them in a position of privilege perpetuates racism while hitting hard everyone else – including almost all recent immigrants from non-English-speaking countries – as they struggle to find and pay for health, education, transport and energy.

Yet there is not even the hint of a suggestion by Infrastructure Australia that its expensive Infrastructure prescription could be easily avoided and the lives of Australians made better if we cut population growth.

Decentralisation is offered as a solution. It is not. The Murray-Darling Basin has been starved of water by big agriculture and corrupt practices.

The main reason average Australians feel worse off is because of the high population growth in the past two decades. Immigration should be drastically cut before the anger at the economic squeeze is manipulated to be misdirected at ethnic, cultural or religious differences.

Before that cut will happen, though, we have to ban what underpins high population policies – corporate political donations.